Uni COA - Andrew

Throughout the story, Jason acknowledges three different inner personas he possesses: Hangman, Maggot, and Unborn Twin. Hangman symbolizes Jason's stammer, Maggot represents an infestation of Jason's desire to fit in with the 'cool' kids, and Unborn Twin represents an impossibly ideal version of himself.  In the beginning chapters of the novel, all of Jason's inner personas seem to be working against him, hindering him from being the person that he desires. Most notably, Hangman blocks countless words through Jason's stammer at the most inopportune times, such as when he's trying to say the answer to a ridiculously simple math question, or when he has a fire comeback against Ross Wilcox's historically incorrect statement. However, due to Hangman, Jason just appears like a stupid loser to all his classmates. Meanwhile, Unborn Twin constantly degrades Jason for not being perfect at everything, even telling Jason that he shouldn't have been born, and Ma...

 Throughout the graphic novel, Bruce can be seen forcing stereotypical feminine or "girly" qualities onto his daughter, Alison. This includes things like putting up a pink wallpaper with flowers in Alison's room despite her open distaste for it, as well as constantly making her wear a barrette as a kid. Bruce continues to pressure Alison to wear pretty, feminine things like skirts, dresses, and pearls even when she's already an adult. While Bruce's actions were probably not out of the ordinary given the time period that the story takes place in, a whole new meaning arises when we learn about how he was a closeted gay person himself.  Given that Bruce reveals to Alison that he wanted to be a girl when he was younger, his actions can be seen as an effort to express and translate his own desires to be feminine onto his daughter. Although we see a snapshot of young Bruce in a women's bathing suit, he represses his feminine desires for the majority of his life with...

While volunteering at her local hospital and distributing flowers, Esther notices several withering flowers on her way to the materinity ward and decides to dispose them in a basin while commenting on its similarities to placing dead bodies in a morgue. Esther also later mentions that her reason for discarding the dying flowers was so that the patients who just gave birth wouldn't have to look at pitiful, droopy flowers.  This scene immediately jumped out to me when I read it because I saw an interesting parallel betwen Esther's actions in throwing away the flowers, and her own ideology about herself. With Esther believing her condition to be hopeless and incurable, she sees herself as one of the dead flowers that deserves to be thrown away. Much like how Esther thought that the depressing presence of the dead flowers would contaminate the positive aura of the other flowers, she worries that her condition will bring down the people around her. In particular, she worries about h...

I really want to talk about the scene where Holden feels like he's going to fall through the road whenever he steps off a sidewalk curb (this takes place the morning after he leaves Mr. Antolini's home). Although this scene was very brief, I saw an immediate connection to the passage where Holden sees a little boy walking on the road right beside the curb instead of the sidewalk, while singing "if a body catch a body coming through the rye" carefreely. I just found this contrast too great. While Holden almost has a mental breakdown every time he has to leave the safety of the sidewalk, the boy just nonchalantly strolled down the road while several cars whizzed past him. I think this kind of signifies how Holden is so far gone from being an innocent child without a care in the world. There's no way that Holden can go back to having that innocence as a child no matter how hard he tries to avoid adulthood.  I also saw a parallel between this scene and a line that Mr....

Some of you may remember reading  Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford in Freshmen English, but for those of you that either haven't read it or need a quick refresher, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet follows Henry Lee, a 12-year-old Chinese-American boy, as he develops a close bond with a Japanese-American girl named Keiko Okabe. However, the story takes place a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor so the government is prosecuting Japanese-Americans, including Keiko, and sending them to internment camps. Furthermore, Henry faces the challenge of keeping his relationship with Keiko hidden from his father who absolutely despises Japanese people.  Throughout the novel, Henry's coming of age process focuses on the dynamics of independence and dependence. Like any kid, Henry began by relying on his parents for most things and obeyed them even when he disagreed with what they told him to do. However, when Henry's father discovers pictures of Keiko ...