Lauren’s Blog

    Reading the following pieces: The Trojan War Summary and Odysseus in the Trojan War helped me gain a further understanding of how the Trojan War began and also helped me to learn about Odysseus’s  character. 

    At the beginning, I didn’t really understand how it all started and the Trojan War Summary explained in detail what occurred, which was really helpful.  Even though it was a lot to read and much of the information tended to drone a bit, it was very useful to me as a student.  I learned some things that I had missed while reading books 1 & 2 of The Odyssey or had known beforehand but forgotten, such as when the omen Calchas appeared, which signified that the war was going to last nine years.  Another piece of information I learned is about the main difference between The Odyssey and The Iliad: The Iliad is all about the war, whereas The Odyssey is more so like its  sequel and starts off where The Iliad ended. ( I know we discussed this in class, but somehow, I had managed to confuse the two poems.)

     On another note, I think that the Trojan War is very well-known because it is such an intriguing story.  The war itself lasted for about ten years and the wooden horse used at the end to trick the Trojans is totally unexpected and memorable.   Also, there comes the debatable question of whether or not the war ever did happen, which has kept the history alive for many years because there has never been any complete evidence that solves this mystery.

Afte reading the book, Huck Finn and watching the film CSA, I have been exposed to different forms of satire and I now understand more why Huck Finn is a form of satire. 

While the beginning and the end of the book are total opposites mood wise, both play crucial roles in the book.   Twain uses the beginning to set the scene for the book and introduce the characters that will play important roles in the end.  There seem to be many things that Twain was making fun of, one of which was the adventure books that Tom had read.  Tom had wasted both his and Huck’s time putting Jim through all that nonsense. 

Another form of satire I think was when Tom knew that Jim was free all along (Miss Watson had died and she wrote it in her will) and just ignoring that fact, continued with Huck on their expedition to free Jim.  I think that Twain was using Tom as a tool to make fun of the many people in society at that time who knew about what the slaves went through, but chose to ignore it.  Huck symbolizes the kind of people who knew how wrong it was, and helped the slaves by going out of their way to free them or try to change everybody’s perception on the subject.  Throughout Tom’s plans to help Jim escape, Huck protests against Tom to take a more direct approach.  There were several times though, where Huck stood his ground, (not that it did any good).

“Now you’re talking!” I says; “your head gets leveler and leveler all the time, Tom Sawyer,” I says.  “Picks is the thing, moral or no moral; and as for me, I don’t care shucks for the morality of it, nohow.  When I start in to steal a nigger, or a watermelon, or a Sunday-school book, I ain’t no ways particular how it’s done so it’s done.  What I want is my nigger; or what I want is my watermelon; or what I want is my Sunday-school book; and if a pick’s the handiest thing, that’s the thing I’m a-going to dig that nigger or that watermelon or that Sunday-school book out with; and I don’t give a dead rat what the authorities thinks about it nunther.”

I think that last quote, especially the last several words, like “what the authority thinks about it nunther…” is a metaphor for the government and how they allowed slavery even when most of them knew it was wrong.  This is similar in context to Tom and how he was persistent in trying to free Jim from the shed according to the “books”.   

To start where I left off before, I feel that Huckleberry Finn isn’t racist.  Twain apparently wrote this book twenty years after slavery was abolished, so I think he was trying to bring forth a message to society about racism and slavery, how even though the slaves were freed, things aren’t resolved.  There were the Jim Crowe Laws that kept slaves apart from everybody else, and I think that Huck and Jim’s relationship is signifying how important it is for everybody, including the former slaves to be able to intermingle and live together and become friends.  There seem to be a lot of portrayals of what Twain was trying to put in his writing, as mentioned in the essay by Jonathon Chisdes, “Grand Climax or Just More Royal Nonesuch?”

