Maus II

The bottom panel on page 41 has Art sitting at his desk with a pile of bodies under him and on the next panel two people are seen standing on top of the bodies. According to McCloud the words and pictures are in parallel because what Art says on that panel on page 41 has nothing to do with what is seen, “words and pictures seem to follow very different courses,” (154). Art is thinking about the book and his mother, but the picture is showing something more horrifying. Even in the next panel, the people seem to be deliberately ignoring them by stepping on the bodies to talk to Art, portraying how Art’s attempt to display the horrors of the holocaust and what the people at the time had to go through is not having the effect that he wants. He’s successful and is profiting off it but people are missing the message that Art is trying to convey.

            Furthermore, as the panels progress on page 42, Art is seen as growing smaller and smaller, to a younger, childlike version of himself, which is an example of “when pictures carry the weight of clarity in a scene.” (McCloud 157). Art is very overwhelmed in this scene perhaps by the people around him or even the weight of the stories of the holocaust and how he is profiting off of it and how other people are trying to use it to make money, completely diminishing his purpose; finally, the very last panel on page 42 is him crying out “WAH.” Here he is like a child who is not able to express his feelings clearly and properly, which is enhanced by Art drawing himself as a child and clearly expressing the overwhelmed feeling he is experiencing in the scene. Moreover, Art’s feeling of sadness or loneliness is seen through the lines on his face, making his face seem visibly darker, unlike chapters before where his face is clear and white.

            Finally, unlike previous chapters where Art and the other characters are seen as actual animals, in these two pages the characters are seen as humans with animal masks on. McCloud says that “Storytellers in all media know that a sure indicator of audience involvement—is the degree to which the audience identifies with a story’s characters,” (42); by this logic before when all the characters were actually animals the audience could identify with the characters, but now they are humans in animal masks, bringing attention to the fact that these were real humans, not different species of animals, who had to live through the holocaust and they experienced things that Art and the reader will never be able to experience, which reduces the “degree to which the audience identifies with a story’s characters.”

            Art in these two pages portrays the negative effects of the holocaust on him despite him never living through it himself; it still haunts him and makes him depressed.

"Spring into Action"

Both The Things They Carried and Maus share the idea that war stories shouldn’t be really about the war but more about the stories, the memories, the story telling, and the effects it has had on them. Throughout the novel, The Things They Carried does not really describe the war itself, but describes the people and their experiences during and after the war, and yet it is still a war story. Similarly, Maus does not describe the war itself but describes how the war is affecting his father Vladek, his mother Anja, and the rest of his family and friends. It describes how they are surviving, where they had to hide, and how people were being affected. Both describe the horrors that come from the effects of war.

Another way they are similar is the way the stories are formatted. Tim O’Brien is telling a fictional story where he is a narrator and at one part he is the telling the story through the character Tim who hears the story from Rat Kiley who hears the story from someone else. Similarly, Art is telling the story of his parents and is referencing parts of the novel that has already passed such as the mice who hung themselves towards the end of the first part. Both are very metafiction.

Both stories talk about the effects of war without really discussing the events of the war itself which reminded me of the “Spring into Action,” when compressed it’s very small and when pulling it, it is very long. The actual war itself is described briefly, but the effects are very long lasting and have longer descriptions. 

Waterfalls and Twelfth Night

When you pull the bottom tab of the waterfall card each flap opens up to finally reveal a single bigger piece of paper. This is like the final act of Twelfth Night. 

Each flap corresponds to each conflict that became solved. Generally, there are four flaps in a waterfall card which can correspond to four conflicts that were resolved in the play. One conflict is Viola and Sebastian not knowing that they are both alive; once they saw each other and started talking to each other they figured out who they were. Once this was resolved, the others followed quickly after; just like once the tab is pulled and the first flap is raised the others follow after. The second conflict that was resolved was that Viola and Orsino could get married because it was revealed that Viola is actually a woman. The third was Olivia and Sebastian getting married because Sebastian looks like Cesario and the fourth conflict that was resolved was Malvolio realizing that it was Maria that wrote the letter and not Olivia. Finally, the large paper is all the marriages and how all the knots smoothed out in the end.

The marriages that are occurring at the end of Act V are Viola and Orsino, Olivia and Sebastian, and Sir Toby and Maria. However, are any of these marriages based on love? Viola loved Orsino, but Orsino never loved Viola. He didn’t know that she was a woman until Act V. He still calls her Cesario and she never changes back into her own clothing at the end of the act. Olivia loved Cesario, but married Sebastian thinking that he was Cesario. Sebastian didn’t know who Olivia was until Act III and he said how great is his luck and then agreed to marry her. Finally, Sir Toby marries Maria because of her clever trick on Malvolio. All of these marriages occurred very casually. Sebastian just accepted that Olivia wanted to marry him without questioning anything, and because they were married and Viola is actually a woman, it feels like Orsino had no other option than to marry Viola, not because he actually loves her. Therefore, I don’t think that any of these characters can be described as actually in love.   

