1979 Prompt: Choose a complex and important character in a novel or a play of recognized literary merit who might on the basis of the character’s actions alone be considered evil or immoral. In a well organized essay, explain both how and why the full presentation of the character in the work makes us react more sympathetically than we otherwise might.

I want to look at both Frankenstein and his monster. The monster kills people to get to Frankenstein but it is because he wants to be loved or have someone who loves him. Frankenstein is sympathetic because he didn’t mean to create such a monster but he should not have played god.

1. In “The Rocking Horse Winner,” the rocking horse was an ambiguous symbol. Some people thought it was his greed and his want driving him forward. Others thought he was releasing sexual tension as a “blaze of light suddenly lit him up” (297) every time he rode the horse. It is unclear what the horse represents exactly.
2. The characters in Their Eyes Were Watching God speak in colloquial dialect. When Janie gets tired of her marriage with Logan, she tells him “you ain’t done me no favor by marryin’ me” (31). Hurston was criticized for this because it makes African Americans sound inferior, when that is the way they talk. She wanted to add verisimilitude to her story that can only be there with the dialect of the area.
3. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in blank verse and iambic pentameter. With lines that had an easy to follow meter to them, “what would he do had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have” (117), it made it less difficult for the actors to memorize it. With so many soliloquies, it was necessary to have a flow to the language or the actors would bumble through the play.
4. In Act 5 of Hamlet, the gravedigger brings a little comic relief to all of the seriousness of the play. With a play on words, Hamlet and the gravedigger go back and forth discussing for whom the grave was being dug. The gravedigger is a commoner and breaks the iambic pentameter the higher class uses and it brings a lighter mood to the play. With the rest of the play being serious and dealing with treachery and death, the comic relief is used as a break before the end.
5. In “The Kugelmass Episode,” Kugelmass, the protagonist, experiences the ultimate irony when he ends up in a Remedial Spanish textbook with the intent of entering a piece of literature. He went to Persky, the magician, to get help and escape from the real world. In Kugelmass’s search for beauty, he found everything but that. He found the boring reality of everyday life he had been trying to escape.
6. Ivan reaches an epiphany after he is done telling the anecdote about his brother near the end of ”Gooseberries.” As his story is wrapping up, he looks at Alehin and tells him to “do good” because there isn’t enough good in the world. Ivan gives up saying he is too old but the point of his story is that the lower classes have to change and speak up instead of being silent. People are only happy because the people around them are silent and Alehin has to change that as someone with power.
7. In “Gooseberries,” Nikolay and Alehin are foil characters because they are both rich but they live different lifestyles. Alehin gets up early to work with his workers while Nikolay gives his workers Vodka on special occasions. Nikolay treats his workers badly because he used to be one of them and feels that is the only way to be truly superior. On the other hand, Alehin was born into his land and works with his workers as an equal.

The narrator believes the woman is unhappy because she twitches and thinks about life as if there was something bad that happened to her. The woman is described as having “such an expression of unhappiness…to make one’s eyes slide above the paper’s edge” (1). Minnie is irritated by her sister-in-law but she is not unhappy. She is just trying to get to her son who is the one waiting for her at the train station. The train must be uncomfortable making her twitch and irritated. Minnie’s bitterness of Hilda seem to be the only consistent element of the woman and Minnie’s life. Everything the narrator imagined about this character is proven false with the appearance of her son at the station. The narrator imagined that everyone who would have picked her up was busy doing something else but the narrator was proved wrong. The perceptions come from the woman’s demeanor. This story is really about finding out who the narrator is and how the narrator can draw from the few known things about this woman to make a story that is not real and show elements of the narrator in the actual creation of the story.

