Lit Discussion of O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"

                                                       Boom-Down, Like Cement
        I chose to read O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” due to its fascinating style of writing. It has this small yet powerful story hidden amongst all this military artillery and combat gear. O’Brien very carefully and cleverly opens this story with a seemingly never-ending list of, well, “Things They Carried”, justifying the title. Within this incredible amount of items that O’Brien intertwines the personal items and the story behind some of them, namely the story behind Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. Lieutenant Cross’s story unfolds through the third-person omniscient because O’Brien knows all the things that Jimmy Cross thinks that none of Cross’s platoon knows he’s thinking. “Lieutenant Cross felt the pain. He blamed himself.” (667) Through trinkets that Martha had sent Lieutenant Cross he was able to imagine a world with her in it as his love, and due to the monotonous boredom that comes along with heavy loads and tediously long days away from civilization Lieutenant Cross allowed his mind to become consumed with thoughts of her. O’Brien states one of the most impactful lines when he states “Imagination was a killer.” Throughout all that these men were forced, chosen, and chose to carry, Lieutenant Cross chose to force his self to carry the guilt of not having prevented Lavenders’ death. He chose to place the blame on his wandering mind that was intricately woven into all of these items. “Lavender was dead. You couldn’t burn the blame.” (676) In this blame Cross now burdened as his own, he became not only the antagonist but also the protagonist as well, in a man vs. self type of conflict. A man died on his watch there was no one else to blame, his platoon did nothing wrong and even the enemy, the mostly invisible enemy could not be the sole bearers of the blame. No, it was the man who was put in charge of keeping this platoon safe and his men alive. By carefully ticking off each and every item the platoon men needed, wanted, and chose to carry O’Brien was able to shape each character individually as well, as a unit. Which did the right thing of presenting this platoon as a band of brothers, which is hat they solider into each of them from day one. Had Lieutenant Cross not had his head in the clouds daydreaming about a love he manifested in his lonely hours, then he might have been able to keep Lavender alive, or so O’Brien would have us believe Cross feels through his sequential list of events that happened to this one specific platoon.

        War stories are ridiculously hard to tell when the writer or storyteller has never actually been to war. So, by O’Brien carefully listening to his friends tell their war stories he was able to make a list of war-related details, which just so happen to work extremely well at effectively setting the stage for his piece without deriving from the list itself except to background and anchor Lieutenant Cross’s items. It is the items and their respective journeys with their respective solider that set the stage for where they are located. Simple dialogue for emotional effect carries the reader even further along in their trek to Than Khe. “They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same.” (672) These words strung together in a checklist, ticked off kind of way helps to add to the setting which aids in describing how each solider could become a part of their surroundings or, such as with Lieutenant Cross, lost in thoughts that took them away from the visions of destruction and isolation that kept them moving “humping” forward.


                                                                     Works Cited:

• Charters, Ann. “The Things They Carried.” The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, 9th ed., Bedford/St. Martin's, pp. 664–677.

A Short Lit Comparison of Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

        There is something similar about Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio’s section Mother in that both main characters are dying, and while dying they reflect on the life they have been apart of thus far. Also, both Harry and Elizabeth had, what seemed like awkward encounters, with their supporting characters Helen and George due impart to their impending deaths and their unusually lonesome personalities. “Don’t pay any attention to me.” (836) it wasn’t that Harry wanted Helen to truthfully leave him alone he just did not want to keep hurting her and be bothered with her steadfast attempts to stay positive. He did not want to hurt this woman who had been dealing and putting up with all of his pungent words that he flung at her and his neglect to care for himself, essentially putting them both in this unfortunate situation. He was dying and she was trying to hold on. It was like digging a knife of guilt into his soul and he retaliated and desired the comfort of solitude so he could continue on with his dying and internal pity party of self-reflection and regret.

        “I think you had better go out among the boys. You are too much indoors” (273) It was never that Elizabeth truly wanted her son, George, to leave her side but she was painfully aware of how awkward their meetings were and she did not want him to feel obligated to have to remain there while she sat lifelessly self-indulging in her own inevitable death. For as long as George sat there with her in silence it was like he was digging a knife of guilt into her soul so she encouraged his departure.

        There are also distinct and vast differences as well, including main character genders, cause of characters oncoming death, the characters who sit with each dying characters gender, setting, allusions within each stories context, and the fact that Harry dies at the end of Hemingway’s story but Elizabeth is still alive at the end of Anderson’s section titled “Mother”. All of these result in completely different stories however that underlying personality that Harry and Elizabeth posses that is psychologically known as guilt brought on by remorse is present in both stories. Both Harry and Elizabeth feel guilty for not having achieved certain goals in life and now knowing the chance will shortly be taken away for good upon their deaths and they now feel remorseful for time wasted.

