Finished metamorphosis

I finished metamorphosis, it was meh. The sister wanted him gone and the parents were catatonic. Then Gregor just sort of dies at three in the morning from not eating, the apple, and a bunch of other crap. Oh, and wanting to die. Them th family does everything they want to. The dad kicks out the lodgers, they clean, they getclose, the write apologies to their employers, leave and make plans and decide to move and appreciate the great new prospects they have. Then the book ends with the parents appreciating the daughters hot body and nice prospects. This book made me sad. He gave everything for them and they hated him. And the family members suck-they're terrible people. I have to digest this terible, unsatisfying ending

Metamorphosis up to page 45

I read up to page 45 of metamorphosis and it was good. This section was all about Gregors relations with the family. The section ending was seriously awesome (I stopped on page 47). It ended with Gregor being enticed by Gretes violin playing, the lodgers seeing him, them saying they've wouldn't pay and the father closing and locking the door to do I don't know what with them. Gregors reaction to the music was extremely emotional even for a human-he really felt strong love and admiration for his sister.  this whole section was about how Gregor was still wanting to interact like a human, and that's very significant. Also, Gregor is dying from various wounds, specifically the apple lodged in his back. Quite ironic. I'm really enjoying this book. It's a quick read, it's deep, and its subtle. I would like to read it in German, tha would be fun.

Essay writing

I have overcome my challenges in writing, but I have come upon a new one. I used to have great ideas but was never able to express or argue them. Then, last year and this year, I figured out how to argue my point and say what I wanted to say. In the hamlet essay I really honed in my arguing, but wasn't bold enough. In the Austen essay I pulled a lot of different things together and managed to express them well, but wasn't bold enough (and was too informal). And the most recent essay was not bold enough and you didn't like how I expressed one or two of my points. I think what I need to work on is boldness. I can express myself and write good sentences and not be too informal, and tackle the small things that come up, but apparently my problem now is boldness. My means of expression has become less bold, and I need to work on that. My writing has gotten much better, but I still don't know how to fully express what I want to say. When I know exactly what I want to say, I say it well and am bold, but when I don't I get caught up in intricacies and don't outright state a claim. The only thing that can help me is practicing and keeping boldness in mind when writing. Personally, I'm happy with my writing now and don't really feel the need to improve it, but prudence dictates that I should. Yeah, so English is fun.

Metamorphosis up to page 35

This week, I read up to page 37 of the metamorphosis and it was great. This book is weird just like I. On page 26 (I think) we hear of the father's saved money, and that's good. Then Gregor starts to climb on the walls and ceiling and leaves the "white stuff" everywhere. We hear about the escapades of Grete going into Gregory's room and immediately needing to breathe at the window. Gregor puts a sheet over the couch to conceal his frighteing figure from Grete. His sister decides to make Gregors life easier by moving out all of the furniture. At first, Gregor is really excited about this and is very thankful. His sister enlists the help of the mother (who is elated to see her son agin). The mother thinks that it would be better to keep the furniture there so Gregor can have some semblance of humanity. Gregor likes this more and decides to side with his mother.but, the plan to remove the furniture proceeds. Once all of the furniture is gone and his mom and sister are in a different room, Gregor decides to climb on top of the picture of the woman in fur to save it. Once the mom sees this, she gets scared, faints, and Grete helps her. Gregor flees into a different room. He waits and then the dad comes home. They have a cute little walk around circle of centension and then th dad starts throwing fruit at Gregor. I think that's enough for me blog.

Metamorphosis up to page 25

These ten pages made me feel bad then good. First Gregor comes out of his room and tries to make peace but ends up terrifying everybody. Then his father shoos him away with a cane, his feet, and a rolled up newspaper. The he waits around in his room, sleeps, wakes up to find milk and white bread, hates it, loiters for hours, notices the fear and caution and silence of his family members, and then waits around some more (but this tome, under the couch). Then his sister brings him a shmorgus board of garbage and fresher foods, he loves the garbage and treats the fresher food like you would trash mixed in with your food. I'm not ready to interpret this story yet, and here's why. The plot and writing are too good, I'm too invested in the story, if I did analyze it it would be obvious and not fun, and I've never been able to ever through a book without predicting the ending based on my analysis (so why not try it now). I'm enjoying this book. It's weird, but its fun.

