Two or Three Things I know for Sure

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure is a beautiful exploration of the human condition, told from a unique female perspective. Allison speaks frankly and intimately with her reader and allows them into the deepest facets of her being. It is because of this, and her extraordinary gift for weaving words together, that I found this work the most moving and relatable of the readings we have done in our class. Despite her incredible talent, Allison never comes off as pretentious or self-aggrandizing, but more like a woman who is telling her story in the most honest and forthright way she can.
Allison’s reflections on love and lust and the tragedies and joys that are born from them showcase her distinct ability to combine sensitivity with a kind of primal rage. This ability can be seen here:

Love was something I would not have to worry about….Women who pined, men who went mad, people who forgot who they were and shamed themselves with need…Love was a mystery. Love was a calamity….Sex was the country I had been dragged into as an unwilling girl—sex, and the madness of the body. (55)

The author employs strong, evocative language to relate her thoughts to us and one cannot help but be moved by the way in which she does it. For a long time sex and love exist as two mutually exclusive entities for Allison. They are “countries” that are completely independent of one another. As a result of things she has observed in the past and her sexual abuse as a child, this concept makes perfect sense and though I have heard of this emotional response before, Allison’s description makes the concept so utterly comprehensible. Allison seems to be stating that at this point in her life she found love something that can be prevented or kept in check by the force of ones will, while sex is a wild, uncontrollable force. In other words, our bodies will betray us but our hearts and minds don’t have to. This conviction does not last much longer.
Allison is equally vivid and bold when she describes the first time she experiences longing for another person in an emotional sense rather than a purely sexual one. The author says:

She had no way of knowing that without warning or preparation I had just become my mother’s daughter, my sister’s counterpart-tender and fragile and hungry for something more than dispassionate curiosity. (58)

Allison can finally relate to the vulnerability, which she had mistaken for weakness up until this point, of the women in her family. It is not until now that she can truly feel a total and complete kinship with her mother, sister, aunts, and cousins she had always watched with a sense of pity and confusion while growing up. Again Allison’s interesting juxtaposition of adjectives can be seen in this passage. She is “tender” and “fragile” yet “hungry” all at the same time.
Allison’s work is endlessly rewarding because of her honesty and courage. At the risk of sounding cliché, the author takes her reader on a journey of self discovery and explores how one can come to truly love and accept oneself.

Symbolism in "Angels In America"

In Angels of America Tony Kushner walks a fine line between pessimism and optimism. He highlights the spiritual bankruptcy present in modern day society while yet also reassures his reader with hope and redemption (in the afterlife). I am particularly impressed by this because he does it through clever, biting dialogue that leads the reader to question their own beliefs regarding existence, both earthly and otherworldly.
It seems to me that each of his characters is used to represent a certain point of view. Though they have many similarities in terms of their insecurities and unfortunate positions in life, each of them is unique in their perspective and background. The character Joe is of particular interest to me because he is symbolic of the fact that anyone, no matter their religious background or strict upbringing is immune to doubt and self-loathing. Mormons can be homosexual and there is no cure for this. No amount of prayer or denial can make Joe straight and this causes unbelievable anguish for himself and for his wife Harper. However, Kushner uses the character of Joe to represent the importance of knowing and accepting oneself. This is clear when he tells Harper:
My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life. I think I believed when I met you I could save you, you at least if not myself, but…I don’t have any sexual feelings for you, Harper. And I don’t think I ever did. (78)
This passage is important for several reasons. Here we see the concept of salvation and how Joe’s religious beliefs have led him to believe that acting on his homosexual impulses were something wrong and unnatural. In some ways it is as if he felt he was giving penance by marrying Harper and attempting to save her from her mental illness. When he comes to the realization that he can neither “cure” himself or his wife he is forced to reevaluate everything he has ever known and amazingly he comes to the conclusion that this was in fact inevitable and he cannot hate a part of himself that he never had any chance of resisting in the first place.
Another character that I find endlessly intriguing is Roy. He is possibly the antithesis of everything that Joe is-shameless, dishonest, and devoid of any real spiritual conviction. It is interesting to me that Joe admires Roy so much seeing as how he represents everything Joe would appear to not want in a mentor. The differences between the two can be clearly seen here:
This is…this is gastric juices churning, this is enzymes and acids, this is intestinal is what this is, bowel movement and blood-red-meat—this stinks, this is politics, Joe, the game of being alive. And you think you’re…What? Above that? Above alive is what? Dead! (68)
In Roy eyes, to be alive is to embrace the unadorned ugliness of existence and particularly human nature. He is infuriated not only by the fact that Joe won’t take the job in Washington but also because he considers Joe to have a holier-than-thou attitude. I also think he is acutely aware of Joe’s inclination toward self-deception; perhaps this is because he recognizes his younger self is his pupil.
In the end, each and every character serves a significant symbolic purpose in this play yet the characters do not come off as stereotypes. Kushner’s characters are nuanced and unbelievably human which makes the work a moving and wildly entertaining read.

