On my Understanding of Sarcasm

For almost my entire life, I have struggled to understand sarcasm.  I have interpreted the literal meaning (or denotation) of people's phrases instead of their figurative meaning (or connotation) for a long time.  For example, when I first read Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (sometime before my junior year), I actually thought Swift really wanted to use children as "food" (405).  Since then, I assumed Swift was twisted and insane.  It wasn't until my tenth grade English teacher clarified that Swift's paper was a satire that I started viewing him as not so crazy.  Unfortunately, my new understanding of "A Modest Proposal" still didn't prepare me to identify sarcasm all the time.  When having conversations with people, it often takes me five to ten minutes to process any sarcastic remarks.  I have to constantly distinguish between the literal meaning of words and the connotation of words.  Oftentimes, when I am listening to a speech or reading a sarcastic essay, I need more information than what the speech or essay provides to help me understand any sarcastic remarks without taking them too literally.  (I apologize for being too repetitive.)  For instance, if a teacher jokingly says that he will take a point off of my test for asking a stupid question, I will need to know for sure that he will not take off that point in order to understand his joke.  If I am missing this piece of information, a heated argument will likely initiate between the teacher and me.  Fortunately, I now am getting a grasp of what sarcasm is like (thanks to 11 AP English's stressful workload), but I still have a long way to go.

Why the Lobster?

I am willing to admit that David Foster Wallace's essay, "Consider the Lobster" did make a good point.  It is true that many animals suffer severe pains from being turned into food.  I do appreciate how Wallace tries to raise questions of this issue, but there are a few components of the essay that I would like to criticize about.  Also, I will act as a devil's advocate against Wallace's argument.

Wallace vividly describes the various ways a lobster can experience "painful stimuli" and even uses scientific evidence to back his claim (Wallace 673).  However, one may weakly argue that lobsters do not easily feel pain because that they do not have a "cerebral cortex" to feel any pain (qtd. in Wallace 673).  This is a weak claim because Wallace easily makes a rebuttal by saying "this... claim is either false or fuzzy" (Wallace 673).  Nevertheless, there is still a different argument to be made that does not reject the assumption that lobsters feel pain.  It states that feeling pain is a part of being alive and is unavoidable.  In other words, animals will feel pain while being eaten simply because of the food chain.  Predators will keep on gruesomely and inhumanely eating prey even if all humans stopped eating meat.  In fact, humans abusing a lamb for food is just as cruel as a lamb being eaten by wolves while the lamb is conscious.  Therefore, humans should not care if about the pain animals suffer because of the food chain (or food web).  Such consumption is simply a part of the cycle of life.  (I am playing as a devil's advocate as I write this paragraph.  So I personally do not completely agree with this justification of animal abuse.)

Now I am going to give a personal criticism of "Consider the Lobster."  I have always wondered why would Wallace choose a lobster out of all of the animals he could have chosen from (besides the fact that he visited the Maine Lobster Festival).  In my opinion, there are many other examples of animals cruelty that could've served as better examples.  In France, Geese get forcefully fattened even when they are not hungry so foie gras can be well made.  In China, rabbits are skinned alive and have their fur gets processed into coats.  (I do not know why they have to be alive.)  In Korea, farmed puppies are hanged on a tree branch and are beaten to death (before being incinerated) to produce "better" meat.  In America, chickens are drugged to have bigger breasts; but this increase in mass had gave the chickens more weight than their delicate, limp legs could carry.  There are many more scenarios I can list, but I can't list them all because there are far too many of them.  However, I do think that if Wallace used a bird or a mammal instead of a lobster, he would've made a bigger impact.  After all, less people feel empathy for a lobster's suffering than that for a cow.  In fact, many people in the real world would like to see lobsters get cooked as seen with the World's Largest Lobster Cooker being "an attraction" (Wallace 675).  To put it bluntly, a lobster's life is treated like that of an "insect" (Wallace 666).  Very few people will feel bad for a squashed fly or a poisoned ant; this attitude is roughly similar to that of cooking a lobster since most people don't think about an arthropod's pain.  If Wallace wrote about a mammal, his essay may be more effective on his audience than it already is because many more people can connect to a mammal's feelings.  They know that mammals clearly have a brain to sense pain. (Unlike lobsters, which don't have much of a brain.)  Therefore, Wallace's essay may have a bigger impact on people's minds if he wrote about a different animal.  (I am not saying "Consider the Lobster" was not effective at all, I am saying it could be more meaningful with some alterations.)

