Literature Circle Response #2

Since our last meet, we've began the book "Notes from the Underground". So far we have gotten to page 36 of this puzzling book. The main character, "the underground man", is a very intelligent, masochistic, self-loathing man. This book is different from any other book that I have read. It's not traditional at all, but instead shows the very interesting and different views of the main character. This book is truly a physcological trip into the mind of a free-thinking and puzzling man. I love the style of the book because it's unlike anything I've ever read. It's more theoretical, and spontaneous, than usual but the biggest difference is how its strictly thoughts of the character, the brain of the character. When I'm reading this book I feel more like I'm looking into the mind of "the underground man", and the character is extremely well developed and complicated; completely believable as a real person (even in our modern society). His attitude is very interesting, he believes strongly in freewill and loves to exercise it, to do the unpredicted. He also likes to feel pain for that reason, I think it's because he truley enjoys to be human and he feels almost trapped by his intellegence. He is an existentialist which means he believes that it is up to him to make his own decisions, regardless of reason. Overall, this is a very interesting book and I look forward to continue reading it.

Literature Circle Resonse #1

Since our book, "Heart of Darkness" was so short, by our second meeting we had completely finished it. Although it was very short it covered a lot of ground. I think the overall theme of it was greed and the potential for madness to overcome us all. The cause of greed in the story, ivory, could be implemented in modern society by money, oil or really any other thing that has value. The scary thing about this concept is that we all have the potential to go made, be overtaken by greed. There is nothing to predict in the story because, like I said, I completed the book. Some other themes that were present were imperialism and mistreatment of natives. The main story of "Heart of Darkness" was about the journey of Charles Marlow to the Congo as a captain of a steam boat. He experiences life in the Congo for several months when his boat breaks down and he has to wait for parts of it so it can be fixed. During his stay he learns of a man named Mr. Kurtz who intrigues him greatly. Mr. Kurtz is a manager and ivory trader at the Inner Station. After his steam boat is fixed, he travels to the inner station and on his way he is attacked by natives. Once he gets there, he learns that Mr. Kurtz has gone mad and taken the position as a native chief. He was overtaken by his greed for ivory. Mr. Kurtz gets sick and dies and mutters his last words "The horror, the horror." There were two parts that I had amazing visualizations for due to the authors amazing use of descriptive language (although it was often a bit overdone). The parts were: Marlow's first encounter with the natives and when Marlow saw the heads on posts. This book was very confusing for me and didn't make sense a lot of the time, but I got the overall idea and theme of it.