“No, he had never written about Paris. Not the Paris that he cared about. But what about the rest that he had never written?” (838)

“Between Elizabeth and her one son George, there was a deep sympathy, based on a girlhood dream that had long ago died.” (269) 

       Each character seemed to represent a lost quality that each writer, Hemingway, and Anderson, had inside his soul. Harry and Elizabeth each had things that they never accomplished in their lives and it now created a void. Both Hemingway and Anderson express this void through these characters and their loner past that clouds their minds. Harry could not be understood by anyone, or so he thought, and his missed opportunities are now images that plague his sleep. Elizabeth could not be understood, even by the Theatrical group that she wanted so much to be apart of and she magnified their laughs that “It’s not like that” (272) when she ventured to speak her inner thoughts. Both Hemingway and Anderson used these characters as a metaphor for their own personal regrets.



                                                                       Works Cited:

• “The Snows of Kilamanjaro.” The Norton Anthology: American Literature, edited by Nina Baym. Norton, 2012, 836, 838. “Mother.” The Norton Anthology: American Literature, edited by Nina Baym. Norton, 2012, 269, 272, 273.

Short Lit Response to Wallace Stevens/William Carlos Williams Vs. Ezra Pound

        Had I not been told that Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams had other professions other than writing I would not have been able to tell by simply reading their poetry. It is detectable that they think differently then Ezra Pound, but not detectable that they were not full-time writers. Their poetry has as much sustenance, if not more, then Pounds does due to Pound’s common inability to be solidly coherent at all times in his writings. It seems that Pound was trying to impress a certain elitist group when he wrote his continuation to Homer’s Odyssey along with many of his other poems geared at furthering the Mythological poetry of the past. This was ever clear with the number of footnotes needed in the Norton Anthology just for the common person to attempt to get through Pound’s relatively short continuations. When reading Stevens or Williams very few footnotes were added because there were very few references made to past works that required readers to read and/or know in order to understand. Wallace Stevens says “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires.” (287) This is not cryptic, it does not include words that come from another dialectic point from the past; it is simple and straight forward. It does not boast legal professional jargon nor stories of past clients, nor descriptions of how to run or better our lives. His job did not define his poetry, it provided him money to survive, and possibly a more level head. Pound’s sole career included writing and nothing else, it could then be remarked that possibly Pound was too engrossed in the literary world that he was becoming disconnected to humanity giving his writings a bias towards other writers and not the general public at large.



                                                                        Works Cited:

• Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine.The Norton Anthology of American Literature. D, New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 2012. Page. 287.

"The Gilded Six-Bits" by Zora Neale Hurston Short Analysis

                                                               Southern Forgiveness
        I chose to read The Gilded Six-Bits by Zora Neale Hurston which is set in the south during the Great Depression. In this story, it is evident through dialect the class setting of Missie May and Joe, a middle-low class husband and wife, who were married within the past year and saving up to start a family. This story was not overly laden with descriptive details about their surroundings but the ones that it did provide were strong within the story. It starts off short, sweet, and to the point in its clear cut description that stated “It was a Negro yard around Negro house in a Negro settlement…” (421) the story then quickly established that Missie May kept a clean house that was “scrubbed white” from a “weekly scouring”. We learn quickly that Missie May’s ability to keep such a clean tight ship is all made possible by the job Joe keeps with “G and G Fertilizer”. These elements gave Hurston’s settings that “something happy” feeling that drove the climb to the climax. It was within this “something happy” that Joe was contented by the wife he adored, that “So long as Ah be yo’husband, ah don’t keer’bout nothin’ else.” (424) This “something happy” was a setting that represented strength, stability, and security for Joe and through his eyes, he assumed it represented the same to his wife. However, Missie May did not here contentment within her husband's words when the walked home from Otis’s ice-cream parlor. Instead, she heard her husband wrapped up in Otis’s money and the way he flaunted it proudly. She didn’t understand his admiration from afar. So it was within that “something happy” that Missie May accepted Otis’s sexual advances in exchange for some of his illusionary gold. As in her mind having this illusionary gold was what seemed to appeal highly to her husband’s happiness. As ironies of life go, Missie was caught and ashamed on a night when Joe got off work early. Joe, upon seeing this unexplainable indiscretion was lost and confused as to why Missie May was unhappy. It took time and patience to heal the wounds of the “something happy” and the assurance that their new baby brought that solidified the “something happy about the place” again.



                                                                      Works Cited:

• Hurston, Zora Neale. “The Gilded Six-Bits.”The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction", Bedford/Saint Martin's, 2015, pp. 421-429.

My Thoughts on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot

        In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock T.S. Eliot addresses ageism in love. How time stands between comfort and frustration. How we allow ourselves to become bound by time, but in doing so time slips by and we miss out on what is important, lending to regrets. Eliot also brings forth the thoughts of human psychological delusional justification, because we always seem to want what we cannot have; once it is attained we become disinterested. So we are involved in a tiring battle with all aspects of mortality. It is written as if Eliot is Prufrock and we are being given a window into his mind. As we walk through life with Eliot/Prufrock we see what he sees…

“Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells…”

…feel what he feels…

“And I have known the eyes already, known them all-
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall;
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?”

…and he even remarks on what he thinks to be the remarks of those who he feels are judging him…

“With a bald spot in the middle of my hair-
(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin-
(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?”.

