Sunday, March 14, 2010

Class Entry

Class this week was pretty entertaining. We did some interesting activities that related to The Great Gatsby and As I Lay Dying. I think that the most important word in The Great Gatsby is memories because the whole book is an account of Nick’s friendship with Gatsby and all of the things that went on in his life during that period of time. Also, the last chapter of the book was filled with memories that people had of Gatsby before he died. Also, Jordan and Nick spoke of some memories that they had together in the last chapter. I liked The Great Gatsby as a whole and I think that the ending of the book was meaningful, but it was a downer. The book wouldn’t have been as meaningful if the story hadn’t ended that way though, so I’m glad that it did end that way. I can honestly say that I enjoyed The Great Gatsby more than any other book I’ve ever read for school. I also liked when we read the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and related it to an equation from math or science. I chose to relate it to an antiderivative in calculus because finding an antiderivative of a function allows you to work backwards or forwards in math almost. The narrator of the poem was wishing that he had just said what he wanted and acted like himself throughout his life instead of allowing himself to be scrutinized by people. He was acting contrived and like a derivative of himself and finding the antiderivative of himself would allow him to go back and be himself. I was hesitant to share this though because I was worried that it didn’t make sense or that the people in our class wouldn’t understand what I was saying. I really enjoyed that activity though because I love math, because it’s so logical, and I liked relating literature and math. It was a unique experience. Also, I was thinking that the narrator of that poem reminded me a lot of Nick from The Great Gatsby, especially towards the end of the book. I don’t particularly care for As I Lay Dying, but I liked the bit of writing we did about insanity that related to the book. I usually like things like that that are straightforward though. I agree with Cash and his ideas about insanity. I think that not everyone should have the right to decide if someone is insane or not. If everyone has that right, then someone could be unfairly labeled as insane because of the situation or people’s previous opinions of that person. Also, I agree that no one is purely, completely sane and no one is completely insane. It takes someone talking about a person that way for them to be considered completely insane. I think that the only people who should have the right to determine if a person is insane are doctors, therapists, and others close to the person in question.

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