Metro 2033 Annotated Bibliography/Reflection

In the class of How Writers Read we were tasked to find a book and present it to our reading groups so we could analyze the methods and foundations that lead to the creation of said book. My choice was Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky, a dystopian novel focused around the Moscow Metro. After a devastating nuclear war has rendered the surface of the Earth uninhabitable, the residents of Moscow sought refuge underground in the tunnels and stations of the metro where they managed to survive and rebuild life. The story follows a metro resident by the name of Artyom who is tasked with finding a way to help his home station that’s under attack by a strange race of monsters from the northern tunnels only known as “Dark Ones.” When a Ranger named Hunter vanishes after heading towards the tunnels he makes Artyom promise to reach Polis and seek out assistance there. Though the main problem is that the tunnels are nothing more than a dangerous maze where monsters, cave ins, bandits and radiation awaits the unlucky, and Artyom has barely ever ventured too far out of the station, aside from the few guard posts. However he comes across several individuals and groups who are more than willing to help him out in reaching Polis, but despite this there are one too many obstacles and challenges that interfere with Artyom’s journey most of which he’s able to avoid and continue on with his mission.

 

Now like many stories, this here contains a set of controlling and opposing values. The first of the Controlling Context of the Controlling Values is written henceforth: Prioritizing individual and familial relationships over your duty to the good of mankind leads to selfishness and cowardice. Basically here, Artyom ponders if he should heed Hunter’s call to action and do what he has been tasked with. Or stay at the station to avoid worrying his stepfather. Either way, there’s the possibility of death, but only one of these two options will help him in the future and eventually save his home station and the metro. Whichever way it’s sliced though the same problems are present, but it’s all ends up boiling down to location. Now the Controlling Purpose is stated here as followed: Maintaining your morals even in the face of opposition of loved ones fulfills obligations to the greater good. Meaning that even though he looks up to his stepfather for numerous reasons he still has fulfilled a promise to Hunter, and by upholding this he’ll show that he’s a trustworthy individual and can be relied on. Even if he’ll be directly disobeying his stepfather, and this then leads to the Opposing Context: Betraying those who have cared for you in the name of empty glory, leads to unforgivable ingratitude. Artyom went and directly disobeyed his stepfather by continuing to venture down deeper into the metro instead of returning home as he had been asked to. Obviously because of this his stepfather will be infuriated but Artyom hopes to explain everything if he manages to make it back to his home station. The question is though, will he make it back from the dangers of the tunnels, and more importantly, will he have succeeded?

 

The genre of this novel is an interesting blend of science fiction and action with a few elements of horror. Throughout the novel we get to see what life is like within this dystopian underground system, people are always on edge, oppressive governments have taken over multiple stations, monsters scour the tunnels and surface looking for those careless enough to wander into their turf and strange monsters and happenings that go on in the underground. As Burke states here; “We might note, in conventional form, the element of ‘categorical expectancy.’ That is, whereas the anticipations and gratifications of progressive and repetitive form arise during the process of reading, the expectations of conventional form may be anterior to the reading” (127). There’s always a semi-erie factor to each station that Artyom visits, and these can sometimes be coupled with massive amounts of danger from either outside elements or the people living inside of it. Nowhere is safe, and Artyom knows this. However he’s been given the task to get to Polis and find help for his station, something that he has promised Hunter and that he must do in order to save it from the encroaching threat from the northern tunnels. The Dark Ones tie into the science fiction side of the genres since they’re highly advanced beings, almost alien in nature. We don’t know of their origins, but their motives we learn at the end. All they wanted to do was establish contact with the metro residents but since they had much more evolved minds all they’d end up doing would be driving people to madness and then receiving a response of machinegun fire. Artyom though is unfazed by the influence of the Dark Ones for some reason and can somehow contact them, but he doesn’t realize this until it is far too late. The action within this book is slow until towards the end when Artyom is on the surface and has to fight through a horde of monsters to reach safety. Other than that there’s still some elements of the action genre that Artyom isn’t directly involved with such as station raids and monster attack and he does his best to avoid these conflicts as best he can since it’s just result in his death if he did. Survival is his top priority, and everything in the Metro would prove otherwise.

 

One of the next points in the analysis of Metro 2033 are the codes, not the codes used by secret agents and military forces to transmit crucial information, but the explanation of how a story is written and what it follows in terms of flow of the plot. For Metro 2033 that code would be a proairetic code, this code is a fancy way of saying that there are a series of causes and effects that happen throughout the book. Culler’s piece here explains the code here better than I can: “To make narrative an object of study, one must distinguish non narratives, and this invariably involves reference to the fact that narratives report sequences of events.” (171). So the code here states that a problem arises, Artyom has to find a way to deal with them, then he manages to work around the problems or avoid them entirely. Some of these problems though are much more direct than anticipated for Artyom. Sometimes even the dreams he has have some sort of issue surrounding them alone, regarding Artyom’s state of mind that occasionally brings up his past and the trek to the botanical gardens, he feels guilty about that since he believes that the Dark Ones managed to get into the Metro because he left the gate to the gardens open when they ran away from the encroaching monsters. This also allowed the influence of the Dark Ones to reach the stations and bring chaos and danger where there was once order and safety. Now because he caused this to happen, he has to go out of his way to fix it. This will be no small task for him since he’ll have to work his way through many tunnels and stations before reaching his destination, only to have it reside in futility and be sent out to attempt a totally different objective that also fails. But each completion of the objectives leads Artyom deeper into the journey and mission for him to save his home station, much like how the tunnels of the Metro drive deeper into the Moscow underground, there are various twisting paths and unknown entities that lie deep down, buried to be forgotten by man until they are unearthed, showing another path, a wall of solid rock or a terrifying monster.

 

So the last question that resides with this book is this; Who’s telling the story of Artyom’s journey through the Metro? The story of Metro 2033 is told in third person with the main focus of the story being Artyom, and since it’s not Artyom telling it, who is? One theory I have that fits well with the story is that the story is being told by a Dark One, although their home nest or city was obliterated towards the end of the book it’s possible that some managed to survive the same way that residents of Moscow did, hiding in the tunnels. So like them the Dark Ones hid and rebuilt below the surface of the earth, their elders telling the story of Artyom and his mission to kill them, unbeknownst that the Dark Ones weren’t hostile in the first place but wanting to contact the humans of the Metro. However since they were more evolved, they drove everyone they came in contact with to insanity and death, hence why the residents of VDNKh believed them to be evil monsters. The story of Artyom was probably told by an elder Dark One to their young, as a tale of sorts or as oral history of their race and how things came to be. Artyom wasn’t affected by the Dark Ones as badly as the rest of the metro, but the lack of clear communication and cryptic sayings didn’t show Artyom their true intentions, which ultimately led to their destruction. However as stated before, some may have survived and then they tell this story to their younger generations so that they don’t make the same mistake as their ancestors. They still wish for communication with the humans of the metro but they don’t want to show that they are monsters but are instead benign beings wishing to understand them. However even though their intentions are peaceful and more than likely they learned from their mistakes, there will still be some who do not want them to be anywhere near their homes or those who will actively seek to destroy them. After all, they’re a highly evolved form of life, they’ll adapt much quicker than humans.

 

How Writers Read is certainly one of the more interesting classes I have been apart of. Normally when I read and write, I don’t usually delve into meanings, codes, the addressing elements of the story or dissecting everything I came across. I read and wrote for the same reason, I enjoyed it. Now after this class, I’m more than likely going to be seeing text a little differently whether I’m reading or writing said text. The use of the blogs was interesting, it’s not something I’ve seen used in any other class thus far. I’m not really that savvy when it comes to making, managing or writing blogs on websites that you can code and alter. I’m alway paranoid I’m gonna mess something up and render it unsalvageable. Thankfully my tasks did not involve anything of that magnitude so I was able to adapt pretty well. Now the choosing of the books to read and make the blogs on, that was interesting. And looking back I was foolish to choose Metro 2033. While it is the harbinger of one of my favorite games the novel was really drawn out and had very little in the way of interesting events. The lore was there but I felt like it was a better experience to play the game than read the book, really I should’ve chosen something shorter and less complex. Or something that I knew would’ve been much more in depth with it’s own lore so that we could have something better to work on like the Bioshock or Witcher novels. However despite this I did have fun writing some of the blogs, throwing in gifs and coming up with humorous comparisons between all the analysis of the text did make the experience that much more fun. At the end of all this though, more than likely I’ll be walking away with some fair knowledge on how writers read, but as a writer who does read the core value for me is just to enjoy each experience to the fullest.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children: An Annotated Bibliography

Network of Controlling Values

For this semester of How Writers Read, I chose to read Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Initially, this book excited my “reading for,” as a strange, fantastical piece of fiction that had just been adapted for a film directed by Tim Burton. I am always drawn to fantasy, especially gothic fantasy, although I am skeptical of the “Hero’s Journey” format, as it is so popular. I was pleased, then, by Riggs’ frequent use of pictures in the book. The multi-media usage added a dimension to the book that created more of an experience than I was used to. As I read, the pictures worked to support the text where it might have confused me, just as the many mysterious letters, pictures, and tidbits of information in the story helped Jacob piece together the truth of his grandfather’s life and his sense of his own identity.

Upon starting to read the novel, we take a foggy and gloomy trip to Cairnholm, Wales – the setting of Abraham Portman’s thrilling monster stories. As a child, his grandson Jacob clung to his every adventurous word, following grand tales of levitating children and an enchanted children’s home that Abraham held as truth. At age fifteen, Jacob leaves his job one afternoon after receiving a frantic phone call from Abraham, defenseless against the monsters he is convinced are coming for him. By the time Jacob makes it to the empty home in sunny Circle Village, his grandfather is lying maimed in the forest behind his home. Jacob sees a hideous monster scuttling around in the dark as he clutches Abraham, who is just alive enough to deliver his last words:

“‘Find the bird. In the loop. On the other side of the old man’s grave. September third, 1940… Emerson – the letter. Tell them what happened, Yakob.’” (Riggs, 37).

The novel has an interesting emphasis on the contrast between what Jacob calls “Before” and “After” – two distinct phases of his life that are separated irrevocably by his discovery of the truth.The first half of the book features an apathetic, lost Jacob, reeling from the death of his grandfather and searching endlessly for something he feels is lacking in his life. His curiosity and desire to explore was suppressed at a young age by his parents, who envisioned more practical ambitions for him: “…so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated” (Riggs 13)

As soon as he enters the time loop in Cairnholm, however, he experiences a utopian parallel of the world he left behind: a safe, sunny day in 1940 that constantly repeats, doesn’t age any of its inhabitants, and seems to hold the answers to his loosely constructed identity among the minds and secrets of the Peculiars.

As Jacob transfers into and out of the loop, he is presented with an antimony between his existence within the present and peculiar worlds. Miss Peregrine, the headmistress of the school, is weary of his travel back into the normal, or “coerfolc,” world, fearful for his safety and secrecy; however, Jacob travels through the novel yearning for a piece of information – a key to his past, abilities, or identity – that is life-altering enough to make him stay. Thus, we are presented with the basis for Jacob’s network of controlling values, an idea founded in Robert McKee’s theory of controlling ideas and counter ideas. According to McKee, a controlling idea “expresses the core meaning of the story” by examining the positive or negative value and cause of this particular idea (McKee 115). With its complementary Opposing Value, this is the conflict between Jacob’s desire to find the truth, the hollows, and himself; and the safety of remaining in his mediocre, albeit safe, normal life. With the help of my reading group members and leader, I worked out the following network.

