The Invisible Man in todays world

Alot of the issues that are are talked about in IM are still around today. The topic of racial discrimmination isn't as big of a topic as it was in the novel but it is still in the world today. Not only racial but gender and sexuality, both very important topics. None of this discrimmination will ever fully go away, though it is not a huge factor and people are learning to all live together there will still be fights and arguements.
Today I think many people are starting to except blacks as their "equals", though not completely. But you look around today and you see colored people marrying white people. You see everyone working alongside eachother. There are no more seperations due to the color of your skin. This is how it is with gender equality. There are still some problems but most people have moved past them. You can see that when you see women holding office and even people talking about when we're going to have our first woman president. Though one topic that is still and issue is sexuality. Gays are still not legally allowed to wed and are usually frowned upon when out in public. It is not to be talked about in the military and if people find out you're gay a person could be abused verbally and physically.
Sexual discrimination is treated very closely to how black used to be treated. Though gays can hide the fact that they are gay, when it does come out they are sometimes hated for it. People stay away from them and verbally attack them just people the choose to love people of their own sex. Some people even look at this as a diease. Though people are slowly coming to except this it's going to be a tough battle. States are finally starting to look at whether this is fair or not and maybe someday pass a law saying gays can wed.

House of the Spirits

The characters in House of the Spirits live their lives in very different ways then some people do today. There are situations that are handled in ways that seem strange.
One thing that I really can not relate to is how Blanca lets Esteban treat her. When she is in his house she has no opinion at all. He makes all the decisions not only for her but for everyone else. How can she just like him live her life for her?
Another thing that I can not understand is how Blanca just chooses not to go with her love. She makes up these excuses and she even says that she doesn't think she could live the way he lives. If she loves him then why wouldn't she want to be with him. In love you're supposed to make sacrifices to be with the one you love but Blanca doesn't do that. Sometimes I wonder if she actually did love him or if she just wanted a male companion in her life. It was just easier to keep coming up with excuses to not live with him rather than just going to live with him and realizing that she doesn't actually love him as much as she thinks she does. I know if I was in love I would do anything and everything I could to be with that person. But I guess that is where Blanca and I differ.

Question for Duplessis

Has poetry and other writings always been apart of your life or did you start seriously writing later in you career?

Antigone

It's always interesting to read new versions of stories. Each author giving their only little twist to the story to add more suspense or just so more readers will read it. The stories all pretty much show the same thing but they are told in different ways, unlike the retellings of Gregorio Cortez.
Each time a story is republished it is changed so it fits in a little more with the world in that day. The activity we did in class shows how much a story can be changed but still have the same meaning.

Gregorio Cortez

It is interesting to see the different view points when reading the different variations. This really shows how much a story can change depending on the person that is reading/telling the story. It depends on their viewpoints and how they were raised. Even so when the story is retold it is constently changing. No story can stay exactly the same through each retelling.

Blood Wedding

I thought this was a very good play though at times a little weird. And it also turned out to be a very ironic story.
The weird part of the play was the relationship between the mother and the bride-groom. That def. did not seem like the kind of relationship a mother and a son would have. She almost seemed to think of him as a husband figure. He was the only man in the house and therefore did most of the work. This may have been a reason she did not want him to get married. After he got married he would leave her and she'd be all alone to do the work around the house. Though she wouldn't mind the marriage so much if as long as she got grandchildren out of it.
The ironic part of the story was the ending. At the beginning of the play the mother did not want her son to have a knife b/c she feared that he would be killed by a knife just as her husband and oldest son. Though at the end of the play she let her hatred of the family who killed her husband and son result in the death of her other son. All she thought of was that Leonardo needed to die, for this to happen her son also died. She did not think of what could happen by sending her son off all she thought about was she wanted Leonardo dead.

The Awakening

I didn't find this book very interesting. I don't know what it was but nothing really grabbed my attention about it. The only thing that stood out what the relationship between Edna and Robert. I guess it was just the time period it was set it but it seems kinda weird that it's a normal thing for Edna to spend that much time with Robert. It seems as if her husband didn't even care how much time they were spending together.
Edna didn't even realize the feelings that she had for Robert until he was gone. After he left that's when she felt the void in her life. That was when she realized how much he was actually involved in her life. She was with him everyday and he was actually someone she could talk to. Now that he was gone she was lost. Every conversation she had she tried to turn it into a conversation about Robert, no matter who it was with. She even compared missing him to someone missing the sun on a cloudy day. If Robert never left Edna would have never realized the feelings that she had for him.

The Yellow Wallpaper

I didn't really know what to think of this story when I finished reading it. I was kind of understanding it until I got to the end and then she was going all indepth about the wallpaper and then the ending with her husband just really confused me. I thought it was a very well written story, I've never read anything that gets so into it the way that she got into this.
Throughout the story I had this feeling that John was trying to just control his wife somehow. Like making her think her "illness" is worse than it is. Yes he does tell her that she is not sick but if he feels this way then why is he talking about her "condition"? He contradicts himself like one time he is saying nothing is wrong with his wife and the next he is saying that doing something is not going to be good for her condition.
It was very interesting to talk about this story in class. There were so many different points of view. There was the way I saw the story and then the way that so many others. In some cases I never thought about it that way, and when we talked about it I did start thinking about the story in different ways. Overall I'd have to say that I enjoyed The Yellow Wallpaper.

Fredrick Douglass

When I started reading this piece I thought that it was just going to be another english piece that I wouldn't really enjoy. As I kept reading I really started to get interested in it. I never knew how bad it was for slaves. It's like no matter what they do they will end up getting whipped. And just the things they aren't allowed to do. Their masters forbid them to learn to read or write. Both of those things have been important to me. I love reading and with writing I tend to sit down and write when I'm upset about somethings. I could not even imagine a life where I could neither read nor write.
In class we were also talking about what if Fredrick Douglass did not actually write this but instead just someone making it up. I don't know how interested I would have been if this wasn't actually true. I mean I was very interested in what I was reading because it was something that I was just learning about. It was an experience that someone had actually gone through and not just something that someone made up.