I think that Twain’s message would have been stronger if he had changed the ending.  I agree when, according to Chisdes, William Van O’Connor called the ending, “a serious anti-climax.”  If Twain had made the ending a little less boring and absurd, then perhaps the book and messages he wove through the pages would have been taken seriously.  After discussing it in class, I reluctantly agree and understand somewhat why Twain would create such an awful ending to a literary classic, but I just think he could have made it a little more interesting and climatic, instead of writing just a plain, simple, (stupid) ending with such an anti-climax.

In class we have been discussing Huck Finn and the question of whether or not the book was racist .  I feel that it is in the sense that many of the characters are racist, such as the King, Duke, Huck’s father, and even Huck himself.  At the beginning, Huck and Jim aren’t friends because of the pranks that he and Tom pull on him.

 ”Afterward, Jim said the wtiches bewitched him and put him in a trance, and rode him all over the state, and then set him under the trees again, and hung his hat on a limb to show who done it.”

Huck also mostly used the word “nigger” in disparaging ways; whereas later, when he and Jim became good friends, Huck said the word only when he was pretending in front of the King and the Duke that Jim was his “nigger.”

“Well, he was right; he was most always right; he had an uncommon head for a nigger.”

Huck said that line before he came across Jim on the island and become friends.  Afterward, the term “nigger” was rarely used by Huck because he had grown to know Jim for who he really was, a courageous, nice man who had the bad fortune to have been a slave. 

I think one of the message’s Mark Twain wanted people to obtain from the book was about racism and how it can grow to be such an impediment in society, such as in friendships and government.  It had caused so many fights on both ends and I feel that Twain was showing how racism could be in the cruelty of slavery and the fights that resulted from it.  It also seemed that Twain was implying how even though Huck and Jim were different races, they were able to become great friends.  Perhaps Twain was encouraging this because even after slavery was abolished, the African Americans had to live by the Jim Crowe Laws, which segregated them by having different schools, public bathrooms, etc.   

   I found the narrative of Annie L. Burton to be extrememly interesting because her story started when she was a very young slave, whereas Isaac Mason mostly wrote about when he was older.  In my previous post, I talked about how Isaac was whipped by his master and mistress, whereas the overseer whipped the slaves on the plantations Annie lived on. 

“Master himself never whipped his slaves; this was left to the overseer.”

As I mentioned before, I guess the matter of the master or the overseer whipping the slaves depended on the plantation.  Perhaps it is determined by the number of slaves that the master owns and how large the plantation is. 

In Huck Finn, Jim, who was Miss Watson’s slave wasn’t whipped.  Jim said, “Ole missus-dat’s Miss Watson-she pecks on me all de time, en treats me pooty rough…”  Even though it doesn’t say that Jim was whipped, according to him, Miss Watson was still awful to him and that’s why Jim ran away.

“We children had no supper, and only a little piece of bread or something of the kind in the morning. Our dishes consisted of one wooden bowl, and oyster shells were our spoons. This bowl served for about fifteen children, and often the dogs and the ducks and the peafowl had a dip in it. Sometimes we had buttermilk and bread in our bowl, sometimes greens or bones.”

Now, I understand that fifteen children are a lot of mouths to feed, but I don’t understand why the masters would give them so little to eat.  Those children would be future slaves and wouldn’t the masters want them to eat well so they can be very strong when they’re older?  Then perhaps, with strong, healthy slaves, more work would get done, which would also mean less whipping.  I remember talking about this issue in class when we read the other slave narrations, I guess that the lack of food didn’t affect the children in the long term, when they had to grow up to be slaves. 

  One of the first slave narratives that I read was that of Isaac Mason.  He was very courgeous and managed to escape from Dr. Hyde, although at one point, he was discovered and knocked his old master to the ground and escaped once again.  In the end, he was forced to work for a new master and mistress, who seemed to be nice people at first, but then the mistress one day whipped him with cowhide, an action that surprised me because I thought that most of the time slaves were whipped periodically, and this happened the first time in four weeks. I guess it depends on the slave’s master and mistress.  Afterward, the master whipped Isaac as well, (on the mistress’s orders) and he was naked and tied to a post, and was, “whipped by master till the blood ran down to my heels.”  This provided a horrible image in my head, I just couldn’t believe that the master would go out of his way to do such a thing, especially since I always thought that overseers were hired to supervise and whip the slaves.  Mason had described at the beginning of the chapter that Chestertown had many large plantations and I thought all large plantations had overseers.  This narrative helped me understand that all plantations function in a different way, and that sometimes the master and mistress themselves whipped the slaves.

