Taking it all in

It's strange tonight, I'm home from senior supper and it's starting to hit me that it's all ending.  There's the old literary cliche that high school is but a chapter in life.  I'm starting to see the truth behind it.  Even though I know there is going to be another page, there's still an empty feeling, like somehow the rest of the current page is going to be left blank.  It's been fun looking back in the spare moments I've had this week, though if I could lodge one complaint it's that it seems the school has collectively decided to push us out the door at full steam, as opposed to let us gradually glide into the exit.  There's something to be said for the ripping the band aid off approach, but it doesn't leave a lot of time or energy for reflection.  Here's my last ounce of reflection that I think I can spare.

It seems like so long ago that I walked into my first day of African-American Lit.  I really didn't know what to expect, our summer reading had been Native Son.  If you haven't read it, you should, but it's a hard read, Wright wasn't writing to make it an easy read.  I remember bits and pieces of discussions from that class, I remember my first poetry discussion was of a poem called "Liberty." I remember I liked it because it was so short.  Not that I was avoiding reading a long poem, but I admired the effort it took to get the point across in six short lines.  Besides that I think I probably talked at most ten times that entire semester.  I really focused on my blog, but I was never really happy with it.  Looking back on my first post makes me laugh and cringe, the level of insight there is pretty minimal, but it was a start, and starts are never perfect.

I was excited for Coming of Age.  The book list looked great, even higher expectations that the books I'd read (and enjoyed) the semester before.  Then Joyce hit me.  How could I expect a book that began "Once upon a time, and a very good time it was" to be such a challenging book.  It wasn't just that it was written with pre-1900 Irish slang, it was also the effects Joyce was going for.  Catcher was easier, I really like Holden, that was my first and probably favorite pastiche.  Black Swan Green was nearly equal on my favorite scale.  I started to talk a bit more that semester, though then I felt like, well I'm just a junior in a coming of age class, these senior who will be graduating in a few months must have more personal insights because of where they are in their life.  I think this was probably the highlight of my blogs.  It was the perfect timing of feeling more comfortable to share my thoughts, and also the drive to write well thought out and meaningful posts.

Over the summer, going into 20th Century Novels, I made it a goal that I was going to talk more.  I said to myself-you're a senior now, with two semesters of these types of classes under your belt, you gotta step up.  And in a lot of ways I think I did.  Not only did the number of comments I made increase, but I think the quality of them by and large did as well.  I still remember my favorite comment I made in the entire semester, it was second day of reading The Sun Also Rises, and I described my first impression of Brett Ashley that she was intoxicating.  Now I don't know if this was particularly original, but it still stands out, in large part because that was by far my favorite book of the semester, and the description of Brett as having "curves like the hull of a racing yacht" I still can't get out of my mind to be dreadfully honest.  I admit, I think my blogs went down a bit, not so much because I didn't have interesting things to say but more because I didn't have as much time or will power to work on them.

And then this semester? Well I don't really know if I have the perspective yet really for good reflection (though would you say any of this reflection has been good?).  I mean you were in class with me, you probably know how I was.  Talked a lot, even when I didn't really have something to say, kind of lazy on the blogs.  Now, if for some strange reason you did read my first blog post, and got all the way to here on this one, you may notice they have similar rigid structuring.  This was intentional, I figured, may as well end how you started, really tie this whole blog in one nice big digital literary bow of varying insight.  And here and now, forever closes my chapter.

Not as it Appears

As far as we, the students of history, know, Bobby Dupard is a fictional character of Don Delillo.  I was tossing around the idea in my head though, what if Bobby Dupard is fictional in the world of Nicholas Branch. What if he's in Lee's head like a childhood imaginary friend? I believe this idea isn't as far fetched as it initially may seem.  Bobby is first introduced as Lee's cellmate in Atsugi.  This I believe is the 'real' Bobby Dupard.  I can't see anyway that an image of Lee's mind could some how end up as fact on the report that Branch is compiling.  It is after that that I believe it veers away Bobby.  Lee has created a new identity for Bobby.  He is now a figment of Lee's imagination, his actions are a construction of Lee's mind.

Let's take when they reconnect at the laundromat.  Lee is in a tumultuous state, he's not thinking clearly.  I would argue it is him projecting Dupard as the anonymous worker.  He then visits nightly Dupard, only he's really just having a conversation with himself.  The discussion he has with Dupard about Walker then is him guessing what an African-American veteran forced into the ghetto would say about his experiences.  When Dupard is talking about not wanting to miss class to shoot Walker, I think it's part of Lee's mind challenging his planned assassination.  His argument about going in close for the kill or taking the distance shot then is also an internal, not external one.

