“This Isn’t Real.”
Lauren Gunderson’s I and You takes place in the seemingly trivial setting of a teenage bedroom; however, upon further speculation the simplicity of a bedroom transforms into a profound symbol of unity. I and You, is a story of two people, Anthony and Caroline, who need each other on many levels, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Initially, Anthony needs Caroline to help him with his school project, and Caroline needs Anthony to leave. As the play progresses their needs change, from selfish needs to selfless needs, and after a series of heated arguments and vulnerable conversations, it’s revealed that Caroline is under anesthesia and Anthony died earlier that day. Caroline is having a liver transplant, and Anthony is her donor. Everything that happens over the course of the play is merely a representation of their physical connection as they become one person. As I and You become I. Caroline’s bedroom represents her body;
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moreover, it represent her soul. Her soul that Anthony touched. As Anthony’s liver becomes one with Caroline’s body, Caroline and Anthony respond as their organs would. In the beginning of the play, Anthony barges into Caroline’s room reciting Walt Whitman, “I and this mystery here we stand.” Caroline, outraged by this first encounter, does everything in her power to get Anthony out of her room, just as a body does when it first meets an unfamiliar organ. Once Anthony gives up his hope of connecting to Caroline, his liver resists resists Caroline’s body. With each argument and embrace, their biology is resisting and accepting, and when the two finally kiss they body’s become one. That’s when Anthony says, “So. It’s late and I should. Probably go soon. It might be time…. It’s not real...this is not your room. (one wall of her room vanishes, falls, flies away-infinite blackness instead) This is not your house (another wall of her room vanishes, falls, flies away-infinite blackness instead). There is nothing here. But you and I.” As Anthony and Caroline finally join together as one body, Caroline wakes up.
Anthony is not there, her house is not there, and as the the walls vanish from her room, she leaves the room of her mind and body, and enters the physical world. Caroline is found alone, and Anthony exists just as he enters, reciting Whitman, “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, but I shall be good health to you nevertheless, and filter and fibre your blood.” He will “filter and fibre” her blood--just as a liver does.
Caroline’s room carries the beautiful union of Anthony and her, and symbolizes her mind and body, where the union takes place. Caroline’s room carries a successful liver transplant, ending in the harmony of two bodies. Caroline’s room carries her emotions, ranging from abhorrence to adoration. Caroline’s room carries Anthony, just as her carries his liver.
I and You is a story of two people who need each other to live on. Anthony lives on in Caroline’s body--her room--while Caroline lives on, with love in her
heart.
The worst essay from this semester is Magical Dinners by Chang-rae Lee. Why even have this atrocity on the syllabus? Magical Dinners is very blandly written (almost as bland as the food his family makes). This was made obvious by the fact that nobody in our class was into it and there was silence during the whole discussion instead of lots of participation. Furthermore, the only rhetoric I could find Lee even attempting to use was code grooming, which was highly unsuccessful because the meals that his mom made did not sound good and were unable to grab my attention or appetite. This is illustrated when Lee writes “She cooks an egg for me each morning without fail. I might also have with it fried Spam or cereal or a slice of American cheese,
Erin George’s A Woman Doing Life: Notes from a Prison for Women sheds light on her life at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women (FCCW) where she was sentenced for the rest of her life for first-degree murder. It is one of the few books that take the reader on a journey of a lifer, from the day of sentencing to the day of hoping to being bunked adjacent to her best friend in the geriatric ward.
The systematic oppression of the underprivileged is an unescapable loop that keeps people chained. J Cole’s album, 4 Your Eyez Only, shows the difficulties of escaping a difficult lifestyle. J Cole, a young North Carolina based rapper, focuses on the consequences that come with choosing to live a life of crime. Although living this lifestyle is wrong, many are forced into this life and tend to glorify it because it is all they know. J. Cole challenges this notion while also realizing the oppression he is facing while trying to escape the life. He chooses to tell the album from the perspective of his dead friend, who chose this lifestyle. Although this album is dark, it has an underlying tone of hope.
The tone of the short story “America and I” changed dramatically over the course of the narrative. The author, Anzia Yezierska, started the story with a hopeful and anxious tone. She was so enthusiastic about arriving in America and finding her dream. Yezierska felt her “heart and soul pregnant with the unlived lives of generations clamouring for expression.” Her dream was to be free from the monotonous work for living that she experienced back in her homeland. As a first step, she started to work for an “Americanized” family. She was well welcomed by the family she was working for. They provided the shelter Yezierska need. She has her own bed and provided her with three meals a day, but after a month of working, she didn’t receive the wage she was so
There you are holding your camera an arm’s length away from your face, posing in the most flattering position to capture your best angle. There you are taking a photo of yourself to share with all of your Facebook friends. Taking a self-portrait photo, also known as a selfie, is something almost everyone has done in this new generation. This action is typically done without a second thought. In Alex Williams’ article “Here I Am Taking My Own Picture” that second thought is provoked through exploring the quickly spreading trend of self-portrait photography. In the article while Williams’ provides interesting examples on a changing generation as this trend progresses through social media and modern technology; Williams also leaves something to be desired within the article due to a lack of direction in the author’s stance on the topic.