Nick is Nikita Khrushchev in the battle with George who is named after George Washington. Further evidence of this is the fact that George’s wife’s name is Martha as was Washington’s. Nick is the new guy coming in and trying to take over from the guy who was already there. There is a constant tension between them that is hard to ignore. Their fighting involves hits against the other like the arms race but there is no open fire. The fighting between them consists of mind games and not of physical fighting. They are playing games rather than brawling. When Nick and George seem to be at peace, the games are easily started up again and neither of them needs to be provoked very much. George represents the negative side of the American Dream. Nick gets in the way of Martha and George’s relationship by creating the sexual tension. Martha is WWII in the Cold War. After that point, the negotiations seem to crumble. At the end of the novel, Nick and George seem to reach an agreement that George can have Martha. George mentions that he will not give up Berlin and that is the key connection to the war. Berlin was the hot spot during the Cold War because it was in East Germany, which was controlled by the Soviet Union. Berlin was divided into four parts although it was in East Germany. Berlin was the connector between the USSR and the US. Martha could very easily be Berlin as well. The sexual tension could be detente in the actual war. George tells Martha that he still wants her and that he will not lose her to Nick. Nick eventually tries to block of Martha from George by protecting her while he throws the snapdragons at her but it fails. This directly parallels the blockade of Germany by the USSR in an attempt to keep the US out of Berlin.

Honey is a simple and conservative woman caught in the middle of the intellectual games of the characters around her. She is having a conversation about chromosomes with Nick, George, and Martha when Nick gets angry and cusses which causes Honey to respond with “dear, you mustn’t…you mustn’t…you mustn’t” (75). All she seems concerned about in this conversation is the fact that her husband cussed, showing a religious background. They are talking about her husband’s job but she does not get involved in the conversation until her husband curses and refrains from adding to the intellectual part. Once the evening progresses further, Honey gets drunk and she starts “echoing George” (85). Her state of mind is reduced when she is drunk and has nothing to add to the conversation whatsoever. She just agrees with what is said and has no idea what is going on in the discussion as if it were a discussion of cats and dogs. She is by far the weakest minded of the four partakers in the dialogue.

1. All of the money that the women earn goes to men and male-run institutions. The women don’t see any of it and if the women had stood up for themselves a while ago it wouldn’t be like this but they didn’t so it’s no use.
2. Mrs. Seton is a mother who has accomplished raising thirteen children and she scraped together thirty thousand dollars but she isn’t praised for it. It is her husband who gets all of the attention and all of the men around her. She is the prime example of how women were treated and the irony of men doing less but receiving more credit for it.
3. Mrs. Seton’s efforts would have been futile because the way society works doesn’t allow for women to earn large sums of money and if they do it goes to their husbands.
4. Men were the ones with the money and they wanted to support their own and they reinvested the money they earned into male colleges and other institutions to make more men like them. The women didn’t need to be educated to work at home and raise the kids. Women didn’t have much power at all.
5. Money didn’t matter for women during that time because they couldn’t earn it and if they did it technically wasn’t theirs. All of a woman’s money was her husband’s money. Men had all of the wealth and power.

I want to lead the film vs. book discussion.

The play is over and Fortinbras is now in charge of both Norway and Denmark. Horatio is stuck with Fortinabras as his ruler now. Again I feel very sorry for Horatio. Everyone he loved dies and he tries to kill himself too but Hamlet won’t let him because Horatio has to tell the story of their twisted family. That would be a horrible thing to be charged with. His sole purpose is to make sure the story of Hamlet gets told. Is that enough to keep living or will Horatio go mad or kill himself? He could just go back to Wittenberg or to England and avoid the whole mess but he is the only survivor and he will probably have to answer a lot of questions about what happened. He is the only who knows the whole story. If he isn’t driven mad by questions, he will probably go mad from Fortinbras trying to control him. Even though Fortinbras claimed Denmark, will he actually get to rule it or will some other government step in and say he can’t? Hamlet is very wordy. It was quite irritating throughout the play. He is the main character but he doesn’t have to do all of the speaking. Horatio can barely get a word in, poor man. Even as Hamlet is dying, he cuts off Horatio and keeps talking. There is no stopping him. The other question I had is does Gertrude know the cup is poisoned when she drinks it? She is told not to drink it but she does so anyway. Why does she do this?