Jacob feels tied to his ordinary life by a sense of familiarity and comfort. As he begins his adventures to the time loop, he expresses, “I wanted, in that moment, for everything to go back to the way it had been before we came here; before I ever found that letter from Miss Peregrine…” (Riggs 268). However, this is a yearning for safety from danger over any extraordinary value of life: his parents are often too drunk or too involved in their own occupations and lives to give Jacob a loving, considerate place in their world, and he feels out of place. His grandfather’s death, as well as the clues he leaves behind, incites questions for Jacob that cannot be answered in his life outside the loop. His discovery that he is peculiar actually comes as a relief to him, and moves him tremendously: “I’d always known I was strange. I never dreamed I was peculiar. But I could see things almost no one else could… I wasn’t crazy or seeing things or having a stress reaction…” (Riggs 247). Jacob is the “chosen one” – after Abraham’s death, he the only known peculiar to be able to see the hollows: the monstrous, soulless beasts that killed his grandfather. This is the key to his identity, his true self, that begins to anchor him in the time loop. In addition to the imminence of the peculiar apocalypse, Jacob ultimately solidifies his controlling value as winner. In this choice, not only does he join his true community and duty, but he begins to conquer his fear of the dangerous unknown – which, to Jacob, is not nearly as “unknown” as his fellow peculiars, blind to the ravaging monsters that only he can see. The book ends with him actively choosing to embrace the After, even in the face of bombs, violence, and danger in the distance, indicating that in allowing his controlling value to win out, Jacob finally knows what he is fighting for: the safety of his new community, but perhaps more importantly, himself.

Form and Genre

In her blog that works with this method, Jenna examined how the novel defies its YA/children’s genre conventions. As we read and travel further into Jacob’s journey, the language and vocabulary become a lot more serious and probably difficult for a child to understand, but the novel can still be considered young adult fiction. It’s centered on a teenager who runs away from home to find himself, and ends up entering a love triangle; however, this is where the plot begins to break the conventions of the YA genre. According to Jane Gallop, this is common, as “…rare is the text which completely follows the rules of a genre: even the most conventional will usually display some individual expressivity, some originality in its details” (Gallop 10-11).There are elements of many different kinds of fiction that further specialize the book, like adventure, coming of age, fantasy, and a “through the wardrobe,” time-and-space-portal temptation. Furthermore, Jacob enters a mildly disturbing love triangle with his own deceased grandfather and the object of their affection, Emma, who hasn’t aged in 80 years. Jacob wins…by default, which is pretty sad, but it still stands. He wins the girl, finds himself, and gets to lead a brigade of loyal peculiar children into battle against hideous monsters.

In his essay “Counter-Statement,” Kenneth Burke describes five different forms that can indicate how pieces of a narrative interact with each other as they progress. One aspect of form he describes is the syllogistic progressive form, which “is the form of a mystery story, where everything falls together, as in a story of ratiocination by Poe” (Burke 124). According to Burke, in a story that follows the syllogistic progressive form, “the arrows of our desires are turned in a certain direction, and the plot follows the direction of the arrows” (124). In Miss Peregrine’s, one of the most important motifs to the plot is the collection of Abraham’s final words. The inclusion of each of these clues quite neatly sets our expectations for the rest of the book, as we reasonably assume the questions that these cryptic words incite will be answered. Sure enough, the satisfaction of each of these unanswered clues act as stepping stones for Jacob on his path to discovering the truth: he finds Abe’s letter from a Miss Peregrine in a Ralph Waldo Emerson book; finds the time loop set perpetually on September 3rd, 1940 with Miss Peregrine, who can shapeshift into a bird; past the “grave,” or museum display, of the Old Man, a 2700-year-old corpse preserved in the bog of Cairnholm. The progressive explanation of each clue works to steadily pace Jacob’s journey, as well as the narrative itself.

Burke also claims that peripety, or the “reversal of the situation,” is an effective result of the syllogistic progressive form in that it reverses the readers’ expectations. At the end of the book, when Miss Peregrine seems unable to shift back into her human form and the time loop cannot be reset, our motif fizzles from existence as the nightly bomb show actually wrecks the mansion. For the first time in nearly 80 years for the children of the loop, tomorrow will be September 4th, 1940, which indicates a few different dynamics within the text. As it subverts the syllogistic progressive form by altering the object of repetition, this change in day signifies a complete and irrevocable change in the lives of the characters, with no chance of return:

“…for the first time in a very long time, the days were moving again. Some of them claimed they could feel the difference; the air in their lungs was fuller, the race of blood through their veins faster. They felt more vital, more real” (Riggs 351).

Further, the nature of the change is one of forward motion, indicating the characters are moving on into a new realm and adventure. Although there are sequels, the ending of this book is self-contained and satisfying on its own, because the change of something as heavily important as the day with regard to the time loop (and consequently, the so-far consistent pattern of syllogistic progressive form) is so irreversible that there is at once a sense of closure and clarity, despite the new journey ahead.

However, at the climax of the novel, we are introduced to multiple instances of the repetitive form that have been operating unconsciously in Jacob’s life. According to Burke, the repetitive form is “the consistent maintaining of a principle under new guises” (125). In Jacob’s case, the “principle” is a wight – a hollow that has consumed enough souls to regain a semblance of a human form. They can take many different shapes, which makes them so dangerous; this particular wight’s most recent disguise was a mysterious birdwatcher that arrived on the island just after Jacob. He reveals himself to Jacob, Emma, and a few other peculiar children, but targets Jacob as he perfectly recreates the voice of Jacob’s middle-school bus driver, the family landscaper from his childhood, and none other than Dr. Golan, the psychiatrist Jacob confided in after his grandfather’s murder. It was this Dr. Golan that originally convinced both Jacob and his parents to travel to Cairnholm, now clearly to trap and kill the young peculiar. This wight has been following Jacob throughout his life, disguising himself under different forms without Jacob realizing; however, he has been substratally guiding Jacob closer to his identity – his unique peculiar ability to see the hollows – than any of his family members or his fellow peculiars ever have. Jacob simply could not see him before now, which is, quite literally, the key to the gift that distinguishes him from others in the peculiar world.

Codes

Jacob’s journey to find and understand the world in which he belongs is tedious, and finding the loop is only the beginning. Silverman, along with the help of Barthes, discusses five “codes” that work in a text to widen our rhetorical perspective and discussion of the text. According to Silverman, “The codes enumerated by Barthes would seem capable of invading the classic text on multiple levels, ranging from individual signifiers to larger syntactic and narrative constructions” (250). Essentially, examining codes in a particular text helps us understand how the dimensions of each code interact and intersect around one central conflict, and that point of conflict is where we as an audience make space to understand the rhetoric of the one overarching “cultural code.”

One of the codes that Silverman outlines is the hermeneutic code, which “inscribes the desire for closure and truth. However, this code provides not only the agency whereby a mystery is first suggested and later resolved, but a number of mechanisms for delaying our access to the desired information” (257). Silverman discusses ten “morphemes,” or parts of the code, which can vary in order and don’t all need to be present in a narrative to analyze its hermeneutic code. Miss Peregrine’s Home includes nearly all ten, but I will focus on six that are most relevant to the text.

The thematization morpheme, which involves “the emphasizing of the object which be the object of the enigma” (258), is the first of the ten described in his essay, but actually does not come into play for us until Jacob arrives at Cairnholm. Before that, there is a proposal that an enigma exists, when Jacob’s wholly uninteresting life is interrupted by the murder of his grandfather, and we hear those haunting last words:

“‘Find the bird. In the loop. On the other side of the old man’s grave. September third, 1940… Emerson – the letter. Tell them what happened, Yakob.’” (Riggs, 37).

After this, Jacob’s life becomes changed forever – on the other side of the proposal of the enigma is Jacob’s After. Throughout the beginning stages of his After, we are provided with multiple instances of formulation – supplementations to the mystery that emphasize it. This is where the steps of the previously mentioned syllogistic progressive form come in, as they work to confirm the mystery by satisfying each of the clues laid out in Abe’s final words, but don’t quite lead us to the ultimate answer. The first of these is actually the last of the clues Abe gave to his grandson; Jacob’s Aunt Susie found a Ralph Waldo Emerson book with Jacob’s name on it, and so she gave it to him. However, there was more than simply a book: “…something slipped out from between the pages and fell to the floor. I bent to pick it up. It was a letter. Emerson. The letter. I felt the blood drain from my face.” Each of the consequent supplementations involves a similar bone-chilling reaction from Jacob, confirming that these are the steps to amplify the mystery he is trying to solve.

When the continued supplementations bring our protagonist to the island of Cairnholm, we see the thematization that, to me, made Jacob’s mediocre life Before seem nearly out of place (conducive to Jacob’s feelings within the Before). Cairnholm is gloomy, rocky, and incredibly hard to get to. Jacob’s first impression is meaningful in this regard, as he observes,

“It was my grandfather’s island. Looming and bleak, folded in mist, guarded by a million screeching birds, it looked like some ancient fortress constructed by giants. As I gazed up at its sheer cliffs, tops disappearing in a reef of ghostly clouds, the idea that this was a magical place didn’t seem so ridiculous” (Riggs 70).

The request for an answer morpheme, which “facilitates narrative movement” (260), seems self-explanatory, but Jacob’s initial request is not explicit. When he finds the time loop and is brought to Miss Peregrine, his ignorance regarding the world of peculiars is a request enough. Miss Peregrine, surprised at his lack of information, commands him:

“‘Sit,’ so I squeezed into [the chair]. She took her place at the front of the room and faced me. ‘Allow me to give you a brief primer. I think you’ll find the answers to most of your questions contained herein’” (Riggs 153).

The suspended answers, partial answers, and jamming morphemes invade the text heavily on Jacob’s journey in the loop. Miss Peregrine and the peculiar children seem always to be hiding something from him, and that “something” is generally held to be the answer that Jacob needs for his mission. Emma herself risks punishment by telling Jacob that he’s peculiar – a transformative piece of information that makes up the very core of his identity. On a few occasions, upon instances of jamming, Jacob expresses this frustration in a matter of revealing how upset he is by the suspension of answers; it is often in these moments that he is treated to some sort of partial disclosure. For instance, after Emma confides in Jacob what happened between her and Abraham, he asks about Victor, a peculiar boy who resides, dead, in one of Miss Peregrine’s bedrooms.

“I can’t,” she said.

“That’s all I’ve been hearing! I can’t talk about the future. You can’t talk about the past. Miss Peregrine has us all tied up in knots. My grandfather’s last wish was for me to come here and find out the truth. Doesn’t that mean anything?” (Riggs 235).

The source of this withholding comes either directly from or per the request of Miss Peregrine. In this way, she is a manifestation of the suspended and partial answers morphemes.  Miss Peregrine is incredibly restrictive with the information revealed to Jacob, either through the peculiar children or through her own doing. She will often gradually disclose the details Jacob desires, only to leave out the rest of the story that she has deemed unfavorable to impart. For example, Miss Peregrine hesitantly explains to Jacob that the children would die if they left their loop for the present, as “all the many years from which they have abstained will descend upon them at once, in a matter of hours” (Riggs 210-211). Jacob then proposes the idea that they could leave the island from 1940 if they pleased, though Miss Peregrine vaguely suggests staying in their loop is the best option considering “other dangers”.