Another Socratic circle discussion

I liked it.

The group dynamic: it was the best that it could be. You effectively separated us into a group with our friends and people at or around our intelligence/ performance level. And the discussions flowed nicely: we talked, we analyzed, we thought, all that good stuff. There was one problem though:the activity seemed forced. Our discussions weren't spontaneous explorations of philosophical thought relating to our course content, we were following guidelines. And, we knew we were being braded on our performance. Without the otter two factors, I don't think this discussion would have precipitated, and I think that we would have had a more meaningful conversation. Going back to group dynamic, the forced and pressured nature discouraged some from speaking and made others dominate the weak ones (myself included). There were awkward pauses because we had to move on with the conversation but knew not how. And the conversation wasn't very deep. BUT, all of these are primarily a result of our nature, not the setup of the activity (although that certainly had an influence).  The activity was great and it helped us connect with the text. I just think that WE could have done a better job at overcoming our teenagerness

First metamorphosis blog

I read up to page 15 of the metamorphosis, and it was good. I can already tell there will be a lot about how people and companies are like bugs and colonies and we're all just pawns and have no real free will and aren't allowed to really think, and all of the degrading, bad things about companies and industrialized society. So far, all that's happened is Gregor woke up and saw that he was a bug and was late for work. Then he thought and tried to get out of bed and couldn't. And then his boss came and he still couldn't get out of bed. His sister knew that he had turned into an animal and now she is getting people to help him. There will be a lot of deeper meanings in this book, and that will be helpful for analyzing with a random book of my choosing. Okay, that's my blog

works cited

I think i figured out how to cite the Freud essay thing. Well, i hope i did it right because i already turned it in

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1930. Trans. Joan Riviere. Philladelphia: Kno Textbooks, 2007.

MLA

I couldn't figure out how to cite the Freud thing because I don't know very much about the document itself. But, here are the rest of the things I am citing.

Murfin, Ross C. Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. Print.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. Charlottesville: Feedbooks,  2012. E-book.

Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2001.

Freud and Conrad conclusion

Freud and Conrad exemplified the phenomenon known as synchronicity: they thought of the same intellectual idea at the same time, but completely separated from each other. They both saw a darkness at the core of all men that manifested itself in the way people treat each other. Freud explained this darkness using psychology. He said that people’s immoral and irrational desires are repressed into the unconscious where they control our behaviors and make us want to harm others, and that we should understand and accept this dark unconscious. Conrad, in literary fashion, says that the darkness is man’s natural tendency towards evil and that we should hide ourselves from it because it is disheartening. However, both Freud and Conrad agreed that all men have a heart of darkness. The reader, then, is left with a choice: choose to believe that men are innately evil or that men are innately good. Or, as Yann Martel put it “Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?” (Martel, 317).

freud and conrad body paragraph 3

Due to their different perspectives, Freud and Conrad differed in their opinion(s?) as to what humanity should do with the knowledge of their inner darkness: Freud says we should accept it and Conrad says we should lie to ourselves. When talking about Kurtz’s legacy, Marlow says, “it was something to at least have a choice of nightmares” (Conrad, 76). Marlow is referring to his choice between being hated by his crew for believing Kurtz was good or his benefit to the company and living with the knowledge that Kurtz was a horrendous man. By saying this, Conrad (through Marlow) offers a choice: either accept and know the atrocities of colonized Africa, or live a privileged life, hoping that man is naturally good. Freud thinks we should accept the darkness of man. When talking about redistribution of wealth/equality/injustice he says, “nature began the injustice by the highly unequal way in which she endows individuals physically and mentally, for which there is no help” (Freud, 4?). Essentially, Freud is saying that people are naturally unequal, and men will inevitably exploit those inequalities because of their innate unconscious desires. Furthermore, mankind needs to know and accept the darkness as a part of psychology and not avoid it. Conrad has the opposite view. At the end of the book, Marlow lies to Kurtz’s fiancé, saying that his last words were her name, as opposed to “The horror! The horror!” (how do I cite?). Marlow wants the innocent fiancé to live her life thinking that Kurtz was a good man and that he did good things unto others. This is symbolic of what Conrad thinks mankind should do with the knowledge of the darkness: repress (suppress?) it under lies. Truly knowing the darkness in man would suck out people’s hope in humanity (the basis of most literary works). Freud’s and Conrad’s intellectual backgrounds gave them differing views on how men should deal with the darkness in them.

freud and conrad body paragraph 2

Freud and Conrad argue that the “darkness” at the heart of men is evil by nature: Freud says that the unconscious mind is filled with desires to do unspeakable things unto others, and Conrad uses his book to showcase the heinous behaviors that man’s darkness leads him to do.