        By asking whether or not he should “Disturb the universe” or not he is showing us his clear understanding that this is bigger than a personal id/ego and more so something that is bound to all of our morality and the justification we give to all aspects of it that is the universal property of all humans. So he is allowing the readers into the inner thoughts, harsh realities, and inner fantasies that are bringing what is imaginary, possibly illusionary, in his mind, into our reality. If something is not spoken out loud is it really real? All of this is a Modernist twist on non-time constraint thoughts that were suppressed in the predecessor Victorian era.

My Career Path With Regards to Linguistics

“English is a complex, rule-governed system that we use every day without having to think about its intricacies”. (Curzan, Adams 1)

        Rules are always meant to be broken and we who speak this language do just that, as time goes on. In our week 8 discussion I wrote that words are vocal utterances that we put together in specific patterns to create singular or strung together sounds that are to stand for expressions of emotions, people, places and things and we weigh heavily how we use these sounds to describe any and everything/one on the reactions we get from those we value. I believe this is exactly how the history of words has evolved, through meant and unmeant vocal utterances. Through these meant and unmeant noises and the reactions our friends and loved ones have had towards them we have then changed to suit ours and their emotional needs with these utterances. As we have evolved in life our vocabularies have evolved and expanded to encompass our new environments around us. As people have moved around the world to and from different places in expeditions our languages have expanded as well. According to wordorigins.org “English is a member of the Indo-European family of languages.” (wordorigins.org) This essentially means our language comes from a strong Germanic and old Roman Latin background, which I believe is what gives our language such depth. By depth, I simply mean that we have many words that mean the same thing or different spelling of the same word for other things. Our language is also a dialect of many cuts and clips mixed together to formulate a storytelling language.

        After our group discussion with the Lord of the Rings clip, knowing our origin makes me want to develop a story that makes use of our origin language, bring it to life again if you will. It seems like such a waste of perfectly good dialect to let it all go dusty. In my particular career path of contemporary realistic fiction writer, I could conceivably take the old languages and revive them with contemporary backdrops, like the Lord of the Rings seems to have done. I could possibly even tweak their sentence structure like Yoda does and come up with a new Old English altogether. It makes me giddy to think of all the exponential amount of possibilities.

        It is important to study and mindfully apply linguistics because it helps people to communicate with each other. Communication is a key part of human existence and while we can communicate through other forms such as body language, it is important to understand the linguistics of speech so that our speech isn’t misinterpreted. It’s important to study when to raise our voice to indicate a question or when to deepen our voice for authority. We also have a specific tone for excitement as well as anger and can even vary our pitch of voice when we cry so that our cries are differentiated. These are all differences in linguistics that are important to learn so that we can successfully cooperate and especially communicate with those around us. In our week 7 discussion, we discussed atmosphere and our authors and I chose excerpts from all three of Steinbeck’s books that I was reading to illustrate that he used linguistics to emphasize each book characters locations because without giving his characters linguistic nuances of speech that derived from where they were from then the reader would have a harder time really getting caught up in the story.

        As an aspiring author, I hope to be able to learn what I have learned about linguistics to further develop my characters like Steinbeck has been able to do by really hearing how people talk and translating that to paper so that my readers can be transported to wherever my story takes them.

        Society changes English linguistics simply by trying to null and void them to an extent. By this I mean that with the evolution of the smartphone and how much people are texting with acronyms trying to convey thoughts too quickly, it’s stripping the linguistic of language away, which even though it makes the message come across quicker it leaves a lot more room for miscommunication. There are still windows available for communication as it is always evolving, such as video chat and emailing, however, it seems that the acronym of text is spilling over to the next generation n the form of speaking in an acronym. By this measure, I believe that the emphatic nature or empathetic one is getting lost and becoming increasingly drone-like. It seems real emotions are getting lost in the new technology as they are getting replaced by emoji emotions which lack personalization. In our week 9 discussion, we discussed evolving technology and in it, I discussed the pros to why evolving technology isn’t hindering society's interrelationship with English by allowing its constant use of acronyms and emoji’s to break certain foreign language barriers. While in high school it’s stripping our children and teenagers of emotional connectedness it seems to be allowing more people to communicate across language barriers that before technological interventions on society’s people were hoping that their pee-pee dance was enough to let a foreigner know they needed a restroom.

        In my particular career path, I plan to simply write. I am an avid reader and avid lover of the written word especially when it is done with style and sarcastic flare. I love reading stories that involve real-life situations that are almost impossible to believe. Whether the stories have a happy ending or not, I appreciate the point and/or lesson; as a writer, I plan to provide a point and/or lesson with every piece I write. I am pursuing this track because books are eternal, they are immortal, they are a way for my mind to go wild and a way for others to keep a piece of my wild mind long after it ceases existence physically.

        In my career choice, it is imperative for me to acquire my own writing style if I want to be able to make and keep a name for myself. Everyone is looking for that new way to spin the plan that already works and it is my goal to figure out how I can spin that plan to fit who I am and also give my audience words they will connect with.