Formal Analysis # 3: The World According to Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is an incredibly engrossing and addictive read. I credit this largely to the author’s wholly original writing style. For a novel that reinforces the concept that human beings are little more than a bunch of banal drones, I must say one need to look no further than this book to find proof that people are capable of original thought. Palahniuk employs a kind of minimalist style to convey his thoughts about the ugliness and triviality of modern day society. His grotesque imagery successfully repulses and attracts his readers; getting them to wince but at the same time getting them face truths about themselves and others that they might usually avoid.
Within the first few lines of the book we are thrust into the mad violence and chaos that is Fight Club: “Tyler gets me a job as waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying the first step to eternal life is having to die” (11). At this point the reader has no frame of reference or context, yet the immediate action all but jumps from the page and grabs us. Character development can wait. What matters now is the gun in our narrator’s mouth. Soon after we realize that the building our characters are standing in will be blown to smithereens in matter of minutes and a tension building countdown ensues. In this way the reader is thrust into the plot with little to no chance of catching our breath.
Another thing that struck me about the story is the rage behind it. The narrator goes from being just another numb, ineffectual person, blindly functioning through the tasks of his daily life, to a fearless, violent madman, hell-bent of self-destruction. Once he realizes the freedom that comes from the total obliteration of everything comfortable, everything familiar, he is addicted to it. To him there is nothing that makes one feel more alive than the destruction of something beautiful. We see this here: “I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see” (123). Here everything we are taught to care about, taught to want to protect, is turned on its head. The narrator does not want to pursue these things. He wants to tear them down. At this point our narrator is acutely aware of the fact that nothing, no location, no person, no object, can make him feel as alive as fight club and the freedom he has gained since he “lost everything” (70).
The fast-paced, fragmented, and controlled style of Palahniuk tends to contrast with the absolute chaos occurring in his story but it works to his advantage. At times he is vague and then without warning will switch to being meticulously descriptive. Unlike any other I have yet to read the author creates an unconventional kind of balance between the bizarre occurrences of his plot and the straightforward, unflinching way in which he relates these events to us.

Formal Analysis #2: Some final thoughts on Ceremony

One thing that distinguishes Ceremony from most novels I have read in the past is the fact that Silko chooses to use nonlinear storytelling. Without any explanation we are taken from the jungle, to the reservation, to Tayo’s childhood, and various other scenes of past events. In the beginning it was equal parts interesting and confusing but once I had a better understanding of what was happening I came to really appreciate the author’s approach. By playing around with the chronology of the story and shifting back and forth between past and contemporary settings Silko gives the reader a very vivid idea of the horrors Tayo experienced at war and why he is so unstable when he returns.
Silko takes us back into the Tayo’s childhood, where we can clearly see where his insecurities regarding his mixed heritage stem from. The character of Auntie is always there to remind Tayo that he is different; lesser. This distinction is reinforced daily because “she wanted him close enough to feel excluded, to be aware of the distance between them.” (62) These feelings of otherness echo throughout his life and are partially responsible for his crippling depression.
Early in the story the past tense narrative takes us into the sweltering humidity of a Philippine jungle where Tayo is ordered to kill a row of Japanese soldiers. For a reason that is never entirely explained Tayo is unable to bring himself to pull the trigger because within the row he sees his beloved uncle Josiah. After the men are shot down Tayo cannot reconcile the fact that Josiah was not one of them.