I admit, the fact that Lee gets a vehicle from Dupard is a bit tricky in my new understanding of Dupard.  The case could be made that Lee has a mental break when he goes to steal the car and by the time he wakes up the next morning is back to himself, the car showing up without explanation equaling Dupard got it.  It's possible but it is sort of a stretch.  Lee does have a propensity for making up stories and people, alternate identities and personalities.  He does expect his cellmate to have wisdom for him like the great revolutionaries, but Dupard doesn't.  He is lonely and consistently abandoned so it would make sense for him to make up someone he expected so much from.  In his mind, history has put Dupard at the laundromat to push him over the edge to take action.  Really, I see it more as the two sides of his mind struggling with what he feels he must do to accomplish his goal of being a part of history.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades?

I think the underlying fundamental question that Delillo is asserting is, does Kennedy have to die for Cuba? At the midway point of the novel, there are two answers to this question.  Mackey believes that he does, Win Everett thinks he doesn't.  Win originally comes up with the conspiracy, with the stated outcome of a near miss of the President from a sniper's bullet.  It has to be close enough that it looks like Cuban intelligence sent someone to do the job, but not so close as to actually endanger the President.  Already there has been dramatic ironic tensions as Nicholas Branch has written that Raymo and Frank haven't been told to miss, andCarmine Lotta, the man unknowingly funding the conspiracy, has stated he wants to take the head off the snake (AKA JFK).  Essentially, the very thing Everett fears, his conspiracy growing legs of its own independent of him, is happening.  He's lost control from his suburban home in Texas, the plot is now moving without his impetus or knowledge.

But beyond the individual, personal motives for and against actually killing the President, is it objectively necessary?  Looking at this historically, granted with the benefits of hindsight the answer is a firm no.  U.S. policy has never been more directly counter the Castro government in Cuba than during the Kennedy administration.  When Johnson takes over in November '63, his attention turns towards his Great Society, the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement.  Cuba effectively disappears from the political debate. Now granted, the Kennedy Assassination was not tied to the Cubans, and if it were I think certainly that would have made a difference, but no other President had as much at stake as Kennedy with regards to Cuba.  Cuba was his biggest embarrassment, and he already had a inferiority complex because of his lack of governmental experience, so he would've done anything to turn it into a win.

If Kennedy had survived that day in Dallas, he would have kept after Cuba.  Publicly the U.S. won the Cuban Missile Crisis, so there would be no reason for him not to keep pressing that advantage.  He was a pretty emotional president, so if he thought Castro had come after him, the threat of the Soviets probably wouldn't have been enough of a deterrent to invade Cuba.  Plus the American public's support for Kennedy would've been galvanized to the point they would have followed him anyway.  I guess then, my conclusion is that it would have been better for the pro-Cuban interventionists for Kennedy to have lived and that Everitt's plot in its original form would have been the best outcome for the whole movement.  In my thinking Mackey seems not only shortsighted but also selfish for letting his personal feelings get in the way of the larger interests he claims to be fighting for.

Cop Out

The ending to Kindred was bad.  Throughout the entire story Butler succeeded in creating something that was more than just a cliche slave narrative.  I really enjoyed it, both the scenes in 'modern' America and antebellum America.  But the ending ruined it for me.  Flat out, undeniably, ultimately.  There had to be a better way to wrap up Rufus' story than to have Dana kill him.  It's one thing to end a random novel by killing off the antagonist, but in a slavery based story? It's just unimaginative.  It seemed out of character for Dana, normally she worries more about how her actions will affect others than herself.  This isn't to say that I disagree with her choice to kill Rufus, I disagree with Butler ever putting her in that position.  Dana knew that Rufus' death would mean that all the slaves on the plantation would be scattered across the South with complete disregard for family and relationships, Carrie told her as much a few chapters before.

Now with the way that Dana's time travel is set up, one of the two of them has to die.  Otherwise there could be no finality to the story, and the first chapter could never be written with such a sense of recovery.  But it still doesn't have to be Rufus trying to rape Dana and Dana killing him in self defense.  I think it could have been a stronger ending to have Rufus kill himself.  He is such a rash person it would've fit with his personality, and it would have elicited a strong moral questioning in readers' minds about the feelings of slave owners. Maybe Kevin comes back with Dana and there's a standoff, redefining the classic plot of two men fighting over a woman.  But something, something that isn't male slave owner attempting to rape the female slave.  Perhaps Butler was doing something with this that I'm not getting?  It's possible, but at least in my current thinking all the ending elicits is a sense that the author was done with her characters and her story, or that she was on deadline from her publisher.  The problem is that it isn't a metafictional aside with Butler showing us that just like we're ready for the end to come, so is she.  Instead it comes across like a movie that ran out of money and ended on a weak note, fading into oblivion.       

O Captain, My Captain

When Tom Weylin dies in Dana's care, it's a very important turning point both for Rufus and for Dana.  All the times that Dana had come back to antebellum Maryland, she was always able to cure what was ailing Rufus or anyone else.  All of a sudden, she didn't cure someone, and it wasn't just anyone, it was Tom Weylin whom she'd had run-ins with before.  Now realistically there wasn't anything Dana could have done to save him, he had a heart attack, which even with modern medicine is often fatal.  Dana knows this, and deep down Rufus knows it too, but the mirage that she is this guardian angel figure is gone.