                                                                        Works Cited: 

• Curzan, Anne, and Michael Adams. How English Works A Linguistic Introduction. Longman. 2012. Pg. 1.
• Wilton, Dave. “A (Very) Brief History of the English Language.”Wordorigins.org, Wordorigins, 15 Jan. 2001, www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/a_very_brief_history_of_the_english_language3/. Accessed 2 June 2017.

Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" Psychoanalytical Literary Analysis

        In the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley we are taken to a world that is unlike any we have experienced, or is it? The imagery is completely unique but the story itself is one that even in today’s culture we experience via power driven Capitalists that is complicated by an over-analytical justification of all the good intentions that only rarely become actuality that mask themselves under the philanthropist's umbrella. In this paper, I plan to explain how the “Controller” aka Mustapha Mond, ran his utopia. Through a Marxist lens was what the “Controller” was going for, a Capitalist one is what prevailed through its consumerism and rank. I also plan on explaining how Huxley intended the book to come across through psychoanalysis of its when, where, why, what, how, and who. By using a Psychoanalytical lens I will flesh out the “Controller’s” (Huxley’s) uncanny need to build his imaginary utopia on the foundation of test tubes, Hypnopaedia, and a parentless society in the Industrial Revolution Great Depression era.

        Marxist literary analysis consists of viewing literature from an economic and societal standpoint. Marxism, named after its forefather Karl Marx, takes the theory of capitalism and breaks it down through the middle-class value of labor to explain why we as a society, as humans, do what we do. “The worker belongs neither to an owner nor to the land, but eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his daily life belong to him who buys them.” (Rivkin, Ryan 661) The money that is collected for these hours given is the wage the worker works for. It is given by the capitalist as monetary compensation for the hours of work put in, and after it is given it is used for the life that the worker feels “begins for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed.” (Rivkin, Ryan 660)

        Capitalism, however, is “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods, characterized by a free competitive market and motivation by profit.” (Encarta 2009) Capitalism does not see the labor being performed, only what comes from the labor, the commodity produced. In Brave New World we are introduced to an “economic system” that is solely run by the “Controller” where he has “private ownership” of the entire utopia that he has created; wherein he manipulates the social classes that he has created for the “means of production and distribution of goods”. One of the true, yet central satire, themes of the book is to always remember "The existence of a class which possesses nothing but its capacity to labor is a necessary prerequisite of capital." (Rivkin, Ryan 663) We see this very early on when the “Director” explains to a student

“Flowers and scenery, he pointed out, have one great fault; they are free. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to take away the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to take away the love of nature, but not the need for transport. Of course, it was necessary that they should keep going to the country, even though they hated it. The problem was to make the use of transport for a reason which was economically better than a mere affection for flowers and scenery. It was solved. ‘We condition the lower classes to hate the country,’ ended the Director. ‘But at the same time we condition them to love all country sports. Then we require that all country sports require expensive equipment. So they buy and use manufactured articles as well as transport.” (Kindle location 139)

        This is clearly a market-driven (albeit dictatorial and somewhat communism sounding with its controlling nature) speech that has a clear “motivation by profit” point. This is however masked to society by having classes that give the impression of an upper, middle, and lower class.

“Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so clever. I’m really very glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children all wear light brown. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are even worse.” (Kindle location 181)

        In appearing to have a social order it gives the society as a whole the appearance of a Marxist society where labor is valued, and while it is, because the “Controller” knows that without a “stupid” labor-intensive working class all of the “clever” ideas of the Alphas would go unproduced, this is all market-driven. Marxist theory is “The worker belongs neither to an owner nor to the land” (Rivkin, Ryan 661) but to his self as he values his labor and time. In Huxley’s utopia all Alphas’, Beta’s, Gamma’s, Delta’s, and Epsilons belong to the “Controller” who has classed them as he saw fit to produce happily what is needed to keep society running smoothly, happily working and happily buying in a constant loop. In Capitalism, there isn’t a clear need for social classes excepting a working-class and a non-working class (business owners). So a clever way to disguise a controlled group of people is to give them more social classes to divide themselves amongst giving the appearance that there are levels to intelligence, responsibility, and fun (i.e. other things to think about than the fact that they come from test tubes). Gregory Claeys puts it best when he states that this story is about “the quasi-omnipotence of a monolithic, totalitarian state demanding and normally extracting complete obedience from its citizens challenged occasionally but usually ineffectually by vestigial individualism or systematic flaws, and relying upon scientific and technological advances to ensure social control.”

        In a Marxist society, people think for themselves and give value to what they want to work for, in Capitalism they are told what to value and therefore they work to produce that while being essentially told they are only worth their weight in pay via the test tube they were raised in.

        Psychoanalytical literary analysis consists of viewing literature from a psychological standpoint. Psychoanalysis, named after Sigmund Freud’s technique of psychoanalyzing the human thought process, aims to see literature through a series of questions that look to answer when, how, where, what, why, and who the story came into existence. It aims to look at these questions through the eyes of the author to analyze all the elements of his/her story. This can be described by Freud’s narcissistic theory of the “ego ideal” or later termed “internalization/introjections” which are “a mental representation that gives expression, according to Freud, to repressed narcissistic libido.” Where “they will come to be seen as representations built up in the self as a way of securing for itself the benefit of relations with others that have become unstable or insecure.” (Rivkin, Ryan 415) In doing these things an author can play out hidden emotions through made-up fictional characters. Psychoanalysis looks to uncover these and explain why these emotions are hidden and how they play out in each specific character.