“What other dangers?”

“Nothing you need concern yourself with. Not yet, at least” (Riggs 213).

The disclosure morpheme in the case of this novel is complicated, in that it may seem mimetically to result from the culmination of the other morphemes, but in fact does not. At the climax of the novel, when Jacob, Emma, and a few other peculiar children come face-to-face with the wight, they are put up against a hollow. To the other peculiar children, this hollow can only be distinguished by its shadow on the ground; however, Jacob is reacquainted with the very same hideous, soulless creature that killed his grandfather and haunted his nightmares.

“I saw it, lurking among the troughs. My nightmare. It stooped there, hairless and naked, mottled-gray-black skin hanging off its frame in loose folds, its eyes collared in dripping putrefaction, legs bowed and feet clubbed and hands gnarled into useless claws…” (Riggs 298)

This graphic, repulsive description of the hollow is the first time we are explicitly treated to any full description of the enemy the entire book. The people in Jacob’s life until this point have tried to suppress or regulate his curiosity, knowledge, and very identity: his parents tried to convince him it was a rabid dog that killed his grandfather, and Miss Peregrine very strictly kept him from any piece of truth that she did not give him herself. Some pieces of the puzzle leaked through, due to Emma’s love for him and him threatening some of the other children for information, but the hollow reveals itself to Jacob fully, immediately, in all of its abhorrent truth. The children’s encounter with the hollow is not the disclosure morpheme resulting from the set of heremeneutemes we have been tracking throughout the book; the hollow skipped every morpheme, created no sense of mystery or repression, and revealed itself to the only person who could see it in its own single instance of disclosure, consequently revealing to Jacob his identity and the difficult answer he has been hunting so desperately.

This points to several instances of the symbolic code invading the text. According to Burke, the symbolic code is “the articulation of binary oppositions, with the setting of certain elements ‘ritually face-to-face like two armed warriors.’ These oppositions are represented as eternal and ‘expiable’” (270). The novel begins by explicitly establishing the “antithesis” between Before and After as a transformative change in Jacob’s life that cannot be undone or reconciled. This antithesis invades the text in a few different ways, even ones that Jacob himself does not realize. Obviously, the Before/After antithesis with regard to his discovery of the loop points to an antithesis between staying/leaving, and even further between the normal world/the peculiar world, which Jacob decidedly cannot straddle. He must choose between the worlds, but before this climactic discovery of his identity and purpose, he did not have a good enough reason to stay. Out of this hollow encounter blossoms another Before/After antithesis: before and after he came face-to-face with the hollow, and consequently himself. Once again, the shift between these is irrevocable, and therefore solidifies Jacob’s place in the peculiar world and his need to say goodbye to his father.

A yet more complicated antithesis arrives from this latter Before/After dichotomy. From my examination of the hermeneutic code, there arises an antithesis between the peculiars/the hollows, but not in a sense of battle conflict – rather, in relation to Jacob’s identity. The ways each side went about revealing Jacob to himself were completely opposite, and puts Jacob in an isolated position in the middle of the conflict. This would suggest that Jacob’s unique peculiar ability prevents him from fitting in anywhere fully, whether it is an uninspired life with mediocre parents, a utopian time loop in Wales, or amongst the soulless damned that only he can see. On either extreme end of this antithesis lay Abraham, with his open revelation of his stories met with childlike wonder, and the hollows. To Jacob, in the end, these are the singular driving forces in relation to his identity: his ancestry and his ability. In a strange way, the two sides of this antithesis work together in their opposition, and Jacob finds himself within the central conflict in a very unique role. Although it may not be completely amongst any homogenous community, it is where he is meant to be; the solace in knowing that, keeping both Abe and the hollows in mind, is what drives him forward to embark on his great adventurous mission.

Narrator/Addressee

Throughout the book, Jacob is endlessly motivated by his remembrance of his grandfather, as well as the shame and guilt he feels about not taking Abe’s stories seriously in life. His mission, centered around finding the truth about his grandfather and also himself, is therefore narrated to Abe. However, according to the work of Seitz, this initial rejection of Abe’s tales were necessary for Jacob to later write his own journey through the world of the peculiars. With the help of Bloom, Seitz argues that “strong reading…must reject the implied reading in favor of a virtual reading, a misreading, that comes to be written. Bloom’s study is that of the ‘relationships between texts,’ how texts misread their predecessors in order to create space for their own writing” (150). After getting bullied in school at a young age for his belief in his grandfather’s adventure stories, Jacob decides to reject the stories for his own social well being: “I told him that a made-up story and a fairy tale were the same thing, and that fairy tales were for pants-wetting babies, and that I knew his photos and stories were fakes” (Riggs 20). At age fifteen, when Abe is killed and Jacob is left to find the truth on his own, he does not have the extended knowledge of the peculiar world that he would have had if he had continued to submit to Abraham’s truth. This “space,” therefore, is more like a lacking blank, which Jacob must make up for by setting out to “write” his own journey. All he has are his grandfather’s last words and the pictures he left behind – he must supplement the information about his story by asking (or threatening) his fellow peculiars and finally facing a hollow, who tells him everything he needs to know.

Just as Jacob narrates to Abe throughout his journey, Abraham narrates back to Jacob, as well as his father. Jacob and Mr. Portman take two different ethical approaches to “reading” Abraham’s stories, which Seitz explains: “A rhetoric of reading, in other words, includes the reader’s ethos, which we might begin to locate along a continuum of submission and resistance.” Where Jacob’s role in regard to Abe’s stories and mission is one of submission – that is, curiosity and willingness to adventure, assuming there is truth to Abe’s words – Mr. Portman’s role is one of reluctance, disgust, and defeat. Mr. Portman’s relationship with his father was one of distance, and he describes Abe as “an emotional Fort Knox.” He recognizes Jacob’s closeness to Abe almost bitterly, as he tells his son: “‘It took him fifty years to get over his fear of having a family. You came along at just the right time’” (Riggs 101).

Mr. Portman’s jealousy of Abe and Jacob’s relationship, which manifests in an accusation that Jacob “worshipped” him, indicates that he is not as resistant to his father’s stories and relationship as he might think. Indeed, Seitz tells us, “Of course, ‘submission’ and ‘resistance’ are metaphors for ways of reading, and it would be wrong to suggest that the reader ever stands entirely on one side or the other” (151). Mr Portman’s relationship with his father was doomed irrevocably since childhood, but his jealousy of Jacob suggests his repressed submission to Abraham, whether it was his stories or his emotional capacity for familial bonds; thus, he feels inadequate in the face of Jacob’s reverent relationship with Abe.

Jacob also confirms the suggestion that no reader can ever be on either end of Seitz’s continuum, given his resistance throughout his adolescence. An argument can be made that Jacob is more willing to revisit and once again submit to Abraham’s stories because he is peculiar, where Mr. Portman is not, and thus Abraham focused his narration on Jacob. Jacob is predisposed to his submission because Abe knows he is peculiar, and thus he is the one who is delivered Abe’s last words, which entreats Jacob on a mission Abe knows only he can fulfill. However, despite Mr. Portman’s un-peculiarity, he was presented time and again with opportunities to believe his father and take up arms to help him against the hollows that hunted him. Instead, he wrote Abe off as a demented, paranoid fool and did not even remotely entertain the idea of believing him. This leaves Jacob the space to submit to whatever of Abe he has left and create his own story, venturing off to finish what his grandfather started.

Final Reflection

When I entered How Writers Read this semester, I was actually slightly nervous. I had heard from my friends who had taken the class that it required a completely different set of skills, information, and learning. They were right, but I surprised myself with how much the course material fascinated me. “Getting” the readings and methods in the beginning was very difficult for me, and even though I desired to get a stronger grasp on the methods, I felt like I was hitting brick walls at every corner. The first blog method that I finally got was the blog I wrote for The Bluest Eye – the first time I feel like I thoroughly applied Writing Arts Core Value Two. The book lent itself conducively to the examination of symbolic codes, but I also felt like I had more or less of a breakthrough, and sort of ran with it. I learned the value of putting myself through “sitting with” texts and methods that were difficult to understand initially and that frustrated me, to be rewarded with a bit of a learning curve and context to begin understanding the rest of the material. In my own relationship with the course, however, I don’t feel like I am finished yet, and so I’m thrilled to be taking it again as a reading group leader next fall!

My demonstration of understanding and applying Core Values One and Three can be seen in the variation in books that our reading group chose. They varied heavily in genre, from fantasy fiction, to mystery-drama, to social-commentative fiction, to dystopian. Similarly, the variety in the texts we read for the methods points to my ability to read critically and apply these lessons in my blog posts. The method readings ranged in experience, mainly in accessibility of language (i.e. Gallop was easily understandable and a godsend, where reading Seitz and Burke often felt like decoding Russian). My application of the methods improved over time, which can be seen in my work as well as in my confidence in completing the blogs. In relation to Core Value Three, the process of improving my understanding of the class readings meant challenging my prior perspective on reading and writing, which I found to be too narrow. I needed to get used to thinking and operating with a different, more inclusive and specialized vocabulary: learning was now “distinguishing,” and something like surface-level or realistic was now “mimetic,” to give some examples. I also needed to wrap my head around the idea that the dimensions of a text can expand spatially, and not just theoretically – that sets of controlling values and symbolic codes can expand out from a central point of conflict in any directions. Drew drew a diagram (ha) in our meeting that helped me understand how to make a space for all of the codes and forms to come together. As a visual learner, I know have a deeper understanding of this for application in the texts I read.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the work that I did in this course, and I have a greater understanding of rhetoric and how it interacts with a text, or how it helps us examine aspects of a text that interact with each other, or how it helps us comprehend how we ourselves interact with a text. However, I think my friends need a break from hearing out my codes and interpellations (and refraining from telling me to shut up) so I’ll check back in next fall when I dive back in again!

The Couple Next Door

READING FOR

I picked The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena for my group to read because of my love for a dark mystery. I love reading for an answer, a solution or a criminal. I like to see someone in cuffs at the end of the book- The Couple Next Door only half delivered. The book’s idea is this: Anne and Marco are new young parents who decide to leave their baby at home during a dinner party next door, checking on her every half hour. The baby, Cora, gets mysteriously kidnapped while they are next door. The novel focuses on finding and getting this baby back home safely, during which secrets between the young couple are constantly being uncovered allowing for plenty of twists.

Anne and Marco work with a detective with the financial help from Anne’s very wealthy parents to offer ransom and fund all of the efforts to find their Cora. We find out about halfway through the book, after numerous chapters of no clues as to who the kidnapper is, Marco admits what’s he’s done to his readers. He kidnapped his own baby for ransom money. The big twist at the end is that this whole staged kidnapping was actually Anne’s own father’s master plan to get Marco out of the family. And you thought your in-laws were bad?!

