Sunday, March 7, 2010

Class Journal

This week was one of the few weeks that I actually enjoyed the readings. Of course, I am only referring to the chapters that were read in the Great Gatsby and not the sections that were assigned for reading in As I Lay Dying. There are many reasons why I have still yet to become interested in Faulkner’s novel. Out of all the books that I have read, which is not saying much by the way, As I Lay Dying has been the most difficult novel to comprehend. I am not just talking about comprehending the deeper meanings that language arts teacher’s praise Faulkner for, I am referring to the fact that for a decent amount of the time, I hardly understand what exactly happened plot wise over a chapter that I just read. Fortunately, I am not the only one that seems to be having trouble with As I Lay Dying.
However, the chapters assigned for the Great Gatsby this week were surprisingly interesting, but I guess that is expected when the plot finally reaches the climax. After reading our last assigned chapter last week, I realized how clever Fitzgerald really is. And I am not even referring to the homework assignment where we were required to write down why Fitzgerald could be seen as a psychic. Which by the way, I do not believe that anyone in our class would have ever been able to made the connection between Nick’s birthday, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the 1930’s. No offense, but I am actually surprising that Glen discovered this parallel; I guess when one read’s the same novel repetitively one begins to discover hidden meanings and metaphors.
I now realized that I have begun to digress from my original point in the last paragraph which was that I finally enjoyed some of the chapters that were assigned in last week’s reading. So as I was saying earlier, I have begun to appreciate Fitzgerald’s clever love triangle that he has created in the Great Gatsby. There has always been something interesting about love triangles; that has to be one reason why Jerry Springer is still on television, right? Anyways, I just thought it was interesting how Daisy used to love Gatsby, but then switched back to Tom, but she never really liked him in the first place, and Tom had an affair with Myrtle, who was killed by a car driven by Tom’s wife, but Myrtle’s husband was told by Tom that Gatsby had driven the car, so George Wilson ended up killing Gatsby and himself. Honestly, I knew from the beginning of Michaelis and George Wilson’s talk that Gatsby was going to be wrongly murdered by George Wilson.
The only detail that I disliked in the last chapter that everyone read in the Great Gatsby was the way Fitzgerald described the ending. It just felt like, to me anyways, that there was some ambiguity as to what exactly happened. Fitzgerald doesn’t flat out tell you that Gatsby died and Wilson committed suicide; if it weren’t for Fitzgerald’s reference to the event being a holocaust, I would have probably not have been able to figure out who all exactly died.

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