Reaction to “Expatriate Lifestyle as Tourist Destination: The Sun Also Rises and Experimental Travelogues of the Twenties”

The reading is a research paper evaluating the language and the value of Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.”

     The style of the reading is more in a profession manner than usual essays, which makes the paper trustworthy. However, it’s in effect hard to be read if readers haven’t read the book before. The writer used specific words like “gentle tourist” to explain or to indicate the image of Paris written under Hemingway’s hands. To be brief, this reading is a guide to Hemingway’s Paris, leading us to the world of Paris seen by Hemingway. It also evaluates how Hemingway taken on the scene with the use of fictional language.       

     From the reading, we know that “The Sun also Rises” can be considered as part of the tradition of travelogues. It’s not a novel but more like a travelogue describing the culture, life-style, and geography of Paris. Through this reading which leads us to the further understanding of the travelogue or be used as a quick overview of this book, readers are able to absorb the most appealing and important information of the book’s material. Pointing out the most valuable aspects in the book is the goal of a research paper.

     The success of a research paper is relied on its capacity to cover the best value of the work or object it explore. I haven’t read “The Sun also Rises,” but I got to have a look at its content in this reading. Another function of a research paper is to define the value or the success for the object it talks about. For instance, the paper says that Hemingway describes the fictional movement in this work as experiential travelogue.

    I started imagine the view of twenty-century Paris while I read the paper. I was attracted to its elegance and beauty among descriptions. It is interested that Paris was ever created by its American inhabitants and the part was then became one of the most popular places there. It’s amazing that language has the function of converting the scene we haven’t glanced to a vivid image.  

    Though usual people don’t usually think of travelogues at the moment when talking about literature, I look upon travelogues as one of the most difficult aspect of literature to be written well. The reason I think it is hard to write a travelogue is because of its unemotional trait. To write a novel, a write can create any kinds of roles by using a variety of adjunctions and get ideas from his or her life experience. Nonetheless, to make scenes appealing to be read and to endow the environment a vivid image is harder than have a character being attractive. Thus, the reading opened my eye to a wider world of literature. From the reading, I got more familiar not only with the content of “The Sun also Rises,” but also with the structure and tone of a research paper.

Compare and contrast of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “A clean, Well-Lighted Place”

     In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Hemingway’s “A clean, Well-Lighted Place,” we are given a chance to see the life of wealth, but lonely old-men. Both short stories take advantage of old men as the material to develop its plots.

     In Poe’s short story, we see how a mental-deteriorated man murder the old man whom he loved; in Hemingway’s short story, we see how people at different age react to the old and to their loneliness. No matter using old man as a victim to depict a distorted heart or setting old man as a discussed topic to disclose the problem of the old in the society, both authors depicted the characters through the eye of other tales.

    Though using the same material to develop stories, there is still a big difference between the two works. The most difference is, “The Tell-Tale” is composed in the way of monologue, while “A clean, Well-Lighted Place” is composed with multiple dialogues.

   “Dialogue generally distinguishes itself as pure, unfiltered, and straight from the source without a narrator to manipulate it (The Geometry of dialogue).” That is, dialogue plays a vital to form a story. Hemingway used dialogues between the young and the old waiters to explore and to concern the life of the old. The old waiter realizes the feeling of the old man, so he is patient to wait for him until three o’clock in the morning. Nonetheless, the young waiter thinks the old man as a stray. He wants the old man to leave the café as soon as possible because he has a wife waiting for him in the bed. He can’t realize why a rich man leads life in this way. What’s worse, he doesn’t want to know more about it. The old waiter is unwilling to to go home because he wants to provide other lonely old men a light and warm place. For him, it’s better to service people other than sleeping alone, but for the young waiter, nothing is warmer than being with people whom he loved. Hemingway concerned the old on the corner of the society through the voice of the old waiter. In the same time, he satirized those who treat the minority with indifference via the voice of the young waiter. He didn’t depict much in the plot, but he makes the theme of the story visible in dialogues. “To linger too long in the choppiness of dialogue disrupts the smoothly connected paragraph of the narrative (The Geometry of Dialogue).” I think it’s the reason why Hemingway makes the story a dense vignette. The proper use of dialogue not only attracts readers to follow the author’s thoughts, but also disclose the theme of the work in a proper way.

On the other hand, Poe didn’t use any dialogues in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” He used words to make depiction, to provide the details, and to study paranoia. For not confusing audience, he provided as many details as he could in the story. His languages lead us to the mental world of a paranoia victim. “In dialogues, characters are avoiding (and revealing through avoidance their true feelings) their true feelings (The Geometry of Dialogue).” If a novel is aim to describe certain traits or mental condition of a certain character, it’s better to have it taken on with descriptions instead of too many conversations, for the excessive dialogues will lead to misdirection.

