The Bear

From the very first sentence, the reader is taken into nature, more specifically the forest. This book is so well written that even if the reader hasn’t been hunting before, he is easily able to imagine himself right next to the boy. The reader finds this humble and scared boy, who has been hunting this bear for the past six years. He actually has no intention of slaying it, but it is the adrenaline of the chase and the mystery of the wilderness that draws the boy in. During his first hunting experience, when he was 13 years old, Ike discovers an emotion that most boys his age cannot comprehend- fear. As Sam told him, you can have fear, but don’t be afraid. It is the men who are afraid that other men and bears must worry about.

Bildungsroman?

This is a bildungsroman. Janie Crawford struggles through her life, but she doesn’t ever give up on hope. She cuts her own path through the uncertain forest ahead. There are so many different struggles that she went through, but she never lost hope.
When the novel starts out, she listens to her Nanny and marries this man that she has picked out for her, but she realizes that marriage isn’t love and leaves him for Jody. She now realizes that it is her life and she is responsible for her own happiness. She is on a journey to find out who she is and this book brings us along on the ride.

The Title

We all have our five senses. The sense of sight is how many of us see the world. I would say that very few people can rely solely on one sense, but the sense of sight dominates the five. Just as that is true, Hurston uses sight to emphasize the passion and feeling in situations. For example, when her Nanny and Janie get in an argument and Nanny slaps her. It is their eyes that meet, after the struggle and through the eyes that you can see someone’s soul.
This title makes God seem tangible, but after thinking about it. God is everywhere, and it isn’t necessarily that we seem him, but that we see him working through others. This is what the novel struggles with. There is so much pain that happens within the novel, but with the pain comes love.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Hurston illustrates many situations and feelings in her book through nature. Nature connects with each character. Janie often goes to the pear tree to think; her husband works the field. There is this familiarity with nature that is comforting for Janie. Because she is mulatto, she doesn’t fit in with either whites or blacks. This is just a further push for her to find comfort in nature. It is during this time that she is allowed to dream and think about what could be.
An apparent theme in this book is hopelessness. The characters give up on their dreams, or just don’t dream at all, because they’ve forgotten how.

Lucy Gets Married

By the end of the novel, Lucy chooses to be with her true-love, George. This is significant because she chooses her own path in life.
If she would have married Cecil then she would have everything she materially needed, but would she be truely happy? With Cecil, she would have only been a trophy wife. Because she picked George, she has forged her own path and made her own desicions about life. She represents the new generation of English and the hope for a classless society, or at least one that isn't obessed with class.

A Room with a View: First Thoughts

The introduction to my book discussed the fact that E. M. Forester believed that characters were interchangeable between books regardless of the century or continent. During a lecture at Cambridge, he states, “we may say that History develops, [but] Art stands still.” The author of the introduction, Mona Simpson, doesn’t completely agree with Forester, but she does admit that his characters could live in other’s books.

I enjoy Forester’s critique of English society. Lucy Honeychurch is a well-to-do in society, and this book discusses her turmoil about what is acceptable among peers and what she wants. I would classify this as a semi-feminist book, because she follows her free-will and doesn’t let society tell her what will make her happy.

Speaking of society, in the SLC there is a presentation about a healthy portrayal of self-image and not relying on what society tells us. It is called A Room with a View, and the book deals with the same facts that we go through today. Maybe not in the sense that we have as segregated of a class system, but media tells us that we must be skin and bones to be pretty. It is the same concept, but for a new generation.

Huck Finn: A Bildungsroman?

This controversial book portrays the immense, but maybe easily over-looked growth of a boy. Because the world Huck grew up in, there would be no surprise if he were pulled back into the family-cycle he was born into. Yet, through his adventures with Jim, he realizes there is more to him than he has given himself credit for. He no longer sees himself is second best to his friend Tom Sawyer, and he also recognizes that his friend, Jim, is a human just like any white man he knows. Of course, it would be possible to read over these two key factors in the growth of this boy, but to do so is to deny him of his self-discovery.