This scene starts off with the gravedigger and his companion. They are lower in class and serve as the comic relief. Why is this scene inserted here and not right after the Queen and Hamlet have their confrontation in her closet? That is more serious than the death of Ophelia and the talk of Hamlet’s death. Does it really serve as a comic relief if it is after most of the seriousness and doesn’t break the seriousness into chunks? It serves as the laugh before the end when everything falls apart and everybody dies. Horatio, the poor man, barely gets to speak during the play but he is the most sympathetic character. I feel for him. I am surrounded by people who talk so much I can barely get a word in edge wise. Then they ask me, “Why are you so quiet?” Hmmm…I wonder….Horatio was initially there to give advice on the ghost but he gets sucked into the madness at the court. He has to watch over everybody to make sure they don’t do anything bad or stupid. He is instructed, at least once, to watch over Hamlet and he also is instructed to watch over Ophelia when she is mad. Although his father is murdered, or that we know of he wasn’t, Horatio is more of the ego personality than Laertes is. Horatio oversees everything in the play and he is the loyal friend of Hamlet. This is a very difficult spot to be in because he is Hamlet’s friend but he cannot be disloyal to the King. All of his choices have to be carefully made or he just does what he is asked. It works out for him in the end because he is the only main character living at the end of the play.

This was discussed during the fishbowl but something is still unclear. Did Ophelia accidentally drown, was it suicide, or was she murdered? For textual evidence, Gertrude’s speech about Ophelia’s death is very specific in detail. Were these just speculated details from how Ophelia was found or did someone tell Gertrude all of this? Or was it a rhetorical choice of making Gertrude appear like an omniscient narrator? Or was it merely to allow Shakespeare to show off his poetic language? This is quite confusing. Also, why does Ophelia go mad so easily? This is also anti-feminist; something as small as her father’s death and the rejection of her lover make her mad. This is not believable that she is that weak of mind. It may have been the view of the time that women were weak minded and Ophelia reflects this. Hamlet goes through the same things, he loses his father and the woman he loves, along with his friends that he once trusted and he doesn’t wander off and die. He is not completely crazy because he still is able to think through things and use logic unlike Ophelia. She just wandered about singing about flowers while Hamlet actually has meaning behind what he is saying to the people around him. Ophelia is treated differently when she is mad. She is coddled and treated very sweetly when Hamlet is told to stop messing around and get to the point. Men and women were not treated the same and this is a huge contributing factor to Ophelia’s character. When her father tells her not to speak to Hamlet anymore, she has no choice but to obey because her father is the male figure in her life and her protector.

I really didn’t like this version of Hamlet. Shakespearean language doesn’t belong in a present day setting. I know this is supposed to help us visualize it today but putting the actual language in makes the story less realistic. I had the same problem with the Leonardo DiCaprio version of Romeo and Juliet. It almost makes it harder to follow because it is so distracting from what is going on in the movie itself. If Hamlet was done like 10 Things I Hate About You, I would probably like it a lot better. 10 Things I Hate About You is Shakespeare today but it is put in modern language and easier to understand. I love that movie.The cinematography was very strange in this version of Hamlet too. It was weird how everything was like a movie to Hamlet and he saw everything that way. It didn’t make sense to me. There were also huge chunks removed from the movie and several things were out of order. It was confusing at times. Ethan Hawke, Steve Zahn, and Bill Murray were not at all believable in their roles. I could not pay attention to Hamlet because he was irritating and didn’t have any personality. Polonius and Ophelia didn’t seem at all close in this one and in this version it seems as if Ophelia went mad because of the way Hamlet treated her rather than her father’s death. What I don’t understand is why the Queen would willingly drink the poison. Was she that ashamed of her behavior?