   Jim in Huck Finn was Miss Watson’s slave and even though he wasn’t whipped, he was treated roughly.  So therefore, Jim was probably one of the luckier slaves; in this case, he was definitely more fortunate than Isaac.  I don’t think Miss Watson whipped Jim as there is no mention of it in the book.

  I had never read slave narratives before reading those in class.  I remember I was surprised by how informative they were, as well as impressed how well these two slaves wrote.  It must have been quite a struggle to have been in their shoes as slaves and also as writers since slaves were not supposed to be able to read or write, and so had to be kept a secret.  I am sure that after reading the other slave narratives, I will feel the same as the others.  However, every slave lived through different experiences, some were lucky enough to be freed and/or taught how to read or write, while others were tortured and forced to work in horrible conditions.  This is what interests me the most, getting to learn about their lives from their point of view, instead of someone else who wasn’t alive then.  The fact that the slave narratives are written from the slaves’ point of view makes them that much more interesting because the reader knows what they are reading actually happened.  In addition, these slaves lived through an unbelievable time and the experiences they suffered through make me want to read their narratives and learn more about it. 

    To be honest, I didn’t find the Colbert Report that funny, just amusing.  I think the problem is that I don’t really keep up with current and world events, so a lot of the things they discussed I didn’t really know about it.  But I still was able to catch on to the main drift of what he was saying and looking back, I guess it was rather funny, even though I never actually laughed. 

    The main idea of the Colbert Report episode was about President Bush and the War in Iraq, as well as the possibility of a draft.  There has been some talk in the news about reinstating the draft and some politicians have been thinking about it.  This episode of the Colbert Report poked fun at the whole idea of the draft, basically conveying that Stephen Colbert’s character is against the draft, in addition to Bush’s decision to go to war.

  I think the message behind this segment was very straight-forward, simply to end the war in Iraq.  A second message was meant to make people more aware of what is going on, especially about the draft.  But I think that most satire sets out to achieve that goal and the show really is satire because it makes fun of our society’s problems.  For example, when he mentioned that not only do we need the draft, but that it’s more important to have protesters in the street.

  For this assignment, I read the article, “Poll: Most Americans see lingering racism — in others.”  I was aware that there were racist people in the world, but I didn’t know it still was such a great issue today.  I thought that many people have overcome being racist, but perhaps I thought that because racism hasn’t really come up that often in the news as much as it used to.  Perhaps that’s because we have been witnessing a different form of it, just like the quote states below.

Jack Dovidio, a University of Connecticut professor who has studied racism for thirty years said,”We’ve reached a point that racism is like a virus that has mutated into a new form that we don’t recognize.”

I think describing racism as a virus that we don’t recognize is a good simile for what most Americans were experiencing after September 11th.  At that time, many people became racist toward Arabs, thinking that they were all terrorists.  That atmosphere of fear has died down a little bit, but I had forgotten how that fear still hangs over us, most without us knowing.  Most people assure themselves that they are not racist, or that racism doesn’t exist, which I think is sad because the only way to conquer it is to face it.  One way to do that is learning about racism in the past.  I think education is the best way to prevent racism from becoming as strong as it once was and teaching it in schools helps.  It is good that America is making some sort of effort to stop future generations from the racism virus that might take hold when they get older.   Even though they could still be racist in years to come, their feelings might not be as strong as they could have been if they hadn’t learned anything at all about racism.  I think that there is no sure way to stop racism forever, but I feel that it is possible to make it weaker by making more people aware of it’s power.