A narrow Fellow in the Grass

This week, I will like to take a step away from The Sound and the Fury and take a look
at one of the poems we had to read for class previously. (We just took one hour to write a
surprise timed writing in class.) The poem that I will like to talk about is from our poetry packet
a few weeks ago called "A narrow Fellow in the Grass" by Emily Dickinson.

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,--did you not,
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,--
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

I got very excited about this poem because I finally somewhat understood what the author was talking about. The first time I read it for class, I had no idea what she was it was supposed to mean or who/what the
narrow fellow in the grass was. But after reading it several times, I had a feeling that she was
talking about a snake. After figuring out the subject of this poem, I reread the poem again and
it all made sense.

The snake was the narrow fellow in the grass which smoothly passed through the grass, dividing it, just like
the the teeth of a comb. It seems to be that the narrator becomes a boy, barefoot out in nature.
He is a boy in love with nature because he is frequently outside during noontime. This boy is unafraid
of the snake, stooping to hold the slithering animal. However, it seems that the narrator, unlike the boy,
is afraid of the snake. She is unable to meet the snake without becoming tense and afraid.

The part of the poem that allowed me to understand the Dickinson was talking about a snake
was the last line of the poem: "And Zero at the Bone-" It just made sense that the author would
be talking about a snake. A snake=no bones.... maybe that wasn't what Dickinson was trying
to point at, but that is the part where I finally figure out the puzzle.

After realizing that the subject of the poem was a snake, I liked the poem. It was similar to a riddle, with
many clues. And once you figure out the riddle, the poem makes a lot more sense. At least this poem
had clues hinting me to the meaning of the poem. Some of the poems however, don't have any of this.
It just seems as if the authors poured out their emotions in words, without trying to make any sense of
it or get a point across to the readers. (Exactly how I think Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury.)Whatever word came across their mind was what they
wrote down on paper...and that was the poem.-I don't like poems like that. I wish it had a concrete
and clear meaning to it. Something someone can understand and FEEL although they may not be
able to relate to it.

Quentin

The last few days, our readings have been centered more on Quentin than on Benjy.
We have finally come to Quentin's section of the novel. Although we aren't fully finished
reading the section, there is still a lot we know about Quentin.
We did an activity in class that helped separate each memory that Benjy recollected into
groups. This activity helped me understand a little more about the characters of Benjy and Caddie.
This is because the first section of the novel is focused mostly on Benjy and Caddie. Although
Caddie is a promiscuous girl, who at first I didn't really like, the more I read, I'm starting to like her.
After Caddie leaves the Compson family, we are able to see how much Caddie meant to Benjy.
She was the only one who truly cared for him and treated him the way he should be treated, with love.
Others such as Luster torments Benjy by telling him that he will be sent to a home for the mentally
retarded as soon as his mother passes away. Although Caddie does run away, leaving Benjy by himself,
I think she still had a big enough heart to connect with Benjy, allowing him to feel (although he doesn't know)
what love is.
In this second part of the novel, we learn more about Quentin. I thought that this section of the novel
would be a lot easier than Benjy's section, not only because Quentin is not mentally retarded, but
also because his thoughts should be a lot more organized than Benjy's, have a lot more description
on the event. However, Quentin's section is just as hard to understand as Benjy's section. This disappointed
me a lot because I thought that I would be able to understand the novel much more easily in this section.
But of course, Faulkner continues to write the novel with his own personally "style."
Quentin, described by Faulkner is in the state between Benjy's and Jason's. He is somewhat mental and
somewhat sane. To organize my thoughts, he is an emotional
man who has only one objective in life. Quentin is obsessed with his sister, Caddie.
Although his family has spent so much on his tuition to Harvard, selling the pasture that belonged
to Benjy, Quentin doesn't really try his hardest at Harvard to bring his family honor.
He doesn't want Caddie to be ruined by other men, living a promiscuous life. He tries to protect her by
doing whatever he can. Quentin seems to be stuck in his past. It seems to me that he is reminded
of the present only when the watch that his father gave him wakes him up from all his thinking.
Quentin hates the fact that Caddie is so promiscuous. He wishes that instead of her, he was the the
"unvirgin."
We are in the middle of Quentin's section, not even halfway through the novel, and I am already
so tired of trying to understand what is going on in this novel. All the different events that randomly
pop up in the novel, ruining the flow of the events, having to figure out how all of these stories come
together...not going to lie, The Sound and the Fury, it's a really hard novel.