Physical, not Verbal (and other stuff)

I had found Brad Manning's "Arm Wrestling with my Father" quite compelling.  In fact, since Ms. Valentino pointed out some "form meets content" in the essay, I almost believed that Manning did not write the essay as a college freshman.  Since I loved the essay so much, I will write about it in this post.

What I want to point out is the physical relationship between Manning and his father.  I know there was plenty of hard-to-find evidence that was pointed out for this relationship, but I will try to do my best to introduce some new evidence with analysis.  There is some imagery when Manning describes his father's hugs by saying "They made me suck in my breath and struggle for control, and the way he would pound on my back made rumbles in my ears." (Manning 147).  Since the imagery is both tactile and auditory, it further contributes to the idea that "words were physical" (Manning 145).  Manning is claiming that he could feel his father's expressions through his father's hugs.  The onomatopoeia of the word "pound" helps create an analogy with the imagery between verbal words and physical words (Manning 147).

There are even some other examples of "form meets content" that we didn't discuss in class (in terms of what I remember of the discussion).  The way Manning uses a short sentence that is "It was not a long match" (Manning 146) emphasizes how short the arm wrestling match was.  In contrast, Manning uses longer sentences in paragraph 4 to show how the arm wrestling matches seemed longer when Manning was younger.

Discussion of Disabilities

Our discussion on Friday about Nancy Mairs' essay titled "Disability" had strongly reminded me about some disabled students at Troy High.  I will briefly write about one of these disabled students, Ann.*  I do not exactly know what type of disability Ann has, but I can describe what I know about her condition.  She seems to be unable to move most of her limbs, which forces her to ride in a wheelchair.  When she talks, her words are slightly challenging to understand since her mouth is partially paralyzed (which I concluded from my observations, but I don't know for sure).  When I first saw Ann, I thought "Oh dear, what a poor, crippled girl!"  I later regretted saying that statement in my mind.  The reason why is that I wasn't viewing Ann as an ordinary human at the time (even though I thought that I did so at that moment).  I was perceiving Ann as a helpless "cripple" (Mairs 14).  I realized this former perception when I read Mairs' statement of how she is "not... Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease" (14).  That sentence made me feel that I was amorally discriminating against Ann (and other disabled people) by saying "It must be terrible to live with disabilities!"  Thanks to Mairs, I now know that in order to treat disabled people as ordinary, I will have to behave as if the disabled people I meet have no disabilities.  (I am not saying that I will make a lie that disabled people do not have disabilities).

I know that I could have written a fictional narrative about a person with disabilities instead of mentioning Ann, but I am not qualified to write such a story.  That is because I am not disabled, so I wouldn't completely understand how disabled people would feel.   While it is true that I some idea of disabled people's emotions, I would have to be disabled myself to get the true understanding.  I can find a way to give myself a disability, but I am not willing to do that.

*Names of Troy High School students have been changed, so don't bother looking up any names in the yearbook.

A Red Line in the Sun

When I watched the video about Redlining that Ms. Valentino assigned us, I instantly made a connection to the ending of A Raisin in the Sun.  The reason I made this connection is because Ruth says "the notes ain't but a hundred and twenty-five a month" (Hansberry 140).  This is an obvious reference to the rent they had to pay for the new house, and is roughly similar to the rent the people interviewed in the video had to pay.  (Even though the Younger family did have to pay for a lower fee.)  However, it would suggest a probable ending for the Youngers that does not have them "BOMBED" in "Clybourne Park" (Hansberry 102).  The Youngers may actually get to live in their new home with little violence, but may still suffer from extreme poverty.

