Monthly Archives: March 2014

things are indeed falling apart

soooo my thoughts are things fall apart are rather surface level, i apologize. with a novel like this it takes me a little to process exactly whats happening and the lecture today left me thinking even more about the book!

for one, it was quite confusing at first and i was constantly having to look back to make sure who this person or this person was. there were so many characters! it was so hard to keep track of them, haha, i ended up drawing a little relations chart so i could get it all worked out and less confused.

even with jon’s explanation on how achebe and conrad are connected, im still kind of struggling to see the full connections. at first i thought that achebe was a direct response to conrad, but now that ive read the text it doesnt actually stand out as much as i thought.

one thing i did notice about the book is that there are a lot of little scenes that happen in the book and it just leaves me wondering why it happened, like ezinma being taken and her mother following and okonokwo i THINK just took her home? or did he take both of them home?  it also jumped between timelines a lot, like explaining how okonkwo would persevere and provide for his father and then it would immediately jump to the “current” season and i wouldn’t get until after the chapter ended that almost 20 or 30 something years have passed. so much confusion! man, maybe im just super bad at picking up on these things. i feel like ill end up reading this book again before the in class essay anyway, so i hope the seminars help me figure some stuff out.

nicole

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the heart of darkness!!

hello friends we are almost done arts one and we get to finish it off with some quicker readings! not gonna lie, i was pretty excited to see that this book was pretty short…

either way, i was actually really excited to read this book because ever since master and the margarita (which is by far my favourite text from this year!) ive been looking forward to more fiction over the rest of the year! i enjoyed the kingdom of this world and northanger abbey, but it was just nice to do more fictional works before the end of the year. i really liked reading heart of darkness because it really reminded me of the more gritty adventuring works that i used to read in social studies in high school! i’ve always liked fictional stories in historical contexts! i’ve actually never read much to do with the ivory trade, so it was nice to be able to read something about it.

i personally found it hard to sympathize with kurtz throughout the book, especially near the end when his poor fiancee was lied to about her name being his last words to hide the truth. it also seemed to me that marlow did this because of  how certain she was that he loved her and he kind of passed it off as her being detached from reality when really, wouldnt it be less her fault and more kurtz’s fault for deceiving her and making her believe that he loved her…

i dont know, thats a pretty specific part of the book to think about! but yeah, there’s my thoughts on conrad’s text! to be honest im kind of confused about how this relates to the theme and de beauvoir, so hopefully those questions will be answered during the seminars!!

nicole

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