        So when did Huxley write Brave New World? He wrote it during the Industrial Revolution and the Great Depression. So it is understandable that this book has revolutionary thought processes with regard to raising children in test tubes and flying transportation as it appeals to the depressed brain of that time period as having possible hope for the future that utopia might be a possibility. Though that is all in the perspective in which one chooses to read the book. Through a psychoanalytical lens, we can dive into the reason why Huxley wanted to write this book, why he felt Hypnopaedia was so crucial as to incorporate it into his book, and why saying mother was worse than swearing since Huxley himself had a better relationship with his mother then he did with his father.

        How did Huxley feel during this time period to make this book so impactful? In another book by Huxley’s titled Ends and Means, he starts off “About the ideal goal of human effort…” where he says “There are some who believe – and it is a very popular belief at the present time – that the royal road to a better world is the road to economic reform. For some, the shortcut to Utopia is military conquest and the hegemony of one particular nation; for others, it is the armed revolution and the dictatorship of a particular class. All these think mainly in terms of social machinery and large-scale organization. There are others, however, who approach the problem from the opposite end, and believe that desirable social change can be brought about most effectively by changing the individuals who compose society. Of the people who think in this way, some pin their faith to education, some to psycho-analysis, some to applied behaviorism. There are others, on the contrary, who believe that no desirable “change of heart” can be brought about without supernatural aid. There must be, they say, a return to religion (Unhappily, they cannot agree on the religion to which the return should be made.)” (Huxley, 1)

        In this, we can see what he felt so inclined to express as the changes occurring within and around society in this time period. Where “economic reform” comes from the Capitalistic-Marxist classed social statuses that love the sport and buy the merchandise even though they hate the country. He gave the “Controller” “dictatorship” of all social classes, since he made each social class from scratch. Huxley then created his “large-scale organization” of “Alpha’s, Beta’s, Gamma’s, Delta’s, and Epsilons” to run the central business of test-tube baby creating on large-scale “machinery” that creates human life in complete organized controlled settings where

“The sound of well-oiled machinery rose softly from below, the lifts rushed up and down. On all the 11 floors of the Nurseries, it was feeding time. From 1,800 bottles 1,800 carefully labeled infants were sucking down their bottles of artificial milk.” (Kindle location 903)

This “machinery” was complete with sleeping quarters where Hypnopaedia can occur daily;

“They’ll have that repeated a hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months while they are sleeping, then they go on to a more advanced lesson. Sleep-teaching is the most powerful force of all time in social education. The child’s mind becomes these suggestions and the total of these suggestions is the child’s mind. And not only the child’s mind. The adult’s mind too, all his life long. The mind that thinks and desires and decides. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!’… ‘Suggestions of the State.’”

        This also allows Huxley to incorporate his notion that there are those “who approach the problem from the opposite end, and believe that desirable social change can be brought about most effectively by changing the individuals who compose society”. It seems to be very important to Huxley, at the time of writing this story, that people be made aware of just how much a person could be controlled and manipulated via one’s subconscious mind. It also seems important to Huxley to make sure that his story’s “Controller” had the power and knowledge to essentially take care of everything, creating the appearance of a safe and calm environment for all at all times. Those reading this book may enjoy the thought of a Marxist social class separation that keeps like-minded people together. Even if someone thinks outside of the proverbial box they were still, in the best-case scenario, being given the opportunity to pick the exile island they wanted to be sent to, which also housed like-minded people.

‘If he had any sense, he’d realize that his punishment is really a reward. That’s to say, he’s being sent to a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, are too individual to fit into community life. All the people who aren’t content to be the same as the others, who’ve got independent ideas of their own.” (Kindle location 1443-1451)

        Therefore, it would appear that being a puppet had its cushy advantages. The downsides to the “Controller’s” safe and calm “World State” are side effects inclusive of and not limited to, drug addiction, whore like behavior, lack of intimacy, lack of individuality, non-existent mother and a father-to-all called Ford, sexual harassment that you receive but don’t understand is not cool, unexplainable notions to dislike others in social classes not your own, inability to chose your own profession, lack of social outlets, forced to give up your sperm and eggs for harvesting, never knowing how to love someone else, never knowing how to accept love from someone else, subjectivity to wearing the same colors and clothes all the time, and of course having no voice or notion to want a voice of your own ever. All in all, it’s the best dream for a psychotically controlling lifestyle.