I know that Hansberry did intend a white mob to attack the Youngers in the original version of the play, but the ending she did use wasn't quite specific in implying this event.  While Karl Linder did tell the family of how desperate the white people in Clybourne Park wanted to keep black people out of their neighborhood, it does not guarantee that they will kill the Youngers.  There is the possibility of the white people moving out of Clybourne Park.  This would, of course, result in more empty houses, and allow for even more black families to move into the neighborhood.  These families perhaps may need to pay an even higher fee than the Youngers' for their new houses, and eventually suffer from intense poverty.  This does not mean the Youngers are better off, since their landlord could simply increase the fee for renting the house.  As a result, Clybourne Park would become a lot like North Lawrence.  Perhaps Hansberry purposely allows this alternate fate of the Youngers to be interpreted from her play, since segregation is a major theme in A Raisin in the Sun.  After all, redlining is a strong example of segregation.

Why does Fitzgerald Include Racism in his novels?

John, from The Diamond As Big As The Ritz, was put into "a state of terror" when he found out that Braddock murdered his guests (Fitzgerald 99).  What I find that is very irritating is the John did not feel this when he first saw the "negroes" as slaves (Fitzgerald 79).  In fact, it may prove that John could be a racist, or at least indifferent to blacks.  Unfortunately, I cannot find enough textual evidence to prove this theory.  So instead of pondering on if Fitzgerald or John is a racist, I will try my best to explain why F. Scott Fitzgerald includes these indirect references to racism.

 It is important to remember that there was plenty of racists that existed in the Roaring 20's.  There was even a famous racist organization that had gained a lot of power during this decade, which is, of course, the Klu Klux Klan.  While Fitzgerald did try to focus both The Great Gatsby and The Diamond As Big As The Ritz (which was actually written for Fitzgerald's pleasure) on social class, it seems he couldn't avoid including racism simply because it was a big issue at the time.  I actually think Fitzgerald was tempted to write a story that addresses racism, but he just was probably afraid of getting assassinated by the Klu Klux Klan or by a racist (or anti-racist) mob.  So he vaguely includes racism in his novels as a result.  (To be clear, I do not know for sure if this is true.)

Overall, I do not think that it matters if Fitzgerald is a racist or not.  Racism does not seem to be the main point of his novels. (I am referring to The Great Gatsby and The Diamond As Big As The Ritz).  As I stated before, Fitzgerald's main purpose in his two stories involved social classes.  So I think that issue would be more vital (and easier) in analyzing some of Fitzgerald's texts.

My Favorite passage from The Great Gatsby

Note: The following post uses the author's opinions.

The following passage is from page 88 of The Great Gatsby:

"I walked out the back way-just as Gatsby had when he had made his nervous circuit of the house half an hour before-and ran for a huge black knotted tree, whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain.  Once more it was pouring, and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by Gatsby's gardener, abounded in small muddy swamps and prehistoric marshes.  There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby's enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour.  A brewer had built it early in the "period" craze a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay five years' taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw.  Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family-he went into an immediate decline.  His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the door.  Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry." (Fitzgerald 88)

 Nick is obviously thinking about how Gatsby's house was built in the 1910s (since he mentioned "a decade before").  What I want to point out though is that the house was built by a "brewer" rather than anyone else.  At first, I thought the brewer was a cook who just made soup to sell to his neighbors.  I later realized that the brewer could have actually created alcoholic drinks because "he went into an immediate decline".  This "decline" could have probably resulted from the 18th Amendment which started Prohibition.  It could also be inferred that the brewer was wealthy because he wanted "all the neighboring cottages...have their roofs thatched with straw."  Although the brewer "agreed to pay five years' taxes" for his neighbors, the "straw" is a symbol of poverty for the neighbors and how the brewer is richer, explaining why they refused the brewer's offer.  There is also noticeable similarities between Gatsby and the brewer because they are both wealthy and made money from alcohol.  The similarities perhaps reveal how Gatsby's mindset is stuck in the past.  (Just to clarify, the brewer is not the same person as Gatsby because the brewer had children while Gatsby didn't).  Nick had actually compared himself to "Kant" (a famous philosopher from the Enlightenment) because he makes a generalization of "Americans" at the end of the passage.  This generalization could be referring to Tom and Daisy, who planed to stay at East Egg like "serfs", but moved out at the end of the book as "peasantry."  (In case you didn't know, the difference between peasants and serfs is that peasants are allowed to move away from their land while serfs are forced by their lords to stay on their land.  Also, I am not saying that Tom and Daisy are poor because I referred to them as peasants, they are obviously wealthy.)