Falling Rings and Modern Romance

         Aziz Ansari pieced together love and marriage in older times versus love and marriage now, in the modern world, and how it has changed.

After interviewing people, he realized some things that were common among them.

1. People got married to people who lived in the same neighborhood or even in the same building. 
2. Women got married at the age of twenty and men got married at the age of twenty-three. Whereas now women are marrying around the age of twenty-seven and men are marrying around the age of twenty-nine.
3. And finally, that most of the older women felt that they were missing a part of their life.

            

            Much like these rings, all these reasons for marriage are connected and linked together. The women felt that they were missing a stage of their life because women were not allowed to leave home and were not allowed to have a lot of freedom. They would get married to leave the house, but marriage came with more responsibilities, such as having children and taking care of their husband. Which is why they would tell their children and grandchildren to enjoy themselves. Giving rise to a stage in a person’s life called emerging adulthood. A stage in an adult’s life where a person can focus on education, focus on a career and earning money, and finally focus on finding the perfect partner, rather than marry someone who lives close to them just to get a little bit of freedom. This explains why the average age of women and men when they get married is much higher.

      

 

Furthermore, when one ring is released from the top (watch the first thirty seconds of the video to see this) it seems to have a cascading event, which seems to change the order of the rings. This is similar to the effect of modern technology and its effect on love, or the way it continues to change the way young people go about expressing love. According to the survey that Aziz includes in the book, “In 2010 only 10 percent of young adults used texts to ask someone out for the first time, compared with 32 percent in 2013.” This is because more people have smart phones, there are more modes of social networking which has free messaging options, and messaging is quick, easy, and fun. One thing lead to another with technological advancement and the way love is expressed. 

Postcolonialism and Slinkys

             In Things Fall Apart, Achebe not only makes the colonizer, the white missionaries, and colonized, the people of Umuofia, relationship clear but also attempts to reveal the true nature of this relationship and the negative effects it brings with it. After extensively describing the culture and traditions of Umuofia in a hundred and twenty five pages, Achebe then describes the quick manner in which the colonizer destroys the people’s faith in their own customs. He describes the white missionaries disregard on the significance of the people’s traditional practices and then summarizes postcolonial thinking in the last paragraph of the novel, stating that these white missionaries will name their novel “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger” and that they will devote “perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph” on Okonkwo’s life. By naming the novel this, the District Commissioner is not accurately depicting the people of Umuofia and the relationship between them and the white missionaries. Instead, the white missionaries are reducing Okonkwo to topics on murder and suicide rather than the respectable man he once was according to their customs. Furthermore, people will believe what the white missionaries write about because they have not been to the village of Umuofia and therefore cannot say what is true and what is not true in the depiction of the village. Another negative effect is that Umuofia’s traditional religion, language, and culture will disappear and be replaced by this supposedly superior way of living.

            Similar ideas that Achebe describes can be seen when applying the postcolonial lens to analyze Frankenstein. Through this lens, the creature can be seen as the colonized and the society that surrounds him as the colonizer. As soon as the creature comes alive he is immediately attacked by societal values. This makes the creature seem like he is inferior just because the society around him says that he isn’t supposed to look the way he does. He is ostracized from society because society makes him feel that he is not allowed to be a part of their society, which is similar to the Igbo people. The white missionaries continuously tell them that they are worshipping false Gods and that they are only pieces of wood, which is undermining the Igbo people’s culture and eventually making it nonexistent. Moreover, it is in postcolonial nature to describe the “inferior” people and customs in such a way that makes the colonizers feel like they are doing the right thing and this is seen in Frankenstein also when Frankenstein is describing the creature’s grin as evil when it really could be an expression of despair when Frankenstein believes he is doing the correct thing by destroying the creature’s companion. Additionally, the reader can only believe that the Creature is evil when Frankenstein is describing him because he incessantly describes the creature as hideous and evil. This is similar to the white missionaries continuously describing the Africans as savages and people who have no culture or language in Heart of Darkness. The negative effect that comes from this colonizer/colonized relationship is that Frankenstein’s family is killed by the creature and eventually the creature also dies, which is similar to the death of the Igbo people’s culture.

