Saturday, January 25, 2014
4)
The individual's conflicts: Books frequently follow the main character or are even told from the character's point of view, and that allows the reader to see a more personal side of them. The main character often has many conflicts, both external and within. To really get inside their head, what was the character's internal struggles throughout your book?
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It was hard to get inside Roger Rosenblatt’s head and see his emotions. Although he tried to connect with the reader personally, he did not give an insight to how he felt very often. Something that I picked up on was a sense of loneliness and lack of belonging.
ReplyDeleteMany of the moments Roger talks about are when he is alone observing others. Even when he talks about his wife and kids, his friends, or his family, there always seems to be a separation between him and them, like he is looking through a window on their lives.
At one point he talks about the time when his mom was pregnant with his little brother. He and his mom shared a bedroom, his father got his own, and his little brother was going to get Roger’s old room. He talks about how after his brother, Peter, is born his mom no longer pays an attention to him, only Peter. He climbed the walls with bookshelves on them all the way to the ceiling and would jump down to get some sort of attention, which he never received.
When he is walking in New York City he says he is never alone, he is surrounded by hundreds of people, as he watches them go on with their daily lives. But I think he likes to surround himself with so many people, because that’s how he learns about life. He was always an onlooker, and he likes to be immersed with other people in order to not be lonely, but there’s still a sense of that he is alone.
I think one of his struggles not as the character, but as a writer, was keeping that separation and wall up. The reader knows that he had major struggles in life, mentioning his mother’s Alzheimer’s, hinting at a death of a child in the family, but he never really lets the reader know exactly what happened. He tells his memoir class to not give details on your life, but rather your dreams and thoughts, and that it’s much more interesting that way. But I saw it as a defense mechanism from letting people to really know who you are and what you’ve been through.
Because my book does not follow one specific character, I can't really get into one specific person's head and see how they view their life. However, I did get to see how a large group of people from many different places felt about poverty and dealt with it on an everyday basis. In this way, I suppose I can say that I was able to fit myself into the head of a generic person, and explore the issues of poverty in that way.
ReplyDeleteThe way that I have come to understand it, living a comfortable life makes you take seemingly everything for granted, which I find really sad. Poverty strips people of their basic needs... food, shelter, and clothing. There are so many things that become secondary issues when you don't have your basic needs. Health is one of them. If you haven't got enough to eat and you're starving, allowing yourself to eat from “unsanitary” places is the least of your worries if you don't have enough food to eat in the first place.
Sometimes I won't eat breakfast, and I'll think,” Man, I'm starving.” But the truth is, sure, I am hungry, but am I actually starving? No, not at all. We come to use these over exaggerated terms because we have never understood them first- hand. There has never been a time when I personally, have not been able to eat for an extended period of time because we could not buy food. There was never a time when my parents told us that we couldn't eat what we wanted because there wasn't enough. This is a problem that poverty stricken people go through every day. There are children who know that their only hot meal will be at school.
Healthcare is also a large issue for people who live in poverty. America is a place where absolutely everything comes with a price. Healthcare is something that is especially expensive. If someone is sick or a “little bit” hurt, going to the doctor might not even be worth it, because it is so expensive to go there and seek treatment. Some people would rather just wait it out and hope that they get better. When you live in poverty, you have to make decisions as to what is most important in your life-- priorities and opportunity costs are everything.
There are a myriad of other problems that I have not even begun to talk about when one struggles with poverty. Putting myself into even a generic mindset is bleak and horrifying.
I can't even imagine what it is like for someone to live in poverty. It's hard enough getting through the everyday demands of life, and add the stress of not knowing if you can survive the day is horrifying to even think about.
DeleteI think we as humans often feel sorry for ourselves and forget to think about what other people are possibly going through and any ways we can help them. I feel like the main character in my book was a victim of that. He never got into details about his life, but you could tell there was underlying sadness. And again I don't know the extremity of his case, but based on where he lived in New York and that he went to Harvard I highly doubt he was struggling to find food everyday.
I wish we all could stop and consider the hardships others have more often, maybe if we were all a little more considerate we would be able to make each other happier and the world a better place, but maybe that is just wishful thinking.
ReplyDeleteAs Julius ventures to many places, the reader gets to develop their own opinion but Julius also makes his own opinions about himself. Julius is mixed race, and often he can feel secluded. He comes across people of many ethnicities throughout this journey, such as Japanese, Nigerian, German, and Caucasian. Julius feels racially, he doesn’t belong anywhere as he is half German, half African. In Chapter 18, he is walking down the street, nods as tow African-American boys, and then suddenly sees them doubling back. He is hit from behind, beaten, and essentially mugged. Julius is identified as “black” to Caucasians, but he is a lighter color. After this incident, he feels even more alone, culturally and socially. In Brussels he feels his European side, but at other times he feels to be a part of the African culture. Julius goes to see a film at a movie theater, and immediately is suspicious, the music featured is not from the right part of Africa, and it’s from Mali instead of Kenya. He had a watched a film earlier in the year about crimes of large pharmaceutical companies in East Africa. He was frustrated because of the film’s fidelity to the convention of the good white man in Africa. Africa was just Africa to Caucasians, always waiting for them and to be a substrate for the white man’s will, a backdrop for his activities. Julius goes through many emotions, anger at this point because other ethnicities don’t understand and never will. But if he feels a part of the ethnicity, why isn’t he accepted?
He observes that society is changing, as he encounters a blond American teaching an Asian girl Chinese, but ultimately, he feels as if he hasn’t been accepted. Even in modern times, there’s still a divide among the racial groups. At one point he’s in a place and sees the African-Americans drawn to each other and the Europeans, and right there he just keeps on thinking. Then at another time, he’s at his good friends Moji and John’s party, he can see the neighborhood is changing and as he walks in, “it’s a symphony of white” At the end, Julius had just gotten out of surgery, after having his hand repaired and comes to see the historic place in New York, where flocks of birds dive to their deaths. To him, it means of the segregation and separation of ethnic groups during modern times.
Julius certainly develops many relationships along his life, but he never fully goes through with them. Some of his personal faults he realizes are never finishing anything which leads to him being indecisive. In his conversation with Saito, he is reading mostly medical journals and many other interesting things that he begins and somehow is unable to finish. He buys a book, and then it reproaches him for leaving it unread. He knows that he continuously does this, but yet he continues with this same behavior. A neighbor he mentions is this couple, who knocked on his door when Nadège, his ex girlfriend were playing music. Seth, his neighbor, said the noise from his speakers disturbed him, but genuinely said him and his wife, Carla, were away on the weekends and were free to be loud from Friday afternoons onward. Fast-forward many months, Seth and Julius are walking down the hallway, and asked him if they still got away on the weekends. Seth said, “Oh yes, every weekend, but now it’s just me now, Julius. Carla died in June.” She had a heart attack. These are the moments Julius continuously thinks about. After he was stunned into momentary confusion and said “I’m so sorry” and going in to their apartment twenty-one and Julius’s twenty-two, just thinks. A woman had died in the room next to his; Julius had known nothing in the weeks when her husband had mourned.
Julius’s character is really broken down here. He hadn’t known Seth well enough to routinely ask how Carla was and he hadn’t noticed not seeing her around. He hadn’t noticed the absence nor the chance. Since he hadn’t taken that step to form a true relationship, he feels that knocking on the door to embrace him or speak with him at length would have been false intimacy. And then Julius feels a certain sense of relief that Seth had knocked on his door to see if Julius was playing guitar before his wife’s death. Putting away his groceries, he was relieved which was immediately taken over by shame. And finally, Julius looking back, realizes the feeling subsided much too quickly.
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