        Why create this back-handed compliment? Brave New World can put its reader in the mindset of perfectionism as it is the “Controllers” purpose to take away freedoms from his society of people in an effort to stabilize everyone’s emotional happiness. From the very beginning of the story, we are introduced to the “Director” who follows orders that he has been conditioned with over the years just as he directs his subordinates with orders they have been conditioned to follow as they help to condition the next generations and so on to keep the perfect order. Huxley’s Brave New World dives deep into the subconscious of human nature and societal conditioning to creatively explore this universal truth that the goal of society is to constantly create something for all humans to do.

        Who was influencing Huxley’s mind when he wrote Brave New World? Though the whole book is not centered on Freudian theories it is clear that the number of psychological studies being explored during this time period, that had Freud leading the pack, was seeping into Huxley’s brain while writing. Huxley suggests that the "Director's" purpose in this grand utopia is to strip what Freud called the Mirror Stage away from the children preventing their ability to assume their own image. By telling the nurses to condition all babies in some way or another at early stages in their development, he is telling them to not allow each child to find their own likes and dislikes. No person is allowed to be an individual as it always has to be about the hierarchy.

        Despite Huxley’s public words of distaste for Freud, we also see significant signs of another Freudian theory, the Oedipus complex, with regard to its lack of family orientation. The central and main father is one that is of a Godly stature that is named after Henry Ford, the automotive headmaster, and mother is a completely forbidden word. Where one could possibly get away with saying “father” without saying Ford, saying mother was intolerable; in effect completely abandoning the family concept altogether. This is where“…the Oedipus complex is deemed such a dangerous and powerful force that it (along with the family structure that produces it) has been eliminated from civilized life, as far as possible. Children are no longer born to a set of parents but produced in an assembly-line process from fertilized eggs, which are then “decanted” into bottles and subjected to endless chemical alteration and conditioning. By controlling all aspects of a child’s birth and upbringing and by keeping adults in a condition of infantile dependency on a larger social body, Huxley’s imaginary state has taken over the role of parent and robbed the child of his or her Oedipal potentialities. Indeed, it could be argued that the active suppression of the Oedipus complex is the principal tool of social stability practiced in this future.” (Buchanan 76)

        In an effort to keep everything uniform and systematic in lieu of the absentee family dynamic Huxley had his “Controller” make sure each child fell into a specified spectrum in an effort to always ensure the populace of money was continuing to generate and humans are never knowingly unhappy. In the intimate conversation that the “Controller” has with the “Savage” John, the “Controller” explains why he didn’t make everyone an Alpha Double-Plus.

‘Because we have no wish to have our throats cut,’ he answered. ‘We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldn’t fail to be restless and unhappy. An Alpha would go mad if he had to do Epsilon work – or start destroying things. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices. His conditioning has determined the life he has got to live. He can’t help himself.’ (Kindle location 1410)

        He went on to explain that it’s like an ‘iceberg – eight-ninths below the waterline, one-ninth above.’ (Kindle location 1410) Huxley made this hard for his character John to grasp therefore allowing his “Controller” to continue with his explanation as it would be hard to explain to any general society that in order to have order and calm there must be an equality among the masses that appear to the untrained eye as unequal as we all seem to think that everyone thinks as we do, when in fact they do not. Sleep-teaching or not, the “Controller” (Huxley himself) knew that we all think differently so to run an actual society without levels would never work. Levels can be broken down into minimal numbers of levels but there always must remain a plural, as a singular level ensues unhappy fighting amongst peers for top spot; that is our human/animalistic nature.

        In an effort to make this essay run current with today’s day and age I will quickly tie Brave New Word to current thinking. When Huxley wrote this book there was a lot less to consume though there was the theory of consumerism. Through the years and all that the Industrial Revolution and New Technologies that have been made available to us, we have been afforded the luxury of individual identities. The same something that Bernard and Helmholtz sought after and the “Controller” eventually granted them with their exiles. However, these individual identities have become levels themselves now. In Brave New World Huxley created Alpha’s, Beta’s, Gamma’s Delta’s, and Epsilons which coincided with the amount to consume back then, but today we have our own levels that come with sublevels to accommodate the influx in people alive. We are now given these distinctive levels when we are in school, on our taxes by way of our jobs already determined rank and income level, and as well as social rank in our own communities we live in, communities that are also ranked on levels of poor, middle class working, or rich/elite. In today’s age “Human beings buy objects not only to consume them but also to establish and reproduce status and identity. People shop for “identities” in a variety of urban contexts, thereby collecting and consuming many dimensions of the “I”. Increasingly, the “I” itself has become a product to buy. Consumer goods and shopping environments are consumed to create new identities as well as to select those already on the market. In doing so, we as consumers have adopted a mobile lifestyle to find commodities, people, and places to materialize a preferred status and lifestyle (Spierings, 2006). Consumer goods and shopping environments we (do not) want to construct our identity. We need something, someone and somewhere to belong to, to demarcate ourselves from, to define ourselves.” (Spierings, Van Houtum 901)

        While Huxley did not make his characters able to shop for their identities as we shop for ours now, that is not to say that he did not set the stage that the original “Controller” didn’t shop for these identities when creating this utopia. Huxley knew of the identity behind the “I” and knew when writing this that to have a utopia there could not be an “I” anymore then there could be a “mother”.