Each chapter presented a new question for me as I read. I usually read for the mimetic purpose. When I say “mimetic,” I mean just reading the surface, no close reading, just reading for entertainment. I like reading for either the thrill of the suspense, the weap from a love story or the laugh from a funny book. I also like to compare what the characters are doing to what I would do in a given situation on the surface. This book made me think deeper than that. I found myself constantly finding a new purpose for my reading, which started with the question of what would happen if you left your baby at home while you attended a party? I then began to ask myself, what would happen if your husband kidnapped your own child? What would happen if your father kidnapped your own child? This book kept me on my toes constantly feeling bad for Anne, but then being pulled back to think well she did leave her baby home alone while she went to a party

 

.Originally we formed a network of values based on the first part of the book which discussed ideas about parental duties and staying true to who you are,  but after finishing the book, we formed a new set of values.

CONTROLLING: purpose-Omitting complicated information benefits and maintains a strong family dynamic. context-Being completely transparent with your past and motives causes unnecessary tension and mistrust within your family.

OPPOSING: purpose-Transparency strengthens family bonds and creates a sense of safety and security. context– Purposely withholding information from your loved ones creates only a facade of a functioning family.

 

 

There are actually a few networks possible for this book, but we found this one to be the most relevant. We discussed the ideas of manipulation. People manipulate others for some benefit, they expect something good to come out of it. But what happens when the manipulation goes too far past what’s considered moral or ethical? Marco and the father found out what happens – your family could be taken from you. Manipulation can fall under the category of secretivity, but I want to stress the problem with manipulation especially in a family dynamic.

How cool would it be if you could make a quick two million dollars in just a few weeks?

If that was a real possibility, everyone would be jumping on that. hat was Marco’s plan. He just wanted money and his family to see him as a success. When the money wasn’t handed to him by his in laws, he turned down a road that some people might have entertained for a split second but then pushed out the idea because kidnapping your baby to get money isn’t the morally correct thing to do. Then, on top of it all, Anne’s father was actually doing the same thing. Manipulation of Marco to go through with this crazy idea was supposed to lead to Marco leaving the family, leaving Anne and her parents to be happy on their own. It just shows how far some people will go for money or their own selfish motives.

 

We explored the reason for secretivity in the book in our purpose to our new set of controlling values because that’s really the main overarching issue: omitting complicated information benefits and maintains a strong family dynamic. Afterall, that’s all Marco wanted from his lies and deception, money for his family. Following that, being completely transparent about your past & motives causes unnecessary tension and mistrust within your family. Would Marco have let Anne be alone with Cora if he that

her rocky mental state has been present since middle school? Would Anne have let Marco check on the baby if she knew what his plan was?

On the opposing side, transparency strengthens family bonds and creates a sense of safety and security. I wonder if Anne and Marco were honest with each other from the start, would this have ever happened? They would have leaned on each other for help instead of hiding things from each other. Which leads us into the problems with withholding information: purposely withholding information from your loved ones creates only a facade of a functioning family. Both Anne and Marco were living in lies. Marco with his staged kidnapping of his own daughter, and Anne withholding critical information about her past, she was abusive and sometimes would “black out” and forget things that she’s done. They weren’t truly in love with one another because they didn’t truly know each other.

FORM & GENRE

The Couple Next Door is a mystery thriller. Or as Brittany called it, “a whirlwind, a never ending cycle.” We are presented with the mystery, then we work backwards with all of the characters to find out the answer. The events are out of place which help to build up the tension. We don’t find out that her own father, Marco, physically took Cora until less than halfway through the book, and we don’t find out that the grandfather is the real kidnapper is until the last few pages. I found it weird that we found out about Marco so early in the book. At the time we thought that was actually the climax, which naturally 

was quick and disappointing. Solving the mystery, finding out who did it. But it turns out that wasn’t the climax at all because Marco was being overshadowed by his father-in-law. The novel symbolizes suspense genre since there is a mystery to be solved and it toys with our expectations the whole way through.

This book presented a few forms of writing. The forms themselves help readers through the novel. But what even is form? Burke says, “Form in literature is an arousing and fulfillment of desires. A work has form in so far as one part of it leads to a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence,” (124). There are five components of form, but the qualitative progressive form was the most preeminent in The Couple Next Door. Burke defined the qualitative progressive form as one incident in the plot preparing readers for one outcome, only to prepare us for another (124-125).

The qualitative progressive form follows right in the footsteps of the “mystery” genre and this book was no exception. Every testimony that the detective, Rasbach, was given made us question the situation and couple in question even more. The title of the book and the beginning horror of the kidnapping leads us to believe that The Couple Next Door is Cynthia and Graham, but then as we hear more testimonies about Anne and Marco, we start to question them.

After Detective Rasbach meets with Janice Foegle, we learn about Anne’s questionable and abusive past. Our view, along with the detective in the book’s view, of Anne changes. Rasbach no longer believes Anne to be innocent but he suspects Anne murdered Cora without remembering. He thinks Marco covered up his wife’s murder. Although probably common among such an intense and clueless mystery, us readers along with the detective, were annoyed with the constant change in theories about who committed the crime.

Each theory progressed as more evidence began to surface. The most progressive and “telling” part of the novel is when we start to learn about Marco’s money problems. Once the problem is introduced to the readers, we can entertain Rasbach’s possibility that Marco may have been involved somehow for ransom money. And bingo, that’s exactly what happened.

Burke mentions that “we are prepared less to demand a certain qualitative progressive than to recognize its rightness after the event” (125), which is an act of foreshadowing. As early as page 36, Shari Lapena foreshadows what may happen at the end. Detective Rasbach asks, “Do you think this could be a financially motivated crime?” (Lapena 36).

So who really was “The Couple Next Door?” From the start we assume it’s the neighbors. Anne and Marco just had their baby stolen- they couldn’t be the mysterious couple that the title of the book alluded to. Or could they?

Each character is a working piece of the puzzle needing to be solved to figure out the true crime. We start to see Anne and Marco as the couple next door pretty soon in the book. They are sketchy, shady and they lie to each other. When we find out about Anne’s past behavior of beating a girl up almost to death and her having no remembrance of it we question Anne, leading to the reader (actually along with Anne) convincing ourselves that Anne may actually have done it. That is until we get to Marco. When we find out about his money problems, kiss with Cynthia and relationship with “Bruce Neeland,” we question him, too. We question every character and situation that the writer wanted us to. Each character posed a challenge and embodies a mystery that needs to be solved. We followed the progression of the book along with the characters and we know that Anne and Marco were definitely The Couple Next Door.

CODES

Understanding how the “codes” operate in a novel is essential to any capable reader. The codes operate basically as a frame to which the novel centers around. The codes help to set up a specific way of writing and telling the story.

I’m going to jump right in to the hermeneutic code, which is the driving force of the entire structure and flow of the book. The idea of following a code in a book helps to construct and structure the narrative better. In Rewriting the Classic Text Silverman says, “…codes which enter the classical text through connotation, and whose discovery transforms that text into a writerly one” (250). He continues to explain the importance of codes by stating, “The codes enumerated by Barthes would seem capable of invading the classic text on multiple levels, ranging from individual signifiers to larger syntactic and narrative constructions” (250).

The presence of the hermeneutic code is obvious in this book. This code is simply a form of writing in which the plot introduces several enigmas leading to an answer, building suspense and creating foreshadowing. Silverman explains it a little bit better later in his piece by saying, “The Hermeneutic Code inscribes the desire for closure and the “truth.” However, this code provides not only the agency whereby a mystery is first suggested and later resolved, but a number of mechanisms for delaying our access to the desired information” (257).

As humans we crave answers, we always need to know who, why, when, where and how.So naturally in TCND we needed to know who did it! The hermeneutic code follows us right along and helps us answer every question we have.

There are 10 morphemes that make up this code. Cynthia falls right into the first one being the  thematization aspect of the hermeneutic code, “an emphasizing of the object that will be the subject of the enigma,” (250). Cynthia is played up to look like the bad guy to defer our attention away from Marco. She also can account for the proposal of the enigma, but Marco can as well. The detective actually suspects Marco committed the crime early in the book creating a concrete mystery aspect into Marco’s alibi. The formulation and request for an answer come from us as readers. The narrative formed the mystery but it’s up to the reader to dig in and crave that answer. Next is the snare which is basically the deception within a mystery book. Deception is the point of TCND. I mean, Marco kidnapped his own baby and his wife had no clue and was left to be depressed, empty and heartbroken over her missing baby.

Equivocation comes next. Silverman states that equivocation combines snare and the truth. So although Cynthia and Graham are “the couple next door,” the mysterious and negative connotation to “the couple next door” is discovered to be Anne and Marco themselves. Then comes the suspended and partial answers. There are so many of these in TCND and I don’t really think they are all there purposely. As I mentioned before, a lot of things are brought up never to be discussed again. The main one was the fact that Cynthia and her husband were kind of strange themselves, however unrelated to 

Marco’s crime. They had a video camera set up to look at their back porch so that Graham could watch Cynthia make out with other men. But this was brought up only so that the camera, in the end, captured Marco and gave Cynthia a reason to blackmail him. I just thought that was so unnecessary in the book. But when it comes to suspended answers, all signs point to Marco. He gave us readers a complete answer, but held it from his loved ones the entire book.

Jamming and disclosure are the last two aspects of this code. “Jamming involves an acknowledgement of the apparent failure of the hermeneutic activity, usually because of the exhaustion of all available resources,” (Silverman 261). Jamming was definitely present at the end of the book. The end scene, right before we see Cora again, consists of a lot of doubt. We find out the Marco gave the baby to Bruce who was really working for Anne’s father. But when Bruce gets killed, where is the baby? The answer is with Anne’s father, but not released to any of us until the very end. And to be honest, I still don’t really know where the baby was in the time that Bruce was killed and she was returned back to Anne and Marco. We were never told.

This actually leads into disclosure, which Bartes defines as, “a final nomination, the discovery and uttering of the irreversible word,” (Silverman 262). We get this when Marco and Anne’s father finally own up to what they did, sending Anne’s father to jail because of Marco’s 100% honesty. We are satisfied at the end, not because of how the book ends (very disappointing) but because of the way we got to the end and the steps we took to figure it all out.

NARRATOR & ADDRESSEE RELATIONSHIP

We can make judgements on our many narrators and make arguable cases for many of them and even sit in the seat of who they ask us to be in any given chapter. But over the course of the novel the narrators don’t ask us to believe anything entirely impossible. Although the whole issue of it is not morally correct, it is definitely possible. There’s no alternate world we are submitting too or some crazy characters that we have to understand. Our audienceship is one Peter Rabinowitz would call an “authorial audience” –  an audience hypothetically aware of the context and preliminary knowledge necessary to hold the story as probable. Of this level of audience, Rabinowitz writes, “Like a philosopher, historian, or journalist, he cannot write without making certain assumptions about his readers’ beliefs, knowledge, and familiarity with conventions.” (Rabinowitz 126)

Our narrators assume we have knowledge of due legal process and crime investigation and even more abstractly, that we have a grasp on the basic tenets of morality and what violates them. We are set to understand the requirements of a mystery story. As Kaitlyn wrote in her earlier blog for TCND, “we are treated with ample internal monologue from each of the characters, explicitly detailing the thoughts, emotions, and histories or context that we may not have simply had otherwise – like Anne’s dissociative disorder, Marco’s involvement with “Bruce Neeland,” and Cynthia and Graham’s twisted idea of a successful dinner party. The narrators don’t ask us to put ourselves in any fantastical world with a brand new gamut of truths to understand and uphold, what Rabinowitz would call a “narrative audience”; except, of course, when Detective Rasback claims he “knew it all along” numerous times throughout the investigation.”