            Finally, Achebe’s argument can also be applied to the movie Avatar. In Avatar, the colonizer are the humans and the colonized are the Na’vi. The humans want to destroy the Na’vi people’s homeland for their own selfish reasons. They do not understand the culture or the significance behind the tree that they want to mine when they attempt to have the people relocate. Jake Sully tries to understand their customs and gain the Na’vi people’s trust but ultimately his goal is to also get resources from their land. He is like Mr. Brown in Things Fall Apart. Mr. Brown tries to convert the Igbo people, but while trying to do this, he learns about the Igbo culture.  Similarly, while Sully is attempting to relocate the people, he is learning more and more about their culture. The humans almost destroy the customs, the culture and the significance behind their homeland near the end of the movie, which illustrates Achebe’s argument that in the process of trying to convert the colonized that they are destroying their traditions.

            In all three works, and especially in Things Fall Apart, the events led systematically from one thing to another which led to another thing until eventually things fell apart. This systematic way of events is like an origami slinky. One piece is connected to the next which is connected to the next, and this makes it eventually “fall” down when placed on stairs. 

Spinning Tops and Feminists

                As I sat at the table finishing up my school homework for the day, I was listening and half watching a Telugu movie my parents were watching on YouTube called Mitr. It seemed to start off with a typical family who immigrated to the United States with the mother still trying to hang onto her Indian roots. Everything was okay until this one scene where the father asked his guests if they wanted anything to drink; as soon as the guests said water, instead of him getting it for his guests himself he asked his wife to get the water for them.  

                Okay, maybe I am slightly overreacting for this one scene, but it continued. The mother continued to act like a stereotypical woman; one who listens to her husband all the time and depends on the husband to do everything because she feels she is the weaker gender. She can’t stand up for herself. As Angelica’s group presented today, she is considered a weak character.

                This made me think of more Telugu movies that I have watched that have “weak” female characters; a majority of Telugu movies I thought of were more oriented towards male main characters with a female character only there to act as a girlfriend for the main character. She had no other purpose or role in the actual plot of the story. She was more like a distraction to the “hero.”

While I could think of many movies with a main male character, only a couple of movies came to mind when I thought of more strong female oriented Telugu movies. These few movies with a strong female character were still well received in society, so why then, especially in modern times, can’t there be more of a balance between male and female characters in Telugu movies? Why does the male character have more importance in plots of a movie than a female character?

                A movie can still be successful if there is an equal balance between a strong male and strong female character who are both central to the plot. For example, a spinning top consists of three pieces of paper; each paper is the same size and each part is necessary to make the top. Each piece of the top can be thought of as each part of the movie, one the plot, one the male character, and one the female character; all elements that are important for a movie.

When put together, the top spins pretty well. Therefore, when all the pieces of the paper were the same size, or when both the male and female character had an equal part in the movie, the top spun well, or in other words the movie can be successful.

Now if that same top has one part that is too big, the top is unbalanced and doesn’t spin as well. In my opinion, this is where Telugu movies are at now. 

Fireworks and Time

           Ruth, one of the main characters in A Tale for the Time Being, happens to find a diary about Nao washed up on shore on the island where Ruth and Oliver live, and in the beginning it seems like they are two different people, unrelated except for the fact that Ruth is reading about Nao, similar to how these twelve pieces in the origami firework are unrelated as of now.

However, as the novel and Nao’s diary progresses, it is seen that Nao and Ruth share similar experiences. Aside from the fact that they both are Japanese, they both seem to be out of place in where they are living right now. Ruth felt like she fit in when she lived in New York, where she could be among other people; however because of her circumstances with Oliver’s and her mother’s health, she had to move to the island where Oliver lives. As a result, “she missed people,” (61). Nao, similarly, fit in when she lived in California. She had friends, her father had a job, and life seemed to be going well for her. Then when her father lost his job and they had to move back to Japan her life fell apart; other students started to bully her and her father started to attempt to commit suicide.

                They are further related when Ruth begins to connect more and finds more clues about Nao’s life with the help of the internet. She first finds an article by a professor that seems to match up with the events Nao has described and later searches up Yasutani Jiko and finds an article, helping her become even more closer to Nao and her story, much like this origami firework.

The firework is more complex than it seems like how Nao describes time as complex. She wants to live now, but by the time she says now, it is in the past already. 

Aside from origami, A Tale for the Time Being is interesting to me because it reminds me of Frankenstein. The novel is set up like a frame tale, much like in Frankenstein. Walton is listening to Frankenstein talk about the Creature and then writing about it to his sister, while Ruth is reading about Nao in her diary. Both Walton and Ruth act as an outside perspective, reacting to the story as a reader would.