        In conclusion, Brave New World is a literary masterpiece that takes a made-up world and society and explains the political, economic, and cultural time period of the Great Depression and Industrial Revolution era with just enough lee-way room that it could still be an applicable foretelling of a future on its way. Aldous Huxley, despite his feelings on Freudian beliefs, incorporated an incredible amount of psychoanalytical material from the Id/Ego to Mirror Stage, and the Oedipus complex in every aspect of the book. He also structured his made-up world off of the appearance of a Marxist society while underlying it with capitalist theories that would translate today to our consumerism of the “I”. When put together Marxism works its best when it can feed off of the psychosis of its society it’s looking to be used in. Marxism cannot flourish without a society full of people who feel the need to outdo someone else in the society. Just as Capitalism cannot flourish in a society where ideas do not form from Alphas and there are no minions to carry out the ideas of those higher class individuals. In order to have classes, a society must have those people whose thoughts constantly feed off of an animalistic dominance in which they will constantly produce ways to fulfill those thoughts and needs for power over others. Therefore, much as in life, we find two lenses of thought, Marxist (sometimes with a capitalists subset) and Psychoanalytical, that effectual can feed off of each other to create dysfunctional yet functioning worlds. Huxley understood this and was able to capture and present a story of just enough satire and out of this world imagery to fool the mind into thinking its fiction when it really depicts a future in slow fruition.

                                                                     Works Cited: 

• Buchanan, Brad. “Oedipus in Dystopia: Freud and Lawrence in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.”Journal of Modern Literature, XXV, no. 3/4, 2002, pp. 75–89., ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edspmu&AN=edspmu.S1529146402300759&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 14 May 2017.
• Claeys, Gregory. “5 The Origins of Dystopia: Wells Huxley and Orwell.”The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010, p. 109.
• Congdon, Brad. “'Community, Identity, Stability': The Scientific Society and the Future of Religion in Aldous Huxley's: Brave New World.”English Studies in Canada, vol. 37, ser. 3-4, 2011, pp. 83–105.3-4, ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgao&AN=edsgcl.312014349&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 14 May 2017.
• Huxley, Aldous (2014-07-01). Brave New World. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
• Huxley, Aldous, and Howard Schneiderman. “Goals, Roads, and Contemporary Starting Point.”Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals, Transaction Publishers, pp. 1–2.
• Murdock, Kayla. “Capitalism versus Marxism.”Capitalism versus Marxism, Grin, 2009, m.grin.com/document/150605. Accessed 1 June 2017.
• Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. “Chapter 3: On Narcissism Sigmund Freud.”Literary Theory: An Anthology Second Edition, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, 2004, p. 415.
• Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. “Chapter 5: Wage Labor and Capital Karl Marx.”Literary Theory: An Anthology Second Edition, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, 2004, pgs. 660-661,663.
• Spierings, B., and H. Van Houtum. “The Brave New World of the Post-Society: The Mass-Production of the Individual Consumer and the Emergence of Template Cities.”European Planning Studies, vol. 16, no. 7, Aug. 2008, pp. 899–909., ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edswss&AN=000258452800002&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 14 May 2017.

Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" Analysis and Discussion

        For the passage in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad that I chose to compare this passage that Conrad wrote early on in the story along with a follow-up passage he wrote in section two of the story. Since we are to analyze this passage within the scope of feminism and psychoanalysis I felt Charlie's reaction to his aunt's words was the most fitting for comparison.

"You forget, dear Charlie, that the laborer is worthy of his hire, ' she said, brightly. It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over."

"I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie," he began, suddenly. "Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it -completely. They- the women, I mean- are out of it- should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse." 

        According to Wikipedia feminism "is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or, more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses feminist principles and ideology to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within the literature."

        With that being said, readers can view Charlie's statement as sexist. "...out of touch with truth..." Conrad writes this in a piece that is about one man's story, his decisions as a man, and his feelings about everything going on around him. Therefore by allowing his main character to say this passage, it allows the reader to believe that the main character has no use for a woman's beautiful world, that apparently women live outside the realm of reality, a reality where only men live. Not only does Conrad narrate Charlie to say this once but then again in the second part of the story reiterating his feeling that women live in a world all of their own when he says "We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse." Conrad's insinuation through Charlie that women could not manage the stresses of reality and therefore live only in a beautiful facade is the exact passage that feminism works to negate.

"In general, feminist literary criticism before the 1970s—in the first and second waves of feminism—was concerned with women's authorship and the representation of women's condition within the literature; including the depiction of fictional female characters." (Wikipedia)

        The benefits of looking at this passage through the feminism lens are that we can see how women were treated in the past and work to correct it for the future, as we are not just creatures of naive fantasies living in a realm that is not reality alongside our human counterparts.

        The disadvantage would be the other side of the double-edged knife. While sexism is not right, we run the risk of losing chivalry to a notion that we of the female race, know is not true, but when we fight to change how men see us after seeing us for so long as helpless, it creates a backlash of inequality. Women know men need us to need them whether we really need them or not but did we/do we really need to scream inequality for all when not all feel the same way. Some women are proud to be of a beautifully naive mindset. Also, analysis of books can strip them of their chauvinistic ways only to put great literature under scrutiny for something that was a factual reality of the male thought processes of years past. Also picking apart an author's words, meaning, theme, etc. is an attempt to understand what the author meant when we all read things differently.