As the actual audience, we uphold some prior assumptions. With any crime and mystery story we can expect an answer, a criminal and a punishment. We only half get that with TCND. Anne’s father is arrested, but what about Marco? And where did this Bruce Neeland guy go?

The ending left us with an open-ended answer, still having us question what else is going on. This leaves us, who have been treated as an authorial audience and thereby led to believe the story will coincide with what we can reasonably expect or know already, wondering: can a crime so contemptible, so complex, so chaotic, ever truly be closed? Will the family ever be the same, will Marco and Anne ever move on?

After a while, I found myself struggling to be in the narrative audience. Rabinowitz on page 127 states, “we must at the same time pretend to be a member of the imaginary narrative audience for which his narrator is writing.” This refers to us sitting in the seat that the writer made for us. As the imitation audience we need to push our morals aside and be that reader that Shari Lapena intended us to be. We need to push our judgements aside and just conform to the headspace and idea that leaving your baby at home to go to a dinner party is do-able, but furthermore kidnapping your baby for money is normal and harmless, although we truly don’t agree with that. “What sort of person would I have to pretend to be-what would I have to know and believe-if I wanted to take this work of fiction as real?” (Rabinowitz 128). At first I thought we need to accept the fact

 that people would actually do this, and people would actually commit the crime that Marco committed, in order to successfully read the book. I thought that if we are constantly thinking “who would ever do this?” how will we be able to really dive into the story?

But it turns out there was no way to turn that switch off in my head. I was constantly fighting the urge to scream at the book and the characters, “TELL THE TRUTH!” TCND was interesting but definitely confusing. Although the story got out, it went through a funky timeline of doing so.

 

FINAL REFLECTION

I knew that How Writers’ Read would be a tough but rewarding course from the start. The layout of the course is really unique. I really enjoyed the reading groups, it gave me four others to go to for clarity if I needed help which was really nice. I grew a lot over the course of the semester in this class, but mainly the way I read has changed. I’ve always been told to “close” read, but never really got a full grasp on what that entailed until this course. I now look for clues that lead me to determine a code and I also am constantly trying to understand what the narrator is trying to say and who they want to say it to.

My writing has definitely changed as well. I can better understand genre and the components of it which helps my writing to follow a more concrete theme. From reading five different books in all different (some similar) genres I am able to adapt and better understand texts I am not familiar with, which makes me go out of my comfort zone for my own writing which is really beneficial to my skill set.

I now can see writing as a study. The fact that each word is written in the exact way it’s written is something I always blew past, but truly understand now. The codes and forms which help guide the text and better tell the story are topics that I was never introduced too, but they click and make reading better and even make writing more enjoyable. I am even able to go back into my old work and see what I was doing, what I was trying to do and how I may or may not have achieved it.

I always feel like a stronger writer after each writing arts course I take, but how writers read actually made me a stronger reader. This course helped me to really grasp the reasons for my reading and will definitely affect how I write in the future because of this.

 

The Bluest Eye Annotated Bibliography

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Vintage Books, 2016.

Network of Controlling Values

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s debut novel, is about a young, African American girl named Pecola. Pecola, because of her strange features and exceptionally dark skin, is ugly and unloved. With the hope that they’ll make her happy, Pecola wants blue eyes. Through the eyes of another girl in the neighborhood, Claudia, we learn about Pecola’s hardships and her family’s past. Pecola suffers from detrimental racial self-loathing, which we see through her desire for whiteness. Pecola is sexually abused by her father, and she later miscarries, sinking into the throes of insanity. Of course, my short summary can’t do justice to Morrison’s beautiful yet harrowing prose. 

In one word, reading this book is, well, devastating. The abuse and neglect are hard to read about, of course, but the feelings of isolation and inferiority are tangible. Generally, my “reading for” revolves around this concept of aesthetic emotion, but with this novel, I may have gotten more than I bargained for when I submitted to this text and allowed myself to be consumed by the mimesis. I think that one problem I find in my “reading for” is that I’m constantly grasping for ways to relate to the text. While I can grasp at the feelings of isolation and inferiority (Ummm hello, have you ever been a teenager?), I prepared myself before reading to be hyper-aware of the thematic elements of the text so I wouldn’t fall into my usual habit.

The method I most struggle with is the one that seems to be most basic on the surface: determining a network of controlling values. The network of controlling values is an extension of Robert McKee’s method of determining controlling and opposing ideas. McKee argues that every text has a “controlling idea” that is like a theme: it “names a story’s root or central idea, but also implies function: The controlling idea shapes the writer’s strategic choices” (115). Conversely, a text has a “Counter idea” which is an opposite force to the controlling idea (118).

The thought of revising our original network of controlling values from our reading of the first few chapters was scary! I was unsure if I’d be able to do it without the support of my group members.

When I sat down to give it a try, assuming that the network would be entirely different in the context of the entire novel, I realized something after spending quite a bit of time working through a new network. Eventually, I ended up right where I started: our network from the first few chapters actually stands throughout the book. I had this idea that the new controlling value of the book was about Pecola never meeting the ideals of beauty. While this is true in reality, it isn’t what matters.  What matters is Pecola’s perspective, that she BELIEVES she has blue eyes, which represent the ideal beauty standards (aka whiteness). In the last chapter of the novel, Pecola talks to someone (an imaginary friend, or an internal self, perhaps?) about her new blue eyes. She says, “Ever since I got my blue eyes, she look away from me all the time. Do you suppose she’s jealous too?” (Morrison 197). Finally, Pecola is experiencing life as the envied one instead of the outcast, loosely the two sides of my determined network. Pecola’s joy doesn’t last for long, as she eventually asks this other voice, “But suppose my eyes aren’t blue enough?” (Morrison 203). But even so, Pecola has received her wishes: beauty and a friend. 

The wording of my new network is a bit different from our original, but the purposes and contexts are extremely similar.

Form and Genre

The Bluest Eye is a fiction novel, though as a group we determined some more specific subgenres that we feel describe this story a bit more specifically. First and foremost, we determined that the book takes some elements of realistic fiction and “slice of life” subgenres with its realistic representation of the mundane, day in and day out of life. Additionally, the book was originally published in 1970 but is set in approximately the 1940s or 50s, so some elements of historical fiction occasionally occur, as well. I didn’t notice this book breaking any conventions of these somewhat serious genres except for one thing.

The prologue begins with this strange paragraph full of short, choppy, abrupt sentences, seemingly narrated by a child: “Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty” (Morrison 3) and it continues. Then the paragraph begins again: “Here is the house it is green and white it has a red door it is very pretty” and goes on again with no punctuation (Morrison 4). Then the paragraph begins yet again: “Hereisthehouseitisgreenandwhiteithasareddooritisverypretty” and continues with no punctuation or spaces (Morrison 4). These grammatically incorrect, nonsense sentences (which continue throughout the novel as forewords to each chapter) seem out of place and go unexplained. They would throw me off every time I came across them.

Since these paragraphs baffled me every time I saw them, I knew it was important to pay even closer attention. Jane Gallop explains that a close-reading will reveal noticeably strange vocabulary, repetitiveness, tools like imagery and metaphor, inconsistencies in arrangement of words on the page, and footnotes (Gallop 7). The paragraphs that appear in the prologue and the excerpts that begin each chapter contain almost all of these types of details. It’s to things like this that I must pay even more attention, no matter how easy and even tempting it is to overlook these nonsensical lines because “focusing on the surprising would mean giving up the comfort of the familiar, of the already-known for the sake of learning, of encountering something new, something [the reader] didn’t already know” (Gallop 11).

Gallop writes, “a text generally engages the expectations of genre and also varies from or even breaks those expectations, combining the surprising and the familiar” (Gallop 11). Each chapter profiles the static normalcy of day to day life of these girls and their families, which is typical of realistic fiction, yet each chapter also begins with a little bit of absurdity from these lines excerpted from the prologue, throwing off the reader every time.

While I can’t say that I completely understand the function of these paragraphs in the prologue, I do notice some odd things about them. First and foremost, it’s the regression that takes place from the first to last paragraph. Even if the sentences are short and abrupt, they paint a picture. The next paragraph removes all punctuation, making the sentences run together, but it’s still understandable. Lastly, all spaces are then removed, making the paragraph nearly unreadable. Perhaps it represents the demise of Pecola’s life and mental health. I really wish I knew. Which brings me to my discussion of form…

Kenneth Burke explains that “form in literature is an arousing and fulfillment of desires” and the importance in close-reading to notice form shows how “one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence” (124). Burke discusses five aspects of form, one of which is repetitive form, “the consistent maintaining of a principle under new guises (125). I’m taking the name of this form too literally here, but I believe repetitive form is displayed by the reinsertion of the prologue at the beginning of every chapter. Every chapter is different, a “new guise,” if you will, but the prologue remains the same, cropping up every few pages with no explanation.

 

Pecola and Shirley (source: https://phdsandpigtails.com/2012/06/12/innocence-in-the-bluest-eye/)

Burke further explains that repetitive form is a “restatement of a theme by new details” (125). Our controlling value, a similar concept to theme, is about meeting, or the desire to meet, the socially defined standards of beauty, though the reader mainly experiences this through the context of our controlling value, where our characters feel they don’t meet the standard and therefore suffer. For example, in the beginning of the novel, we see that Pecola has a strange fixation on Shirley Temple. Pecola “was fond of the Shirley Temple cup and took every opportunity to drink milk out of it just to handle and see Sweet Shirley’s face” (Morrison 23). Shirley Temple is a symbol of whiteness, which is synonymous with perfection and desirability to Pecola and most other black girls in the novel. On the other hand, Claudia, our narrator, “couldn’t join them in their adoration because [she] hated Shirley” (Morrison 19). Instead, Claudia “destroyed white baby dolls” (Morrison 22). Whereas Pecola and Claudia’s sister, Frieda, admired Shirley Temple, even going so far as wanting to be her and striving for white beauty, Claudia resented Shirley.

 

These ideals continue to pop up throughout the novel, like when Pecola becomes a scapegoat because of her ugliness, and is blamed for killing a neighbor’s (blue-eyed!) cat (Morrison 91). Happening at the same time as the cat controversy is the arrival of a new girl at school, Maureen. Maureen is light-skinned and wealthy unlike most black girls in town. In these ways, Maureen encompasses some characteristics of whiteness. Claudia explains, “Frieda and I were bemused, irritated, and fascinated by her. We looked hard for flaws to restore our equilibrium” (Morrison 63). A fellow black girl being associated with whiteness threw off their entire words, and it was hard to understand and justify this in their minds because this isn’t the norm at all. Maureen was deemed superior.

This restatement of the theme continues throughout the novel, and until the very end of the scene, I discussed previously with Pecola believing she has blue eyes (a symbol of whiteness and beauty). While we know that Pecola doesn’t have this feature and she’s as “ugly” as ever, in reality, she believes she meets the standard of beauty finally and no longer has to suffer. Instead, she can be happy. To everyone else, though, Pecola is just insane.