He felt the shivering then; it began at the tips of his fingers and pulsed into his arms. He shivered because all the facts, all the reasons made no difference any more; he could hear Rocky’s words, and he could follow the logic of what Rocky said, but he could not feel anything except a swelling in his belly, a great swollen grief that was pushing into his throat. (8)

Though he knows it is a physical impossibility the sensation of watching his uncle die before his eyes sends Tayo into a frantic collapse. Here we see the emotional toll that violence is taking on him and get our first glimpse of the kind of paranormal, mystical aspects of Ceremony. The fact that Silko chooses to share this experience early on in the story is indicative of the fact that the author wants the reader to understand Tayo’s sense of loss early on. The fact that we know virtually nothing about his uncle at this point is incidental because we can see how deeply Tayo is affected by witnessing Josiah’s death, even when he knows (at least from a logical standpoint) that it did not happen.
Aside from this approach to storytelling being compelling I think Silko employed this style to mimic the concept of the past being something that continues to play out in our present lives, becoming an essential part of who we are and shaping our future. Tayo’s story would be nothing if not put into context for the reader, we must know about his past to understand his struggles. There is also the sense that the author believes in history repeating itself and therefore something we can learn a great deal from. Ceremony ends up tying together Tayo’s individual story with the story of all humanity. This kind of disjointed storytelling is not always well executed but Silko does it in such a way that I can’t imagine the story being told successfully in any other way.

Formal Analysis #1: Some early thoughts on 'Ceremony'

I am only one-third into Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony so any analysis I provide is based on early interpretations of the story. Despite this, I already find myself mesmerized by the author’s style of writing. There is poetry to her prose that Silko not only uses to garners sympathy for her characters but to present her readers with the daily monotony of life on a reservation and the horrors of jungle warfare.
The vivid imagery found in Silko’s writing can be seen early on in the story. I first realized this when I read the description of the incessant, suffocating rain that fell in the pacific jungle during Tayo’s time at war. This nightmare is recounted when the author writes:

"Jungle rain had no beginning or no end; it grew like foliage from the sky, branching and arching to the earth, sometimes in solid thickets entangling the islands, and, other times, in tendrils of blue mist curling out of coastal clouds. The jungle breathed an eternal green that fevered men until they dripped sweat the way rubbery jungle leaves dripped the monsoon rain." (p.10)

The author’s evocative language penetrated me so that I could feel and smell the sweltering humidity and discomfort caused by the endless rain. The jungle is depicted as a pitiless creature who breathes “an eternal green” that drives men to madness and death. There is no relief, no escape from this hell and Tayo is eventually forced to watch helplessly as Rocky is killed in front of him, a fate he blames on the environment more than anything else: “Tayo hated this unending rain as if it were the jungle green rain and not the miles of marching or the Japanese grenade that was killing Rocky.” (p.10). Here it is the infinite precipitation and plant life that is the enemy, not the Japanese who are mere soldiers just like him and Rocky. This is a unique and insightful way of empathizing with a character, not to mention a beautiful mode of description.
So far it seems that Silko’s power as a writer can be found in her spellbinding descriptions of just about everything and every one of her characters. When she refers to Tayo’s state of numbness during his hospital stint as a period of time in which he was “white smoke” I was surprised by how spot-on this description of someone who was blindly functioning through life was. This personification exquisitely conjures up images of somebody who is unaware of his own existence and simply floats through the days as a result of this.
My favorite description of the author’s so far comes when a native shaman-like figure is summoned to help heal Tayo of his illness (which is likely brought on by severe post-traumatic stress). Here the wise old man tells him that “the world is fragile” and the author elaborates:

"The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web." (p.32)

The analogy of the spider web masterfully illustrates the essence of the word “fragile” as used here. The author’s description captures a simultaneous degree of power and delicacy. The intricacies present in an insect’s web are symbolic of the wonder multifaceted nature of the world while the frailty of a web is representative of how easily life and creation can be undone.