        To psychoanalyze these connected passages under the psychoanalytical umbrella that says psychoanalysis of literature "can be the psychoanalysis of the author or of a particularly interesting character in a given work." (Wikipedia) leads us to question why Charlie thinks the way he thinks by way of Conrad's mind. We have to ask whether Conrad was simply describing how it was on that day in age or was that truly how he felt about life around him.

        The advantages of looking at this passage through the psychoanalytical lens are that we can get a better picture as to why the story was written. What the significance is to have this story published and read by the masses. It allows us to look deep into the context of Charlie's words for the meaning of how he feels and why."The chief function of the psychoanalytic critic is to reveal the true content, and thus to explain the effect on the reader of a literary work by translating its manifest elements into the dormant, unconscious determents that make up their suppressed meaning." (Devardhi)

        The disadvantages of looking at this passage through the lens are that we strip away the enjoyment of just reading the words and allowing ourselves to simply be engulfed by the author's characters, settings, tones, and themes. Sometimes picking something apart is helpful and other times it just takes away from the simplicity of reading for light-minded fun.

                                                                         Works Cited: 

• "Feminist Literary Criticism."Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 31 Mar. 2017. Web. 13 Apr. 2017.
• "Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism."Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 05 Apr. 2017. Web. 13 Apr.
• Devardhi, J. "Application of Freudian Concepts to the Explication of Literary Texts: A Case Study of Walt Whitman’s “The Sleepers”."African Research Review3.1 (2009): n. pag. Web. 13 Apr. 2017.
• Conrad, Joseph. "Heart of Darkness."Gutenburg.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2017

                                                                       My Discussion Responses:
Hi Amy, 

         Thank you for agreeing. However, despite my stated point of view above, I will now play devils advocate to my own words. As I am quirky like that. So from a feminist standpoint, yes, the passage is sexist and paints women in a less than flattering light intellectually speaking, but when you read the whole story and read the women symbolically then a whole new light is shed on Conrad's story.

        The story is, while still in a somewhat sexist way, literally all about a man and his journey, though literature is full of these kinds of stories about women too, where the male roles of the story are symbolic of the woman's journey. Conrad seemingly, specifically, made only a select few things in this story feminine. Two of which were Kurtz women, which much like the whole stories paralleling good vs evil nature, Kurtz had one woman of bright lighted purity and one of savage intensity. The third would be the feminine-named vessel that carries Charlie along the river and deep within himself.

        Though I completely stand behind what I wrote above, I felt I needed to further state my feelings on the book to clarify that I do understand the immense symbolic nature of this novella. I do agree that many literary pieces do take an extreme sexist approach in describing women within their stories, however, I believe the sexist parts of this story are to aid the symbolic nature of how Kurtz viewed the woman with regard to the standard views of women of this novellas time period. Charlie actually, in one respect feels women are better then men if you read into the words through a psychoanalytical lens that follows the thinking that by not wanting women to have their beautiful worlds tainted by the possibilities of a man's worse world he is helping to preserve woman's beauty. It's a double-edged knife, in stripping a woman of their ability to handle the nitty-gritty, he is allowing women to be in a category that doesn't need to be amongst the nitty-gritty, which men tend to think is complimentary while some women think it's insulting.

        Perspective is always subjective to an individual's personal views on life. Open-mindedness allows for vast interpretations of all things tangible and non. That's the true beauty of life, to me of course.

        I really enjoy exploring this with you too. Part of the reason why I wanted to go back for my masters was so that I could talk to intelligent people who enjoy using their brains as much as I do. So thank you!

        I can't say I disagree at the moment with anything that you have stated or how you have stated it. In literature, I don't believe there is a right or wrong per-say because it is all subjective to how the reader wants to interpret the written piece. However, there is always the way that the author intended to write it but some authors don't always give up their intentions because they like hearing the debate. From the little bit I have read on Conrad I think he definitely intended his women to be symbolic statues that embodied that time period for exactly what they were supposed to stand for at that time period. While I think that this was a story specifically written by a man about a man's journey I don't think women mattered much more then they needed to matter which is why he left them symbolic and nameless, I can't say I haven't written a character as such because the character was important to the story but not enough to have a life, just a presence, and a purpose. However, in doing that, it does allow for many doors to open up with questions and possible reasonable answers as to why it was written that way.

        I believe Conrad's women were symbolic of good and evil as he presented polar opposites and that due to the nature of the stories events and the relationship between Krutz and Charlie that surrounded them, I can see the women being a foreshadowing of those ominous events in a way that paralleled the actual voyage into the darkness that was central Africa where Charlie was faced with Krutz's darkness and finding his way out of it back to the beauty.

         I really enjoyed reading your interpretations and having you read my thoughts as well. Thank you very much, Amy!!!

~Maria