Intertextual Codes

My favorite high school English teacher told me, and I quote, “there are no new stories to tell because all stories are just motifs all mushed together in mixed up ways.” This was my very first experience with and definition of intertextuality. Texts, then, are frequently “invaded” by “codes” which allows “a digression away from the text toward the larger discursive field” (Silverman 239). Silverman, with the help of Barthes, explains that “a code represents a sort of bridge between texts. Its presence within one text involves a simultaneous reference to all of the other texts in which it appears, and to the cultural reality which it helps to define” (239). In other words, intertextuality occurs and is defined by the “codes” a reader notices through “connotation” throughout their reading of a text. It is through these codes that we find common ground and relate one text to all of the texts that use the same code.

Our Blog 3 and its comments do a lot of great work when it comes to codes, though I’d like to focus on symbolic code like our full blog did and how that ultimately relates to the cultural code. Silverman writes that the symbolic code relates to “the formulation of antitheses” or the “articulation of binary oppositions” (270). Kaitlyn explains in her blog, “We are repeatedly presented with strict binaries between white/pretty and black/ugly…this ‘antithesis’ is unresolvable.” Our network of controlling values expresses this binary, though less specifically.

This dichotomy is visible with literally every character we meet in this novel. Pecola desperately vies for blue eyes, which represent whiteness, which, to her, represents beauty. Morrison writes of Pecola, “Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike” (Morrison 45). All Pecola thinks about is her ugliness. She becomes a scapegoat for all black ugliness as fellow black people project their personal feelings of ugliness onto Pecola.

Perhaps it stems from her parents. Both Polly and Cholly Breedlove suffered from their own traumatic experiences as young people are ashamed of their blackness, which, for them, represents ugliness. Claudia and Frieda aren’t as tragically fixated on these feelings of ugliness, though the dichotomy certainly operates within their own personal set of controlling values. Claudia, for example, reacts negatively and resents white girls for being deemed prettier are more valuable than her for nothing more than their whiteness. As best as she can, Claudia resists this dichotomy she’s been forced to exist within, as I mentioned before with her destruction and hatred of white baby dolls. Maureen operates on the opposite end of the spectrum. Racially, she is either mixed or black, but her skin color presents as extremely light, therefore she, too, is considered prettier than her black peers, and they resent her and are jealous of her simultaneously, just as if she were a white.

Kaitlyn also mentions how there are other symbolic code antitheses that occur within the novel, like God/Devil, male/female, and adult/child. I also see the divide between wealthy/poor and even familial love/hate. All of these dichotomies are true to the time period, a convention of the historical fiction genre.

Our group’s reading of the symbolic code leads directly into the cultural code and its use of our network of controlling values. Silverman explains that Barthes “establishes a direct connection between the cultural codes and that larger discursive field which we have identified with the symbolic order” (274). The symbolic binaries that we see within the novel represent the dominant cultural code. Take our network for example: our culture is fixated on beauty above all else. Beauty is happiness. In the case of The Bluest Eye, beauty and blackness cannot happen at the same time. Replace any of the previous dichotomies in the context of our controlling value. Living according to God is happiness. Being wealthy is happiness. Being male is happiness. It goes on.

Silverman explains cultural code further, saying “more careful consideration indicates that cultural codes make their effect felt everywhere in a classic text – not just through style, but through the activity of the semic, hermeneutic, proairetic, and symbolic codes” (275). Like McKee’s controlling and opposing idea infecting every moment of a story, so does the cultural code in tandem with whatever code we decide to read for in a writerly text.

Rhetoric of Narrative

My favorite method, the most fun one (i’m not biased at all) delves into all of the levels of narrator and addressee relationships, types of audiences, and moments of the text that interpellate the audience about these relationships. In addition, it uncovers the submission and resistance a reader may experience within all of these layers.

As a group, we discussed the narration of the novel at length. At times it was confusing to tell who was speaking or narrating because of the switching of the focal characters from chapter to chapter. In most chapters, our narrator is Claudia, but other chapters, like the ones that were snapshots of Pecola, Cholly, Polly, are technically narrated in third-person limited view. Eventually, we decided to examine the book as if Claudia is narrating from start to finish, even if she isn’t always speaking in first-person. Instead, she’s narrating a life from the outside looking in in the third person.

In her comment, Kaitlyn points out that during these chapters where Claudia is narrating in third person, she changes her “writing.” When she’s narrating Soaphead’s chapter, the language is “full of heightened, proper vocabulary and syntax” while Cholly’s section is “conversational, rhythmic, and profane.”

If we are to attribute the narration entirely to Claudia, a child, we must wonder how reliable she really is. How does she know all of this information? How does she have such a mature worldview with so much wisdom, yet still maintain her childlike innocence? Unfortunately, this isn’t a question I can answer, but I do know that if I was to be a submissive reader, I had to trust Claudia to take me along for the ride. I believe that trusting and believing in Claudia was part of Toni Morrison’s plan, and in that way, I was able to immediately submit pretty closely to what Peter Rabinowitz calls the “authorial audience” or the “author’s hypothetical audience.” Of course, I can’t literally be what Toni Morrison had in mind as she wrote The Bluest Eye. I cannot be a hypothetical being. That means that I likely maintained some of my “actual audience” characteristics by still having some distance between who I was as a reader and who Morrison had in mind as her reader (125). Because of that fact, there will always be a “gap between the actual and authorial audience” (Rabinowitz 127).

I believe that the most important chapter of this book when it comes to Rhetoric of Narrative is the last one, where we see that Pecola has gone a bit insane: she believes that she has blue eyes, and she’s talking to herself. It is the scene that resonated with me as most interpellating throughout the whole book, and I made sure to comment on it after the original blog. I discuss that up until this point, Pecola is extremely passive about most things that happen to her with no idea how to respond. That is until she has her blue eyes. It’s as if her blue eyes give her some type of authority over her life and story, which she’s lacked until presently. Suddenly, in this last chapter, Pecola has become both the narrator and addressee in her story as she’s created a new self in her imaginary friend. Pecola does what we’ve all worked toward in class. Pecola has created a new self that is able to read and respond to the situation. The situational irony that we know what Pecola doesn’t isn’t of importance. As I said before, it doesn’t matter that Pecola’s eyes aren’t blue or that she’s crazy. Maybe it’s even arguable that Pecola is better off than any of the other characters. Where they’re all reliving their same role over and over, Pecola creates one that works better for her. Alright, alright… maybe I’m reaching.

Final Reflection

When I first walked into Professor Kopp’s “How Writers Read” classroom for the second time as a Reading Group Leader. I was a nervous wreck. Now, anyone who knows me knows that this is already my general state of being, but I was even more so because I had no idea what to expect (even having taken the class before) and had no idea how I’d do as a reading group leader. While I got so many things out of my time as a reading group leader, in this reflection, I want to talk about how much more I’ve gotten out of the methods of reading and writing this second time around.

Last year as a group member, I was never sure if I ever understood what was going on, and it certainly wasn’t because of a lack of effort or trying. In fact, I dedicated more time to this class than any of my other three, one of which was a graduate level class. Yep, that’s how much I wanted to “get” what was happening in class. As a reading group leader (turned group member pulling double duty halfway through the semester) I can say that this feeling never really went away. Despite how committed I was to my role as a reading group leader, I was always worried about failing my group by not having the answers or being unable to be a good leader. Thankfully, I don’t feel like this ever happened because even when I didn’t necessarily have the answer, my group members and I were able to work together to figure things out.

I feel that I understand the methods more than I ever did and more than I ever thought I could. Cue the corniness, but I think I’ve been changed as a reader forever. I looked back at my last reflection, about how my “reading for” for school and my “reading for” for pleasure were happily distinctive. These days, I notice the methods without even reading for them. An even more important improvement I’ve experienced is that I’m less inclined to resist a text. Instead of passing immediate judgment that I don’t like a text or a thing that’s in them, I am an ethical and responsible audience that tries to be the audience that author needs me to be.

What I enjoy about this class and these methods is how much they push me and challenge me. I even enjoy how much they confuse me (…sometimes). I can say with certainty that becoming a reading group leader is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for my education. I really hope that I get the chance to work with all of these methods again in the future!

 

Blog 3

We are almost nearing the end of Metro 2033, bringing us closer to the “dark ones” and closer to the end of Artyom’s interesting quest. This book just isn’t grabbing me, but that’s a conversation for our next blog. For now, I dug into the close reading aspect of the novel. Intertextuality.

It’s no secret to the readers that there is so much going on in this book. There’s a different character coming and going every few pages, new problems and new solutions as well. Along with that comes an array of different ways to close read the book and really dig into what’s going on and why it’s going on. I’m going to focus in on one specific code for now that Culler can help me explain, the proairetic code.

While the proairetic code is a basis for “cause and effect,” Culler’s piece, Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative, clears up exactly what that means and how it is implemented in real life writing. Culler explains the need for cause and effect in order to close read on page 171, “To make narrative an object of study, one must distinguish non narratives, and this invariably involves reference to the fact that narratives report sequences of events.”

What if we didn’t know about the mutated rats eating his mother, or the fact that they are living in a subway in post-apocalypticRussia?Without a proper causation, what’s the point? Do we really care what happens at the end if we don’t know how or why

Artym gets there? The whole story of Metro 2033 is leading up to this big discovery of the dark ones, and completion of Artyom’s main mission, to warn the others of what might be coming.

I mean the first chapter is called The End of The Earth. We know from the start that something happened leading Artyom to become this chosen one sent on a mission by a very strange man. As we dig deeper into the book, we then see Artyom leaning on different people he meets along the way, who all teach him different things leading to the end conclusion. Around the sixth chapter, Khan interested me the most.

Khan interested me in the way he presented himself. He was almost a proairetic code in himself. He introduces himself and right away tells Artyom who he was in a previous life, leading him to who he is today. Khan continues to explain that he’s the last of his kind by talking about Artyom’s last encounter with Bourbon dying in the pipes. “…it won’t reincarnate and come back in a new form. It joined the other unhappy ones, in the pipes.”

These “unhappy ones” he’s referring too are the dead people in the pipes. Really creepy. Their souls leave their decaying bodies to stay in the pipes and scare people (kind ofjoking, kind of not). However these voices don’t do to Artyom what they did to Bourbon, kill him. Could these be the dark ones and Artyom is the only one that can handle them?!

My point of the Khan rant is to express the causation leading to the end result. Without all of these stepping stones and things that happen along the way of the journey, no one would care about the end. Although this isn’t my favorite book, I felt myself digging into each step of the journey seeing how each piece connected with the last and will connect with the next. Dmitry Glukhovsky really knows how to write in the proairetic code, now onto find out who these dark ones really are…

Metro 2033 Blog 4

Metro 2033 has finally come to an end. After much death and destruction (like, even beyond the nuclear holocaust that started this whole mess) from the ongoing struggles between post-apocalyptic factions living in the underground tunnels of Moscow and an intense fear of the mysterious “Dark Ones.” After several disposable sidekicks and a quest or 7, all of which lead up to Artyom’s main quest, to save his people from the “Dark Ones,” we learn that the “Dark Ones” aren’t all that dark after all.

The ending I was hoping for. Once I found my way into the ideal narrative audience, that is.

In fact, they aren’t the least bit evil or threatening. They’re only trying to make contact with those who live underground. Artyom is only seconds too late figuring this out, and the “Dark Ones” meet their demise. To begin to dig deeper into this loquacious story, we began by determining a network of controlling values. Then we tackled by close-reading to consider form and genre. After that, we read between the lines, working on intertextual codes. At last, it’s time to tackle the relationship between narrator and addressee and readerly roles in relation to the book’s author.

