Several of our works this week portray significant or complex relationships between characters. Choose one that stood out to you as particularly moving or engaging. Describe the relationship and explain its personal resonance with you.
The most intriguing relationship between characters for me was the relationship between the persona and his father in the reading My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Roethke. The relationship between these two characters moved me most since it depicted the amount of love and the bond between these two characters. The persona is a young boy who is up late just to spend time with his drunken father. Despite his father’s foul whiskey breath, he decides to dance with him whilst his ears getting scrapped and getting beat down by his father’s rough hands (Roethke, 1961). As the father dances him to bed, he still clings to his shirt showing the love the character has towards his father no matter his sobriety state.
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Research one of this week's authors and tell us what about his or her biography struck you as being reflective of issues in the work. Be sure to cite all biographical information you report.
Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, Blonde is a fiction novel which is largely considered as Marylin Monroe’s biography. This biography struck me as Oates takes a bold path to understand the character of Marylin Monroe who was largely misunderstood by many. The novel is remarkable in the way it paints Monroe’s image in a fiction yet real manner revealing her inner struggles away from the camera life everyone knew. Oates views Monroe as an influential actress who was incapacitated and put through torture in a masculine world that coveted and despised her body both at the same time (Oates, 2017).
Post-modern work is sometimes ambiguous. In O'Brien's story, we meet a soldier who goes AWOL- he leaves his post and a squad of men is sent to find him. How do you think this story ends based on what you see in this short excerpt? What clues can you tease out of the chapter to give an indication of where this story might be headed?
Towards the end of the novel, the squad appears to be closing in on Cacciato whose name ironically means “hunted” in Italian. I think this story ends with the death of Cacciato whom the squad comprised of Paul Berlin was pursuing after he ran away from his post. This is from the clue in the novel when Johnson orders Berlin to carry the rifle into Cacciato’s room to “neutralize the target” but Berlin walks into Cacciato’s room and falls after firing several shots into the darkness. The story goes back to the present time but still leaves the clue/impression that Cacciato is dead.
O'Brien's work focuses on Cacciato before he becomes AWOL. Therefore, you are tasked with 'guessing' about what happens next after reading this short section. If you prefer, you can focus on why Cacciato says this at the end of the story: "You will. You got a terrific sense of humor"
Cacciato had been a soldier longer than Berlin and therefore had more experience in this field. When Billy Boy accidentally steps on a land mine ripping off his foot, he later dies from a sudden heart attack according to Doc Peret and Berlin cannot stop thinking about his death. The more he tries to forget, the harder it becomes. The other soldiers, however, resume their business and sing humorous songs about Billy and this is when Cacciato offers a pack of his favorite gum to Berlin saying these words. He says these words because it was only through humor that the soldiers could deal with the horrors they constantly encountered in Vietnam (O'Brien, 2009).
References;
Oates, J. (2017). Blonde . Hopewell, New Jersey: Ecco Press.
O'Brien, T. (2009). Going after Cacciato . New York: Crown/Archetype.
Roethke, T. (1961). My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke . Poetry Foundation . Retrieved 8 August 2017, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43330/my-papas-waltz
