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Paradise of the blind essay
Paradise of the blind essay
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Duong Thu Huong’s novel, ‘Paradise of the Blind’ creates a reflective, often bittersweet atmosphere through the narrator Hang’s expressive descriptions of the landscapes she remembers through her life. Huong’s protagonist emphasises the emotional effects these landscapes have on her, acknowledging, “many landscapes have left their mark on me.”
The contrast Huong provides between the reality of Hang’s impoverished life and the beauty of the scenery that she experiences, emphasise the powerful effect the landscape has on her. When describing the first snowfall she ever observed, Hang noticed that the snowflakes “flood[ed] the earth with their icy whiteness,” this observation “pierc[ing her] soul like sorrow.” The scenery had such a moving effect on Hang, perhaps because she longed for the familiar sight of a Vietnamese landscape. Then recalling a time when her mother took her to a beach, the exquisiteness of the scene at dawn was equally emotionally poignant to Hang, not because she wished for a recognisable sight, but because it was such an extreme difference from the slum in Hanoi where she grew up. The sensory details of her childhood remain with Hang even years later, acting as a reminder of her humble beginnings even as she advances in life. The stench of “rancid urine” that permeated the walls of the slum and the hut where she and her mother lived, with its persistently leaky roof “patched together out of…rusty sheet metal” ; build a vivid picture of poverty. To then be exposed to the breathtaking vista of a natural landscape, having experienced the scarceness of beauty in the slums that is her home, causes distress in Hang.
Huong’s protagonist regards life as difficult and at times depressing, the positive aspects ofte...
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...the landscape reveals to Hang that despite facing hardship, there is always hope to recover, and the steady presence of the land to assist in returning to the way things were.
From the contrast of the slums of Hanoi and the breathtaking beauty of a natural vista, Huong has revealed the impact of this disparity on her protagonist. The author utilises the connection between the land and the villagers of Que’s birthplace to emphasise the steadiness and support the landscape gives, in times of upheaval, illuminating that it is possible to recover from disaster. Despite Huong’s criticism of Vietnam, she emphasises the resilience of the people of Vietnam and the ability for beauty and hope to flourish through oppression.
Works Cited
Paradise of the Blind by Doung Thu Huong. Translated from Vietnamese by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. New York: Perennial, 2002.
Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” opens with a narrator whose wife has invited a blind friend to spend the night. The narrator depersonalizes the man right off the bat and repeatedly throughout the story by referring to him, not by name, but as “the blind man” (Carver 513). He admits that hi...
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The story focuses on her great-grandfather, who was in disapproval of the French occupation of Vietnam, but still excelled at his job as a Mandarin under the puppet imperial court, fearing persecution of his family if he were to resign. In this section, the author also mentions more about the how the values of confusion had influenced the Vietnamese people in attempts to justify her great grandfather’s
It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more plentiful harvest, or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage; but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature. And the same feelings which made me neglect the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends who were so many miles away, and whom I had not seen for so long.
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In the novel Paradise of the Blind, Doung Thu Huong explores the effect the Communist regime has had upon Vietnamese cultural gender roles. During the rule of the Communist Viet Minh, a paradigm shift occurred within which many of the old Vietnamese traditions were dismantled or altered. Dounh Thu Huong uses the three prominent female characters – Hang, Que and Aunt Tam – to represent the changing responsibilities of women in Vietnamese culture. Que, Hang’s mother, represents a conservative, orthodox Vietnamese woman, who has a proverb-driven commitment to sustaining her manipulative brother, Chinh. Aunt Tam embodies a capitalistic
cold, harsh, wintry days, when my brothers and sister and I trudged home from school burdened down by the silence and frigidity of our long trek from the main road, down the hill to our shabby-looking house. More rundown than any of our classmates’ houses. In winter my mother’s riotous flowers would be absent, and the shack stood revealed for what it was. A gray, decaying...
Duong’s novel depicts a Vietnam caught up from the 1950’s through the 1980’s in turmoil and chaos. Many of the ‘land owning class’ were forced to flee their homeland or were sentenced to forced labour camps, this is shown in the novel through the characters Aunt Tam and her brother Ton, both dispossessed of their property. Through Paradise of the Blind Duong is able to personalise the struggles of the working class during these times of political change and criticise the Vietnamese government, “Their fate hung from a thread; and just as an overripe fruit hangs from a branch, they could fall at any moment.” The comparison made between one’s fate and an overripe fruit that could fall at any moment depicts the power that the government had over the people and the many injustices that can occur. Despite doing no wrong, their social class is enough for them to be considered the enemy. This mirrors the lives of the Untouchables in The God of Small Things, namely Velutha whose future is determined by his social status. Duong adopts many differing literary techniques to criticise the actions of the Vietnamese government during the 1950s, “You say our dances are decadent. But haven’t you done some dancing yourself? Invisible dances, infinitely more decadent than ours.” Here Duong compares western style dance and music to the fraudulent actions of
Kimberly Tsau, for example, follows De Quincey's lead in her analysis of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, suggesting that among the violence, apathy, and disjointedness of the poem is a call to face and learn from suffering. Her essay, "Hanging in a Jar," examines how Eliot collects a variety of "cultural memories," cutting and pasting them together to form a collection that is both terrifying and edifying.
...eased soldier, Tung, whom Kien has forgotten. “ ‘Maybe it was Tung. What do you think, Kien?’ ‘Tung who?’ asked Kien. ‘Crazy Tung. The guardsman, don’t you remember?’” (Ninh, 97). Yet, after the war, Kien cannot quit remembering all that died. “He mistook her first for a jungle girl named Hoa…Then, horribly, for a naked girl at Saigon airport on 30 April 1975.” (Ninh, 113). Kien returned to his pre-war culture of remembering the dead.
The dry, emotionally and spiritually barren village, and the villagers as an extension of the village, then encountered inexorable changes. A poetic sense slowly stepped into...
Pham, Andrew X. Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Print.
In the novel “Hunger” by Knut Hamsun, the novel’s narrator is unfortunate enough to go through delusions and pains that are caused by what many people cannot experience in the modern days; state of being hungry. As the novel progresses narrator becomes more intoxicated into state of delusion as the hunger deepens. In many scenes of the novel, narrator relates to God many times. Narrator blames, thanks, and even to talk one-sided dialogues with his imaginary God. While many can think that God doesn’t take key parts in novel and let it slip as just another symptom of narrator’s delusion, the scenes with God being a part reveals that God plays both scapegoat and a person of gratitude for narrator’s outcome for every action he takes. From the passages it can be deducted that both narrator and Hamsun have attitude that God is ominous and act as catalyst in everyday life.
Hayslip, Le Ly, and Jay Wurts. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace. New York: Plume, 1990. Print.
In this text Mohanty argues that contemporary western feminist writing on Third World women contributes to the reproduction of colonial discourses where women in the South are represented as an undifferentiated “other”. Mohanty examines how liberal and socialist feminist scholarship use analytics strategies that creates an essentialist construction of the category woman, universalist assumptions of sexist oppression and how this contributes to the perpetuation of colonialist relations between the north and south(Mohanty 1991:55). She criticises Western feminist discourse for constructing “the third world woman” as a homogeneous “powerless” and vulnerable group, while women in the North still represent the modern and liberated woman (Mohanty 1991:56).