Rufus now is forced to see that Dana may not always be there to protect him and the plantation.  Even worse, she can now be seen as a threat.  If she didn't save Tom, why would she save Rufus?  Rufus doesn't know that she's a descendant of his, so seemingly the only thing making sure she saves him is that his father would have tortured and killed her if she hadn't--a thing Tom reminds Dana on multiple occasions.  He knows that when he's in danger of being killed she comes against her will, but once she's there there isn't anything stopping her from walking away from him now.  Rufus has to give in to Dana a little more, because unlike before, she now holds a lot of the cards.  While he's alive and lucid she is still his slave, but clearly he never knows when he'll be near death so he can't take the chance.

For Dana, she's now had someone die on her watch.  As traumatic as it must be, it's liberating too (irony fully intended).  Tom's death gives her the leverage to inspire fear in Rufus of what she's capable of.  It also proves to herself that she can survive in that time with someone's death.  Her parents died when she was young, so she knows what that loss is like, how debilitating it can be.  I think she was living still in a little bit of a fantasy world that nothing was ever going to change around the Weylin plantation and she would always just be getting Rufus out of jams and playing him against his father.  Now that fantasy is over and she's now gained an even stronger position in that time.  Going forward, things will be different, and the unspoken understanding between Rufus and Dana is going to be even more sensitive.    

Abandonment Issues

*Note:This is specifically about the latter half of "The Fear" so potential spoiler alert, though it isn't anything very surprising.

When Dana leaves 1819 at the end of Tom Weylin's whip, Kevin is left there.  He's alone, and worse yet, unlike Dana he doesn't have a way of getting home.  Now Kevin does have the advantage of being White, which in the antebellum South is probably the best 'trait' you can have.  Dana says she is gone for eight days, meaning that she's been gone for years in 1819 time.  Kevin waited and waited and then went North.  Dana is hurt by him not waiting for her.  Is it reasonable to expect him to though?

I would say no.  Rufus tells Dana that he waited around for a while at the plantation before finally deciding to go north.  Kevin couldn't have even be sure Dana was ever going to come back.  Even after he goes to the North, he still writes letters to Rufus providing his current address, so on the off chance Dana is there, she has some way of contacting him.  Yet the fact is, Dana abandoned him.  I realize she couldn't control it, but that is what happened.  I hope for him that he did move on and find someone else, or if not another person, at least something to put him at peace in his new life.

Now I know this seems like a pretty minor detail of the whole situation to focus on, but the way Butler sets it up, it is in direct contrast with Tom Weylin's current relationship status.  Tom's wife has left for Baltimore after the death of her twins, making him now twice left by women (Hannah, his first wife dying).  Unlike Kevin's relative flexibility, Tom can't move because all his wealth his tied up in his land.  He has to live in the same house, the same bed even.

I must admit, I haven't come up with anything to really draw from these parallel situations as of yet. However, if Kevin does come back, or if Dana somehow gets to the city he is in, it will be interesting to see how much Kevin may have changed.  This change could then lend insight into who Tom was before Margaret.  Perhaps when Hannah died he changed just as much as Kevin changed when Dana left.  The Tom we see in the present may be a different version of his true self, maybe the past isn't as different as we normally, or want to, believe?      

Why Three?

As I think I established with my last post, I really like war art.  That's why Vonnegut's one paragraph of military action, when the two scouts are killed, really intrigued me.  In class we talked about how the past perfect verb conjugation makes it less exciting, and the short declarative sentences almost innocent and childlike.  There is one thing we didn't talk about in class that hasn't left my head though.  Why is it "three inoffensive bangs" (54)?  Two scouts, three shots, the math doesn't add up.  From my understanding of military training, soldiers are taught to fire two shots at a target, "double-tapping" them.  It is few enough shots that the recoil of the gun doesn't throw off accuracy by very much, but enough that if both are hits the target won't be getting up.  For marksmen, for the range that they presumably got to behind the two scouts, one shot apiece would have been sufficient.  Depending on who the soldiers were, that's either four or two shots, so the question remains: where does the three come from?  

Vonnegut was in the Army, so he would've known what was standard operating procedure, which leads me to the conclusion that the three shots was chosen for a reason.  Perhaps it is suggesting that the Germans who kill the scouts aren't real soldiers and haven't had any military training, so that while one of them needs to fire twice (or chooses might be a better word) the other elects to fire only once.  This would fit with the makeup of the squad that captures Billy and Roland, with the young boys, Princess, and the old men.  Or perhaps the reason for the three shots is that they didn't have enough ammunition/one gun misfired and wasn't operable. This would fit with the description of the rest of Germany, Dresden essentially, being no longer militarily capable.   Either way really, it still supports Vonnegut's overall point about the war, that by the time Dresden was bombed the outcome of the war was already decided.  It adds to the utter stupidity of the war, that people who have no inclination toward violence are forced into it without even so much as the proper equipment or training, and still expected to succeed for their country.