"Sonny's Blues"

This is a story about life. The pain, suffering, hope, fear, loss, freedom and entrapment. This is what people go through when they are brought up in troubled situations. The narrator of this story is the older brother of Sonny, who is really the main focus of this tale.

There is very little one can understand from this story without having lived at least a part of it, pain, true pain, is incredibly hard to explain. Sonny himself explains to his brother at one point that he "can't really talk about it, not to you not to anyone", I don't think this is because he doesn't want his brother to understand but rather because unless you have been to a place where you are completely broken, you don't understand what it is like, you never really can.

This story is telling the reader one of the greatest truths in life, the harder the times, the farther a person has fallen, the more pain and suffering they have been through, the more they become something else. While they lose something in the process, like an animal leaving it's leg in a trap, they become something more then they were before at the same time. Everyone does this to a certain degree, everyone loses something, it's just that some lose more than others and that brings out more character in a person and you lose more of who you were before. Sonny says at one point that it is repulsive to think you have to suffer so much to get something so beautiful out of it.

Another point made in this story is that suffering is a huge part of life and as the narrator said "...there is no way not to suffer-- is there Sonny?" and while there isn't people make choices in an attempt to lessen the suffering. The point that Sonny makes through the whole story is that someone who has not made the same choices to lessen the suffering could not possibly understand what he has been through. He loses the boy that he was before but at the same time he becomes something more and gains abilities to do things and understand things that people who haven't been to the place where they were, as Sonny said, "Something I didn't recognize, didn't know I could be. Didn't know anybody could be." where he "Did terrible things" to himself and was quite literally "bad" for himself, could never possibly understand.

Everyone makes their own decisions in life and the choices they make, along with the choices that are made for them before they are even born, define who they are, and what they can do. Whether this makes what Sonny did right or not... who am I to judge the decisions he made to cope with the suffering in his life? Was his brother better off than him? or was he worse off cause he could never possibly share his reality with people the way Sonny did at the end of this story?

"The Flowers" by Alice Walker and “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid Analysis

First and foremost I would like to say that the Alice Walker poem is one of my favorite kinds, a death of innocence poem. I really want to focus on the line that really grabbed me "And the summer was over." The very last line after Myop the girl in the poem finds a dead and rotting body by stepping in it. The whole poem up until she finds the body is quite innocent and happy it describes scenes where she is picking wildflowers and watching animals play, then she finds the body and kind of describes it in the same way she has described everything so far, very observantly and with a child like innocence realizing that the buttons have turned green, and the blue overalls, his naked white smile. I think at this point she didn't really realize what had happened, it was only when she picked the wild pink rose from the center of the remnants of the noose did she realize, that not only was this man dead but everyone will die someday including her. Then her childhood was over, her innocence left, the end of the summer wasn't a literal end of the summer it meant that she died a little inside cause she realized that the world wasn't what she thought it was. The death of innocence, no one ever goes back to how they were before and it is sad to lose the person that was before. In essence Myop died that day and was gone forever.

"Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid focuses more on the overbearing parent, the one that tells you you are nothing and will never be anything because they want you to become better than they were but they really don't think you can. The person that the story is trying to help gets all of three sentences in, throughout the whole story and the first two times she speaks she is ignored, and the parent keeps going on their rant. The narrator of the story thinks that what they are saying is important and will help their daughter, but in reality they are just giving their child that many more reasons to fail, because the girl will ultimately fail no matter what she does according to the narrator. "this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming", "so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming", "this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man; and if this doesn't work there are other ways, and if they don't work don't feel too bad about giving up". It's almost sad, in trying to help her child the narrator almost creates a self fulfilling prophecy that destines her daughter for nothing but failure. In the very end when the narrator finally does pay attention to her daughter all she does is chastise her. "you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?" The narrator has already predetermined that her daughter will be a failure.

"Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year " analysis

This is a poem talking about how he never realized how much it took to be a parent, he is staring at a picture of his father and realizes just how much his dad had done for him. In the line "But the eyes give him away, and the hands that limply offer the string of dead perch" the author can see how even though his father tried to hide it it was just as hard for the author's father to be a father as it currently is for the author. The line "yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either" is the author admitting to the picture of his father that it is way harder to be a parent and how he never really realized how hard it was until he became one himself.

"In a Station of the Metro" analysis

The title of this short poem tells you the setting and from some of the wording (black, wet, crowd) it seems as though she is trying to portray the metro as a not entirely pleasant place. The line"Petals on a wet, black bough." is probably talking again about the people who have 'these faces' in the crowd and how they are just a part of something bigger or in a bigger place like the Metro Station, yet for some reason she feels the need to mention them as though they stuck out and were different for some reason.

Letter of Introduction

My favorite book is the original Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. She was one of the first science fiction writers and personally I think she did a wonderful job of portraying how a simple mistake in the scientific world could cause a catastrophe. Many of my favorite short stories and novels that I had to read were either very dark or incredibly fictional. Two of my favorite poets are Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickenson, I love writers and stories that force you to look at the world from a different perspective.
My favorite English teacher so far was Ms. Rinaldi, she was the one who introduced me to my current favorite book Frankenstein. She also challenged me to bring my outside ideas in class into my writing. I was almost always on the "wrong" side of arguments according to many of my classmates and a few of my former teachers. Ms. Rinaldi was the first teacher to encourage my debates of the less commonly argued points of a story.
As far as writing goes, I have always had to write, something about me just wants to put pen to paper and get my feelings out that way. Weird I know but for as long as I can remember I have always had a place to put down my random thoughts about the world and how things work.I had a book that I was working on for a while, it was a fictional story about how this kid was trapped in a virtual world, kind of like the matrix, but his real body in the real world was a dragon. It got kind of crazy from then on, a war between dragons and humans and the boy has a split personality and one of them leads the dragons and the other one leads the humans. It would have been an awesome story except for the fact that I am a perfectionist and kept going back and fixing it as I was writing it and never really got past the first chapter since I didn't spend enough time on it.
The reason I wright fiction is the same reason I enjoy darker poems and stories, because I understand how messed up the world is and writing is an escape for me. In my stories I try to expand things that I see in real life and make them more physical and understandable. For example the kid who ended up leading both sides of a planet wide war, just expands on how almost everyone has an internal struggle going on inside of them between what the want to do and what they feel is right.
I am taking this class for two reasons, the first reason is because besides what my parents and grandparents have told me I don't really know much about the world since the 1950's on all my history classes stopped right around there, that and I was sick a lot and smart enough to get by without making stuff up, and second I love writing and may want to become a writer but I need to know what people recently have published and why. My major is polymer and fiber chemistry.

Clemson so far...
First I was scared home was far behind,
Second new friends same scenario,
Third moved homes for the fourteenth time,
Fourth 70,000 people are louder then I thought,
Fifth so much free time, it wasn't really free,
Sixth messed up again one more shot to get it right,
Seventh I can do this.