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Lee Being Smart and Dumb and a Little Annoying

Lee Harvey Oswald as depicted in Libra , written by Don DeLillo, is a tough character to pinpoint. I started off feeling bad for him in the beginning with how he seemed like a little wimpy kid with big beliefs. Even in the first few chapters when he was around middle school age, he was said to be “not afraid to stand up for his rights” (DeLillo 47). This was said after he brought a broken gun to be repaired, but the mechanic didn’t even take a look at it for 5 weeks. Poor Lee goes and decides to stand up for himself. I found this scene a little silly that Lee viewed the inaction by the mechanic as an infringement upon his right to bear arms, but it’s shown in a sort of endearing way like the kind of feeling one gets when a toddler gets mad when you take something from them. Lee doesn’t change much in his self righteous fight for his political viewpoints/rights. When he’s with Alpha-66, he says that he got sent to jail for “politics. Just like Fidel” (293). The true reason though was th...
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Nature vs. Nurture in Kindred

  One of the difficult things about Kindred is how much of Rufus’s character development was inevitable. Dana from the beginning once she realizes that Rufus is her ancestor attempts to influence him to become a better person that isn’t racist. One of the ways she tries to change his mindset is by asking him to call her “black or negro or even colored” (Butler 61). She then tries to explain the vulgarness of the n-word by comparing it to the example of white trash, but it’s not clear if Rufus fully understood it. Later on, Dana is warned by one of the slaves that Rufus “can turn mean mighty quick” (68). This behavior is explained in conjunction with his father’s temper, which implies that Rufus learned this behavior from his dad or had somehow inherited it from him. One of the frequent questions that gets brought up is nature vs. nurture. A strong example of the interplay between nature and nurture is with the will of slaves. Slave breakers were employed to break the spirits of sla...
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Jes Grew and Cultural Appropriation

  Jes Grew is an amorphous idea that plays a key role in Ishmael Reed’s book Mumbo Jumbo . I interpreted its modern variation as the emergence and infiltration of non-white non-Christian forms of expression into the mainstream. One of the first examples we are given of Jes Grew is Jazz. Jazz originated in New Orleans, a city with a large black population. New Orleans also importantly has practitioners of voodoo. Voodoo contrasts with the monotheistic beliefs of Atonists with followers of voodoo believing in many different Loas for individual purposes. Mumbo Jumbo also attacks the notion of keeping other people’s culturally significant artifacts in museums. This idea manifests itself with the Mu’tafikah who steal back from “private collections of Europe and America” (Reed 63). The popularization of alternative practices and backlash against current systems alarms the Atonists in the Wallflower Order, so they begin a plan to exterminate Jes Grew.  Mambo Jumbo deconstructs Euroce...
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The Upper Class in Ragtime

  Ragtime written by Doctorow E.L. Doctorow explores the almost forgotten time period of the early 1900s. From the various threads present throughout the storym one thing remains constant: the rich being presented with irony. Doctorow shows the United States being in an interesting state where the rich “honor the poor” (Doctorow 34). The narrator describes how the rich decorate their poverty balls to look like the mines. They participate in these poverty balls to raise money for the poor, yet at the same time they need poor people to live in bad conditions to continue this form of entertainment. The tone of the passage shows the irony such as the way Doctorow writes about how the “bloody beef trailed around the walls on moving pulleys” and then ends this vivid description with “the proceeds were for charity” (35). While the tone doesn’t imply any sort of bias towards the descriptions, the way Doctorow ends the descriptions of the rich pretending to be poor with “the proceeds were f...
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