In purely literary studies terms, the story is narrated in a third-person omniscient point-of-view, with the narrator seeming to be a completed unbiased party with insight into the situation. However, as a group, we discussed the possibility of the narrator being a Dark One (or maybe even the Dark Ones collectively, as they seem to operate on a psychic level, in touch with everyone and everything around them). They even had influence over Artyom in a psychological way, as he spoke of them as having “filled and warmed him” and “[gave] meaning to his existence” (Glukhovsky 458). If Artyom is the only being from the Metro with the ability to save them, it makes sense for them to do so revolving around Artyom. His story is also their story. If this is true, then Metro 2033 reads kind of like a chapter from a history book on the existence of the Dark Ones, its readers being younger generations of the Dark Ones learning their culture, or, better yet, groups other than the Dark Ones learning how this group met such a fate. History books are read by those who don’t want to see history repeat itself. I see the story of the Dark Ones rooted in the fact that their otherness, their mystery, caused them to be feared. This book isn’t about Artyom or the faction members, but the Dark Ones.

This message transcends this book, of course, and relates so much to society past and present. Fearing those that are different than ourselves for the sole reason that they are different generally isn’t a good thing. Maybe one day this motif will stop appearing in stories because it’ll finally be a lesson humans have learned. In that way, real humans, the actual audience, are also the addressees of this lesson.

This guy is no Artyom.

In the book’s case, Artyom was “one who could become a bridge between the two worlds, who could explain to the people that there was nothing to fear” (Glukhovsky 456). In that world, Artyom was the chosen one, the narrator of the narrative that all factioners needed to hear as an audience. Depending on which readerly role we readers are playing, Artyom’s role changes. Or does it?

Phelan explains, “an author communicates to her audience by means of the character narrator’s communication to a narratee” (1). So if all of what I said above is correct, Glukhovsky, through the Dark Ones (who use their story with Artyom) communicates this idea of not rejecting or fearing otherness. Phelan continues later on in the chapter: “the narrator directly addresses a narratee and, through that direct address, the implied author indirectly addresses the authorial audience” (Phelan 12). It appears to be a never-ending circle. An infinity sign, perhaps? 

I found it difficult to become this audience for Glukhovsky. Once I got past the sheer verboseness of the story, I found myself questioning or disliking most of the characters. It wasn’t until the last chapter of the novel (which, honestly, is when almost all of the story happens) until I made my move from only the actual audience, which I’ll always be, regardless of my reading for, to finding a place where I could slip into the role of authorial audience. It turned out that, through my questioning and dislike, I was on the right track all along.

Metro (Blog 2)033

In our continuing adventure through the tunnels with Artyom, we encounter thrilling and terrifying aspects of the post-apocalyptic metro of Moscow. The story unfolds gradually, as Artyom meets many interesting characters along his path to Polis, and while the stations and tunnels connecting them hold unimaginable horrors – I was not necessarily jarred by the succession of events. This is largely due to what I expected of the book prior to reading it.

The novel straddles a few genres, coming together into one chilling package. The novel is most obviously dystopian, set in the year 2033, some two decades following a nuclear war that rendered the surface of Moscow completely unlivable. However, the book also contains some elements of science fiction, introducing us to the radiation-warped monsters, or “dark ones,” and some eerie, nightmare connection Artyom seems to have with Khan. There are also elements of the action genre, as every character in the book is mistrustful and constantly on-alert, infinitely strapped with military-grade firearms, and seemingly ready to kill everyone always (I’m not even really exaggerating). Finally, the book is laden with deep, spine-chilling horror, as the violence, mistrust, and constant threat of death mix in with the claustrophobia of living exclusively underground in an exhaustive, oppressive tunnel system. (Mind blown.)

The novel’s plot fits very reasonably within the parameters of these genres, as the multiple genres allow for a lot of flexibility jumping in and out of each. Therefore, I would say the book generally follows what Kenneth Burke calls the conventional form. Within the first chapter, we are introduced to Artyom’s grueling reality, as well as the threat of the “others” – the dark ones, coming from the north and posing a significant threat to Artyom’s home station, VDNKh. Not long after, a distant and unfamiliar man named Hunter comes and delivers Artyom’s “call to action,” or the request that Artyom deliver a message to a man named Melnik in the distant city of Polis, should Hunter not return from his quest. (Spoiler alert: Hunter doesn’t return.) Artyom, now our “hero,” then leaves his home station to embark on his journey to fulfill his duty to Hunter and to save his home station from utter ruin by the hands of the horrible dark ones. All of these facets of the plot fit very comfortably within the confines of a fantasy dystopian hero’s-quest story, not to mention hints throughout the journey so far that would indicate Artyom is the only one who is capable of seeing this through and saving his station.

However, simply from reading the back cover of the book, I was only introduced to the book as dystopian; the rest of this genre analysis came once I started reading. What gave me an idea of the book’s form was what my group member Lewis told us about the book prior to starting: that a video game had been adapted, and had stuck pretty closely with the plot of the novel. From this, I was able to both interpret and expect certain generic aspects of the plot before diving in. According to Burke,

“We might note, in conventional form, the element of ‘categorical expectancy.’ That is, whereas the anticipations and gratifications of progressive and repetitive form arise during the process of reading, the expectations of conventional form may be anterior to the reading” (127).

Because of what Lewis told me, I was able to go into the book expecting a certain plot structure and method of revealing information about the story. The novel gratifies those expectations almost pristinely. I was surprised a video game had been based on the book, rather than the other way around. Hunter’s quest for Artyom is the ultimate goal of this “game” of Metro 2033, fighting dark demons, skeptical foreign station members, and the insanity inherent in living perpetually underground (not to mention the constant heavy artillery and shooting). Artyom even meets a number of random people along the way, who either need his “help” or are a little too conveniently just there to help him (or us, the “players”) along the storyline (as a person who has played videogames herself, I know a side quest when I see one).

The book also sets up extensive prologue and backstory for the history of the metro tunnel factions, and how they fought carnivorous rats, dark ones, but always more savagely, each other. These dark ones are established as an eerie, collective enemy:

“The mere thought of the dark ones sent an unpleasant shiver through everyone, including Andrey, although he tried to hide it. He didn’t fear humans of any kind: not bandits, not cutthroat anarchists, not soldiers of the Red Army. But the undead disgusted him…to the north, a muted, deep-chested croaking sound in the tunnel could be heard from time to time in the distance, as if the Moscow metro were the giant intestine of some unknown monster. And these sounds were really terrifying” (23).

By intensely and repetitively establishing these “dark ones” as atrocities, readers are very clear on who the enemy is; the threat is made all the more terrifying by the ambiguity associated with them, what they even are, and how they were created. All we’re given is that they are awful, and that they must be wiped out – and the prevalence of the mere threat of their existence in the lives of the characters foreshadows just exactly what we, as readers, will eventually be up against.

Metro 2033. Controlling and Opposing Values.

В доме находится метро

When it comes to rebuilding society and surviving against all odds. Humanity is the bonafide expert. Many anthropologists and historians would agree as there is evidence throughout history of mankind conquering the planet and establishing civilization. Even when it falls, it rises from the ashes. As with many dystopian novels, movies and games, each one shows how humans are more than willing to rebuild life from what they once had and then strive to either take back the planet, or live in solitude until their lives come to an end. However the latter may be from a mix of issues such as natural disaster, disease or attacks from outside forces, from both man or beast. One of these stories goes by the name of Metro 2033.

“You mean there’s a book that the game is based on?” -you, probably.

Metro 2033 is a russian dystopian fiction/horror novel that follows the story of an inhabitant of the newly formed society that now resides underground in the Moscow Metro railway system. The name of the inhabitant is Artyom, a 20 year old resident of the station of VDNKh, as he is tasked with reaching another station across the metro to find someone to help his home station that has been the target of recent attacks from mutant monsters and some unknown otherworldly presence that prowl the tunnels to the north of his station. Artyom is given the task of fetching help when a Ranger by the name of Hunter goes to investigate the happenings and fails to return, when this happens Artyom leaves home station and venture out into the heart of the metro.

This is pretty much how Bourbon convinced Artyom to leave. 

The main premise here is what someone would be willing to do in order to preserve their home from outside threats, even if it means disobeying those who you idolize and look up to. It shows in Metro 2033 since Artyom’s reluctance to leave the station is tied with the love and admiration of his stepfather, Sukhoi. But he does owe his word to Hunter since not only did Hunter entrust Artyom with this task of reaching Polis, but Hunter knows a part of Artyom’s past that not even his stepfather knows of; The Botanical Gardens incident. Because of that Artyom received a secret of Hunter’s life and now bears some guilt over his disappearance.

After a lifetime underground, this is how I imagine Artyom when he first saw the sun.

Now for the Controlling Context of the Controlling Values; Prioritizing individual and familial relationships over your duty to the good of mankind leads to selfishness and cowardice.

Artyom knows how dangerous the maze of tunnels that makes up the Moscow Metro. Not only will they be filled with monsters, radiation, bandits and otherworldly beings, but many of the tunnels could be blocked off or collapsed. Not only that but the endless service passageways and pitfalls that litter the place contain more than enough dangers for someone to become hopelessly ensnared in. All the reason for Sukhoi to keep Artyom in the station.

How the residents of VDNKh are taking the Northern Tunnels threat.

So then this leaves us with the Controlling Purpose; Maintaining your morals even in the face of opposition of loved ones fulfills obligations to the greater good.

This breaks down to Artyom directly disobeying Sukhoi so that he can venture out into the metro. Even though he tells his stepfather that he’ll return with the caravan after it makes the delivery, he instead leaves the station and travels into the tunnels.

This is how it is in the game. At least for me.

This then leads into the Opposing Context: Betraying those who have cared for you in the name of empty glory, leads to unforgivable ingratitude.

Since leaving his home station, Artyom does feel as if he has undoubtedly let down his stepfather even after stating that he would return to his home station after the escort mission. Sukhoi has looked after Artyom for years and the sudden departure does weigh heavily on him.

Sukhoi going over the returning guard roster, guess who’s not listed?

The final question remaining is what’ll become of Artyom and the adventure that lies before him. I myself know what will happen since I’ve played the game that was developed long after the publication of the novel. However events are loosely tied to one another between the game and the novel, for starters Artyom kills a lot of people and monsters in the game but in the novel he’s not even fired a shot. Despite this the overall goal for our protagonist remains unchanged, reach Polis and find someone to help VDNKh. However will his mission be successful or will Artyom end up like those who’ve met their untimely ends in the cold, dark tunnels of the Metro?

Они хотят помочь вам, знать вас.

The Bluest Eye Blog 4

One could say the ending of The Bluest Eye was a bit more satisfying than The Couple Next Door, yet still not satisfying at all. As we close out on Pecola and her ambition to be accepted all we want is someone to take these girls by the shoulders and scream, “you are beautiful! I accept you!” It just doesn’t happen, leading Pecola down the same path as her mom, Pauline. A life of self-pity and lack of self-worth is not leaving Pecola but only getting worse for her as the novel ends.