In the book “look me in the eyes” by John Elder Robison, he talks about his life with Asperger’s and the challenged he faced as a kid. The first thing I noticed when reading the book that John Elder had a hard time looking people in the eye. Which is very common with kids with Asperger’s. During the time her was a student teachers didn’t know what this was so they handled the situation differently by yelling at him trying to force him to look them in the eye. If I was the teacher I would go about this situation differently I would try to figure out why he can’t look me in the eyes. By yelling at the student the teacher may be causing them to have anxiety which can cause any student to want to look away. Students sometimes think if a situation
The narrator is trying to get better from her illness but her husband “He laughs at me so about this wallpaper” (515). He puts her down and her insecurities do not make it any better. She is treated like a child. John says to his wife “What is it little girl” (518)? Since he is taking care of her she must obey him “There comes John, and I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word”. The narrator thinks John is the reason why she cannot get better because he wants her to stay in a room instead of communicating with the world and working outside the house.
This article is a good example of how life would be like for a foreigner in a different country. Because the author talks about the Chinese culture, living space and funeral. The author uses a humorous tone to talk about her living in China. This story has great balance between humor and emotions. “The Old Man Isn’t There Anymore”, by Kellie Schmitt tells a beautiful tale of her experience of life in China.
In Natasha Trethewey’s poetry collection “Native Guard”, the reader is exposed to the story of Trethewey’s growing up in the southern United States and the tragedy which she encountered during her younger years, in addition to her experiences with prejudice. Throughout this work, Trethewey often refers to graves and provides compelling imagery regarding the burial of the dead. Within Trethewey’s work, the recurring imagery surrounding graves evolves from the graves simply serving as a personal reminder of the past to a statement on the collective memory of society and comments on what society chooses to remember and that which it chooses to let go of.
In Me, Myself and Them: A Firsthand Account of One Young Person’s Experience with Schizophrenia (2007), Kurt Snyder provides his personal narrative of living with Schizophrenia with Dr. Raquel Gur and Linda Andrews offering professional insight into the disease. This book gives remarkable insight into the terrifying world of acute psychosis, where reality cannot be distinguished from delusion and recovery is grueling. However, Snyder’s account does offer hope that one may live a content and functional life despite a debilitating, enduring disease.
In Myla Goldberg’s fiction novel, The Bee Season, young Eliza Naumann is a fifth-grader at McKinley Elementary School. In the novel, Goldberg incorporates several key concepts Martin Buber presents in his text, I and Thou. The story is set around Eliza as she competes in the school, district, and national spelling bees. Throughout the story, struggles as her family begins to separate and deteriorate. Buber in his text argues that there are two separate realms of I-You and I-It (Buber 82, 83). The I-It world is where Eliza experiences reality of the circumstances her family is experiencing. On the other hand, in the I-You world Eliza becomes in total commune and relation with God, or shefa as Eliza describes (Goldberg 190). Buber suggests every human has desire to be in I-You realm (Buber 79). However, this realm can become an I-It by individuals seeking the I-You— making it objectified and using it for a specific purpose (68). In Goldberg’s novel, Eliza begins seeking I-You, shefa, to remove herself from chaos and to help solve her problems of her broken family (Goldberg 172). Once she has obtained shefa, Eliza wants to be removed from the I-It world and “desires to have God continually in space and time” (Buber 161). Buber would suggest Eliza’s I-You relationship is lacking depth and that she is actually going further away from the I-You realm and into the I-It realm, as she objectifies her I-You. Goldberg helps the reader to have a better understanding of Buber’s key concepts, by allowing the reader to experience alongside Eliza as she encounters the I-You and I-It realms.
Within the thin exterior of the cold dark building she called home, she wanted to keep the bodies of those in which she felt she had a connection. Whether it be a reasonable connection or not, she didn’t want to be alone. Her connection with her father brought her to keeping his corps in the house as well as the other man. Her distance from other people around her only drove her to madness causing nothing but isolation and a craving for any type of relation she could hold or be close
Her identity of a wife and mother is stifled through the work of her husband and sister in law. Both John and his sister Jennie, do not want her to think about her condition, however that is the only thing she is able to think about. She had given birth to her baby a short time before moving into the house with the yellow wallpaper. Perhaps she suffered from postpartum depression, however not much was known about this during these times. If she had gotten proper treatment for her depression, maybe she would have overcome her illness. Instead, she was essentially locked away in a room and told to rest. She strives to form her own identity that has been lost due to her illness. Ultimately the narrator loses her whole identity to the wallpaper. She transforms from the depression filled wife and mother to one of the women creeping behind the wallpaper. The narrator destroys the wallpaper in an effort to escape the hold her husband has over her. In the end she loses her identity along with her
“Hidden Talents” by David Lubar is about kids who have powers. Some of those powers include telepathy,finding lost objects, and the power to light fire. One of the themes in the book “Hidden Talents” is powers can be a bad thing when you don't know how to use them. The second theme from the book “Hidden Talents” is do not judge people on who the are right now, judge people on who you think the can become.The first theme is shown when the powers have flaws to them. The second theme is shown when people decide to put away other people's differences.
Early in Aliyah Eniath’s novel The Yard, we come across “callaloo”, a quintessentially Trini word, which for me is the summation of both the stylistic and narrative choices employed in this debut work of fiction. Callaloo, being a Caribbean creole word for a soup or stew made with mixed greens and crabmeat, is often used to describe a jumbled or chaotic state of affairs, and it is certainly a very strange mix that Eniath serves up to us in this book.