AP Lit reading

For the past few days, we have been concentrating on reading novels: The Sound and the Fury
and our outside reading book, in my case, Memoirs of a Geisha. Reading these two novels
at the same time, I had very contrasting and different feelings about reading. Before AP Lit, I
read books only for fun, without annotating and analyzing every page. Although I didnt read much either, whenever I did read a certain book, I enjoyed it and finished it with positive feelings.
However, ever since I've been in this class, I have been taking literature much more
seriously, and honestly, that has made me lose some of the interest I had for reading. I was very tired
of all the analysis we had to do in class for every book/poem we had to read, books and poems that I didn't
even enjoy. But after reading The Awakening, I started to become hopeful again. Yes, there
were still books that interested me. Yes, there were also books that I could UNDERSTAND. In the
days of holding onto that hope to last me a few more weeks of first semester, we HAD to come across
probably the worst book cbosen in AP Lit: The Sound and the Fury. This book, is just a no. Not only
is the story so bland (To me, I don't know about what other people in our class think. I don't think
they like it that much either.), it is also written with one of the most confusing style of writing.
BUT! All hope is not lost! The outside reading we were required to do wasn't a pressure to me but I'm
very thankful that we were given this assignment. I was in the process of finding every literature
in AP Lit very dull and horrible, but the book I read came to be very pleasant. I chose to read
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden as my outside reading book. I finished reading the book in 3 days.
Although it wasn't as good as Harry Potter which I finished reading in only a couple of hours, (:D~) it
had been a long time since I read anything with so much focus and excitement.
I personally believe that good piece of literature is that it has the potential to keep the readers' attentions.
Memoirs of a Geisha had all the potential to keep my attention and keep me excited for literature. However, The Sound and the Fury did not have me hooked; not even for a single page. In my
very own and personal opinion, this novel is not a good piece of artwork. The purpose of writing
should be either for learning or enjoyment. I don't think that The Sound and the Fury is either.
Reading both a very great book and a boring one has given me mixed feelings about reading.
To end this blog on a good note: I guess by exposing me to all the different types of styles and works
of literature, I'll be able to have a greater and more insightful view of the even more complex world than some of these complicated books.

The Sound and the Fury

Another week of AP Lit has gone by and this week, we started a new novel,
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. We read the first few pages of the novel (3~20).
My first impression was that Faulkner was a confused person. A novel that even the author didn't
make any sense of and interpreted in different meanings, I didn't know if this would
be a great novel after all. When reading the very first few pages of the book, I was very confused.
I can't say that I'm not anymore. But in the beginning of reading it by myself, I was truly lost.
The random date and scene changes that Benjy introduced were not clear at all. They were certainly
given at very random moments in the book, sometimes so sudden that I didn't even catch that it
was a flashback, but thought it was another scene hard to make any sense out of.
In this blog post, I want to take an especially closer look at the character, Benjy. Benjy is the
character with the mental disability. He is characterized as having no emotions and is more like an
animal than a human. There was a question in class: do you sympathize or pity Benjy?
I personally did not pity Benjy. Although he didn't have the ability to express and feel like the
rest of the human population, he himself was not aware of this and lived perfectly fine with who he was.
This relates back the The Awakening and how I didn't sympathize or feel sorry for the "trapped"
Adele, who lived by societal standards, because she was happy with the person she was, and the
fact that she was not exposed to the freedom Edna had, she was able to live perfectly fine.
Nevertheless, I don't think Benjy was completely emotionless. He had the ability to cry and feel
some kind of sorrow, although he wasn't sure of what it was. He was able to remember Caddie and
was able to feel something grow inside of him when he remembered her.
This novel is really confusing. I don't like the way it is written, Faulkner's style is not working with me.
Especially because I like pieces with exact meanings and an exact ending (Yes, Inception was
a great movie, but the ending still bothers me. I personally would have liked it much more if
it had a definite ending.), The Sound and the Fury will be a piece of literature I will enjoy reading.
There are times when the novel is extremely bland and boring, with a lack of description. Being both
bland and hard to interpret, The Sound and the Fury seems like it will be a hard book to
accomplish and enjoy. But I'm going to try to enjoy this piece of literature because it's going to
help me become more analytical and break apart the meanings of texts that are hard to interpret.