Freud argues, in Civilization and its Discontents, that man naturally seeks to do harm unto his fellow man because of the id, and civilization is just a futile attempt to stop it. Freud describes the results of unconscious desires as such: “[Men’s] neighbor is to them not only a possible helper or sexual object, but also a temptation to them to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him” (Freud, 1). For Freud, the unconscious makes men want to kill, rape, torture, and exploit each other to fulfill desires of which they are not consciously aware. This is a true darkness at the heart of man. The similarity between this list of uses of other men is bafflingly similar to Conrad’s descriptions of white men’s treatment of the Africans. For example, Marlow sees six emaciated, despondent, mentally empty African men chained together, walking in single-file up a hill, followed by a content white man carrying a gun (18-20). These men are not working for pay, food, or their families. All of that has been taken away from them. The white men have come and gratified their aggressiveness, exploited, raped, stole from, humiliated, tortured and killed the Africans: the darkness/ unconscious at work. Kurtz, the representation of unrestrained darkness, does equally heinous things to local tribes in trying to get ivory. “’To speak plainly, he raided the country,’ I said. He nodded. ‘Not alone, surely!’… ‘Kurtz got the tribe to follow him’” (Conrad, 68). Kurtz pitted tribes against each other, enslaved them, stole from them, tortured, and killed them, all in pursuit of personal gain. This exemplification of the “darkness” perfectly parallels Freud’s description of unconscious desires and demonstrates that the “unconscious” and the “darkness” driving men are composed of the same evils. In this way, Freud and Conrad’s theories about the malevolent core of all men are the same, just from different perspectives.

freud and conrad body paragraph 1

As Ross Murfin aptly points out in Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, Conrad’s “darkness” and Freud’s “unconscious” are one and the same. Murfin’s book is about how authors use their books to demonstrate the phenomena that psychoanalysts use to understand psychology. This connection does not stop with Conrad and Freud. “Conrad, Freud’s contemporary, [was] a writer who meant by “darkness” what Freud meant by “unconscious” and who, like Freud, believed human beings to be largely motivated by the irrational side of the mind” (Murfin, 122). As Murfin says, Conrad and Freud talk about the same irrational and immoral core of mankind; they just have different names for it. The parallel nature of Freud’s unconscious and Conrad’s darkness becomes strikingly similar when one reads their two main works. The last line of Heart of Darkness reads: “the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness” (Conrad, 93). In this quote the Thames (the “waterway”), the heart of England’s empire, is used to represent the hearts of all men, the clouds are the shroud of unconsciousness preventing our moral “god” from seeing the true darkness of man (England), and the “immense darkness” is the evil that all men eventually come to. As the last line of the book, this quote has the responsibility of driving the books central message: the hearts of men inevitably drift towards evil and because men are unaware of it, there is nothing they can do to stop it. This message is strikingly similar to the unconscious Freud describes which drives all conscious behaviors. When talking man’s about the cruel, selfish violent instincts that communism naïvely seeks to eliminate by means of total equality, Freud lays out the nature of the unconscious. “This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty… it is at the bottom of all the relation of affection and love between human beings” (Freud, 3). Freud says, here, that our unconscious instincts to steal, harm, fornicate, and covet are innate and control every relationship and action we have—even love. Conrad and Freud saw at the core of men unknown desires that drive them to do evil things and control every aspect of their lives. Conrad called it darkness and Freud called it the unconscious id.

intro paragraph

In the early 1900’s, two brilliant men wrote about the internal drives of men. Sigmund Freud saw a dark, natural unconscious at the heart of man that drives our conscious behaviors. Joseph Conrad saw an evil within every man that makes us treat each other horribly. Both Freud and Conrad wrote about the same darkness at the core of men that drives their behaviors and enslaves them to their desires: Freud from a psychological perspective and Conrad from a literary perspective.

this is VERY rough, i am going to edit this like crazy.