Being an authorial audience and submitting to the text by becoming exactly who the writer wants us to be is really difficult, especially in a book as complex as this. I failed to fill that role as an audience during my reading of The Bluest Eye. After a few chapters in I found myself researching the text and trying to understand it better. It just didn’t jive with me, but with that being said the rest of my group was able to fill that role and help me move along and sit in that seat that Toni Morrison put out there for me.

The narrator’s jump around quite a bit in this novel, changing the direction of the audience/narrator relationship constantly. With each narrator, we must fill a different seat and act as a different type of audience. As a whole, we generally sit in the authorial audience understanding the background, although we do jump to the narrative audience where we understand the background of the material and believe it to be true. For us to really believe people would treat children like this, we must join the narrative audience and be who the narrator wants us to be. We take on this hypothetical character that the author wants us to be in order to dig into the book.

We must possess the background knowledge to center around this fictional truth. As Rabinowitz says, “If historically or culturally distant texts are hard to understand, it is often precisely because we do not possess the knowledge required to join the authorial audience” (127). With that being said, living in a continuously prejudice society and knowing our countries history including the racial tensions brought about in the 1940’s, we have seen first hand that the problems that Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda go through are real. Therefore joining these audiences is not too much of a stretch for us. We already hold this backbone of knowledge and the author knows that.

However, when we jump from Claudia to Pecola to Cholly to Pauline etc., we need to read and understand these viewpoints differently. I want to focus mainly on Cholly and Pauline because I found these two antagonists and their points of view really interesting (not in a good way, considering Cholly raped his own daughter and Pauline only brings her own daughter down). A few pages back in the novel, Pauline treats her daughter Pecola like a piece of trash. She embarrasses her in front of the white family that Pauline works for and makes Pecola feel even more ugly and isolated by the way Pauline so nicely treats the little white girls, who call her “Polly.” This alone makes Pecola upset.

“The familiar violence rose in me. Her calling Mrs. Breedlove Polly, when even Pecola called her mother Mrs. Breedlove, seemed enough reason to scratch her” (108).

As the narrative audience, we need to believe that a mother would do this to her own child. As heartbreaking as it is, we do believe that. Pecola pulls on our heartstrings making us sit in that sympathetic narrative audience seat. That’s where Pauline comes in. The next chapter is all about her, her life growing up and how she came to be who she is today. We sit in the actual audience and conform to be understanding and see where Pauline’s personality today comes from and it seems all too familiar with what is going on with Pecola. Toni Morrison also pulls us out of the audience in general at this point, and other points in the book. After diving into Pauline’s background, we can see where she comes from and why she acts the way she does. “Her general feeling of separateness and unworthiness she blamed on her foot” (111). Pauline felt as though a problem with her foot “ruined her,” while her daughter thinks not having blue eyes ruined her.

I didn’t feel sympathy or justification for Pauline or Cholly, Pecola’s dad. Cholly’s violence stems from an incident that happened when he was having sex with Darlene years back. He was caught by white men who made them keep going while they watched. A scene that could have scared anyone. However, Cholly didn’t take his embarrassment out on the white men because that would be a losing battle for him but rather felt violence build up toward Darlene, mentioning he wanted to strangle her at the time.

“His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess-that hating them [two white men] would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke” (150-151).

This incident left him empty, “Nothing, nothing interested him now” (160), leading to the eventual drunken rape of his own daughter, Pecola. We are pulled out of the audience and forced to self-reflect feeling only more sympathetic for Pecola.

This novel has us all over the place as readers. Although I found it hard to submit to the text, the Bluest Eye does a fantastic job of capturing the real struggles and feelings of prejudice starting at such a young age. The ending just makes me want to hug Pecola and tell her she’s beautiful and I wish her baby survived!

The Bluest Eye: Blog 3

As we continue to read The Bluest Eye, we travel further through the lives of Morrison’s vivid and complex characters in a world of vicious racial bias. The codes at work to manifest this racism throughout the book are heavily symbolic. We are repeatedly presented with strict binaries between white/pretty and black/ugly, and, as Pecola’s eventual demise into madness would suggest, this “antithesis” (Silverman 270) is unresolvable. The ending of the novel demonstrates how the dominating values that would promote happiness, security, and acceptance for characters on both sides of this antithesis are innately at odds and unable to exist simultaneously. However, beyond this dominating dichotomy, Morrison highlights numerous other antitheses present within the cultural order of the time period, and expertly demonstrates how these antitheses interact and intersect.

The primary antithesis between “white” and “black” is the most prevalent in the lives of the novel’s main characters. Pecola’s fascination with Mrs. MacTeer’s Shirley Temple mug, Maureen Peal, and the idea of pretty blue eyes establishes society’s love and preference for whiteness and Pecola’s internalization of these controlling values. Maureen, a new white girl, is popular, beautiful, and described as a “high-yellow dream child” whose arrival on a “false spring day” both literally and figuratively disrupts the dead of winter (Morrison 62, 64). Conversely, Pecola is described invariably throughout the book with one word: ugly. We see Pecola’s peers, Mrs. Breedlove, and Pecola herself submitting to the idea that she is ugly because she is black. While Claudia, in her young age, rails against this idea by fiercely hating whiteness and destroying her white baby dolls, Pecola submits to it with gruelling self-hatred and painstaking prayers to God to make her eyes blue. Even further, we can see through Cholly’s section that any fight or rebellion against this symbolic code is futile, solidifying its firm, unyielding influence in his society:

“Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess – that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and question mark of smoke” (150-151).

We see this binary laced throughout the language of the novel itself; where Frieda’s, Claudia’s, and Pecola’s situations are described as “acrid” and “bitter,” and associated with “mesafetidas,” white characters like Maureen and the little Fisher girl are described with “honey” and “yellow,” and even the light-skinned brown girls from Mobile and Aiken are treated to words like “quiet,” “starched,” and “sweet.” The characters’ insistence on describing Pecola as “ugly,” even after unspeakable trauma has left her impregnated by her father, is infuriating and devastating; however, this is conducive to our code analysis, as Silverman states: “Indeed it could be said that the symbolic code is entrusted with the maintenance of that order’s dominant binary oppositions” (270).

The symbolic code also poses this antithesis as eternal and pervasive throughout history. In Soaphead Church’s section, we see an analysis of his genealogy that dates this white preference back to the time of his ancestors. Sir Whitcomb’s “mulatto bastard” instilled this value in his young wife of similar ancestry: “She, like a good Victorian parody, learned from her husband all that was worth learning – to separate herself in body, mind, and spirit from all that suggested Africa…” (167) While we know this racial dichotomy existed systematically far before the early 1800s, the mention of this proves Soaphead Church’s pride in a lineage based on racial prejudice. The antithesis is, conversely, presented as eternal and cyclical in the gossip surrounding Pecola’s pregnancy. According to one anonymous townsperson, “Ought to be a law: two ugly people doubling up like that to make more ugly. Be better off in the ground” (190). This gossip immortalizes the antithesis between white/pretty and black/ugly, so that it will be propagated through coming generations, and will be repeated again and again into the future. The idea that Pecola’s child would “be better off in the ground” nonchalantly suggests not a subversion of these biased values as a solution, but rather the death of innocent, “ugly” black children. This drastic and inhuman suggestion, based solely on the idea of “ugliness,” demonstrates just how prevalent and inherent this binary is in this society.

Toni Morrison sets up another antithesis between two characters treated to long, biographic sections: Polly and Cholly. This antithesis is more personal and abstract, as it is religious – Polly considers herself a martyr for Jesus, while Cholly is wholly fascinated by the devil. Their relationship is interdependent; Polly needs Cholly’s sins to rail against in the name of God to strengthen her own martyrdom, while Cholly needs Polly to abhor and hurt, because she encourages it. Cholly’s impulsive violence is made all the more chilling by his analysis of the devil as a child, looking at the man about to smash a watermelon: “He never felt anything thinking about God, but just the idea of the devil excited him. And now the strong, black devil was blotting out the sun and getting ready to split open the world” (134). This God/Devil antithesis works to strengthen the primary white/black antithesis through the roles that Polly and Cholly play as nurturers and providers. Polly, ever holy and pious, rejects her own daughter in favor of the little Fisher girl, who can be seen as more deserving of godliness because she is white. Polly, in turn, achieves considerable success and reputation as a servant in the Fisher house as she works with steady determination. On the contrary, Cholly impulsively focuses his attention on Pecola in a moment of drunken perversion, and traumatizes Pecola to the point of insanity. Pecola delivers a stillborn baby and is left with the hellish aftermath of her father’s transgressions, yet Claudia validates Cholly to a degree: “He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her” (206). However, this “love” was fatal to Pecola, yet it is seen as the only love she was capable of receiving, contrarily to the Fisher girl, because she is black.

Other binaries are present throughout the text that speak on the cultural order of this time period, like man/woman and adult/child. However, by analyzing where these antitheses intersect, Morrison offers incisive commentary on the position of black women:

“Everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders. White women said, ‘Do this.’ White children said, ‘Give me that.’ White men said, ‘Come here.’ Black men said, ‘Lay down.’ The only people they need not take orders from were black children and each other. But they took all of that and re-created it in their own image. They ran the houses of white people, and knew it. When white men beat their men, they cleaned up the blood and went home to receive abuse from the victim. They beat their children with one hand and stole for them with the other. The hands that felled trees also cut umbilical cords; the hands that wrung the necks of chickens and butchered hogs also nudged African violets into bloom…” (138)

In this one excerpt, Morrison analyzes all of the social antitheses that black women were up against, and how they remained within the parameters of these binaries while still creating a life for themselves. It succinctly demonstrates how, while the white/black dichotomy seems at first the most dominant in the story, perhaps more prominent is an antithesis between black women and the rest of society, as their position is at an intersection of so many antitheses. However, in this novel, Morrison shows us a vast range of black women as mothers, servants, whores, healers, and providers – and how paradoxically versatile their roles are considering their inferior positions across multiple social binaries. Through characters like Mrs. Breedlove, Mrs. MacTeer, The Maginot Line, Aunt Jimmy, and many more, we see the sheer power of black women to lead complex, vivid, painful, poignant, and fierce lives in spite of the antitheses that, in theory, limit them.

The ending of this novel is devastating and unsettling, as we watch Pecola descend into an irreparable delusion of having blue eyes, and sit by as it seems none of these furiously unfair and violent antitheses are subverted or changed. However, according to Silverman’s approximation of the symbolic code, this is not morally bankrupt or pointless. When analyzing Balzac’s “Sarrasine,” Silverman states:

“…it declines the opportunity systematically to reverse the usual relationship [between male/female]. Such a reversal would of course preserve the symbolic value of sexual difference; it would permit ‘Sarrasine’ to be read as a witty inversion of cultural norms, a sort of ‘holiday’ from an orthodoxy which would instantly reassert itself at the story’s end” (271).

Here, Silverman asserts that undermining the symbolic code by reversing the roles of a dominant antithesis actually has the opposite of the intended effect by bringing attention to the motivations and values of the author. In this way, it can be argued that The Bluest Eye is actually stronger in its message because the dominant racial biases are present and dichotomous until the very last haunting line of the book; it is a truer capture of the reality of the time period, and thus blares its corruption and perversion in twisted detail. We as modern readers are shocked by the gruesome truth of the narrative’s context because the truth was shocking and gruesome, and it effectively instills in us a desire to subvert, destroy, and rebel against these antitheses in our own reality.