 To heighten readers’ association with the murder’s image, Poe specified the objects which stand for the murder’s emotion: the old man’s blue-evil eye, the heartbeat, and his own claim to sanity. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is filled with economic style and pointed language, which contributes to the reliable explication of paranoia.

For most readers, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is harder than “A clean, Well-Lighted Place” to be read and be understood because of the lack of dialogue. In addition, Poe used more words to cultivate the atmosphere of the story and to talk about a tougher topic. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is about a man who suffers from paranoia; thus he killed the old man resulted from his incapability to bear his blue-evil eye. The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” even rationalizes his behavior by viewing his unusual sensitivity as excuse of his sanity. He doesn’t consider it as a symptom of madness. The most mocked part is that he killed the old man even though he loves him, which is another central contradiction to the story. Here Poe indicated a psychological mystery that people sometimes hurt those whom they love or is essential to them in their lives. The contradiction between the narrator’s love and resentfulness toward the old man makes a climax in the story. He separates the old man’s eyes from him because he wants to split his hatred toward the evil-like eyes and his love toward the old man. Thus, he murders the one whom he loved with love. To him, the death of the old man gives his love a space to breath. His desire to eliminate the man’s eyes provides him an impulse to his murder, but he himself does not look upon the result as the ending of the old man’s life. Not until the appearance of police officers does the narrator face his mistakes. The beating of his own heart is like the beating of the old man’s heart, hurting and torturing his mind.   

Both stories are thought-provoking, although they were taken on in such different way. I wallowed in Hemingway’s“A clean, Well-Lighted Place” because of his proper use of dialogue. The function of dialogue is to attract readers and to simplify a complex content. On the other side, it took me a while to understand the outline of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Without the attraction of the dialogue, readers must be more patient to figure out the why and how of the story.    

Home

It has been an exhausted week that I got so many things to do.
It seems like there's infinite things left with limited time.

However, I still went home this week. I always love going home.
Not until I started living alone did I realized how much was I protected and loved by my parents.
"We always don't know how much were we cherished until the real loneliness came."
The university  is so big, filled with many people. Yet sometimes we feel relatively lonely as we
stand in the crowd.

Stressed and busy, I got on YouTube and tried to find a song to comfort the weak mind.
I found a song that is extremely good-listening. I felt a string of warmth as I listened to it.
The song is called "home" expressed by Dierks Bentley. The melody is touching, and its lyric is inspiring!

"From the mountains high to the wave-crashed coast
 There's a way to find better days I know
  It's been a long hard ride, got a ways to go
  But this is still the place, that we all call home"

It says that no matter what day it is or where we are, there's always a place that we all call home.

Life is a roller coaster along with thrilling. Sometimes it is inevitably tough, but there's always a place  that we are able to consider it a harbor. 

For me, home is the best place to be. It is not constrained in the definition of family, but is looked upon as the place where we feel belonged to be. It supports our affection and helps us go through the ups and the downs. It gives us courage as we face our own vulnerability in front of the invisibility and danger of life.

  

Reaction to “A&P” and “Fire and Ice”

I think the story A&P by John Updike is a story talking about conflict, a conflict between the new thoughts and the conservative thoughts. The three girls in nothing but bathing suits stand for the new thoughts in current society while the manager stands for the conservative thoughts from the old society. Teenagers born in the new era are more open in some aspects, dressing, sex, or relationship. However, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who still honor the traditional conservation. It seems like Updike was satirizing the old thoughts in this story. He made the manager a stubborn man who doesn’t appreciate the new standard of beauty. The manager insulted the three girls and embarrassed them, which is not respectful for individual difference. Sammy, a worker in the store, is a guy who has his own ideas. However, he doesn’t have ability to take on the result after he conveyed what he thought. He stands out for the girls, but he in the end lost his job. I look upon A&P as an irony story because I saw the unfair in the plot. The three girls don’t need to be responsible for their indecent dress or their impolite words. They can still go home and eat their expensive snacks because they were born in richer families. In contrast, Sammy did a good thing but lost his job and got nothing. He felt helpless and lost after he did what he thought was right because his power is too small to convert the reality. I think it is a story satirizing those who don’t accept the new thoughts and those who are afraid of changing.          

A poem I chose to read is “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost. It says that the world would end in either ice or fire, from one’s desire. I think the ice and that fire is the hate and the love. We are alive because of the love, but we are also died of the hate. The thing we hate can be the destruction, so it is not about for destruction of ice of fire but is about for destruction of what we don’t like. I thought the poem is about science at the first time I read it. Nonetheless, I found that it is meaningful in the word fire and ice. Fire and ice are contrast. Some people like fire, so fire makes them alive; some people like ice, so ice stands for their life. It’s not about what cause us to be alive or what makes us to be dies. It’s more like we are alive due to the love and died because of the hate. There are no standards between ice and fire. It’s relative.