The Harsh Reality

  We all like to fool ourselves into being someone we are not. Every day, we take on many different roles – a stressed student, an all-star athlete, and a perfect child. Yet, we never realize that we end up trapping ourselves into this perfect reality that we’ve created. Perhaps Art Spiegelman felt the same way when he realized where Maus had led him. In part 1 of Maus, Artie is simply interested in learning more about his father’s past and what he went through, but part 2 is starkly different. In this part, Artie begins to realize that Vladek’s story, along with the stories of the millions of Jews that went through the Holocaust, was not his story to tell. On page 41, Artie is depicted sitting at a drawing desk placed upon a pile of dead Jews. This image shows how the drawing easel, the same one that he created the first book on and is the stem of his success, now rested on the deaths of those Jews. It also demonstrates how Artie’s depictions of Vladek’s story were inevitably bury...

Sometimes, we don’t realize just how much we hold on to the past. It follows us every minute of our lives, until we begin to live around it – like we, or rather we of the present - are guests in the bodies of our past. One specific man who embodies this idea would have to be Mr. Vladek Spiegelman. In particular, on page 81 of chapter 4 in Maus part 1, Vladek rides his standstill bicycle as he converses with Artie about his past, in particular when he wanted to give Richieu away for his [Richieu] safety. At the bottom of the page, the author includes an interesting series of images of Vladek peddling slowly at first, then speeding up while standing, and then stopping. Most people stand on a bike when they attempt to go faster, however, when Vladek begins speeding up, he says “but his son remained alive; ours did not” (81).   This clever use of the speed of the bike shows off how Vladek is attempting to speed up the memories of losing his son, along with all the other trauma that he ...

In the many years that I have been alive, I have read my fair share of non-fiction – from stories that brought forth tears of sympathy to those that have made me clench my fists and grind my teeth in frustration. Yet, I have been stunned to silence by Lynn Nottage’s play “Sweat”. It seems The New Yorker’s description of Nottage as having “built a career on making invisible people visible” is a rather accurate statement, and she displays her ideas post prominently in her play “Sweat”. As background for those who have never read it, “Sweat” follows the lives of ordinary people and their struggles as they experience a variety of modern-day problems, including unemployment, drug abuse, and violence against each other. The very first thing to notice is that Nottage’s people of focus are all those who are ordinary. Each person is struggling in their own way: Brucie and his drug addiction, Cynthia and Chris looking to gain a better future, and the others, who find themselves stuck in the past...

 I think, now, more than ever, reality sucks. Everything seems really hard. Ever since COVID, things have begun changing, and not for the better. I want to look at this in a different way, however. It seems that we have all also grown from the experiences that we have been through in the past few years. I think, somewhere along these lines at least, was what Langston Hughes was trying to convey through his poem ‘Mother to Son’. Hughes utilizes the phrase “crystal stair” to add some emphasis towards how life, for some people, is a simple climb. They walk up the stairs and reach whatever goal they are attempting to. On the other hand, Hughes emphasizes how the narrator’s own staircase “had tacks in it, and splinters, and boards torn up” to offer the perspective of someone who hasn’t had it as easy. The narrator has been through many hardships throughout her life, which is displayed by how worn down her staircase is. Yet, when she speaks to her son, she mentions that she has “been cli...

Hello again! It seems my obsession with The Great Gatsby has taken a rather interesting turn: fan fiction. Honestly, I don’t know how to feel about this one, so I’ll leave you to be the judge of it!   Tom ground his teeth, willing the order of the king, of his father, to be untrue. As the eldest, and only, prince of the kingdom, he had no choice but to obey his king’s latest orders, orders that included an arranged marriage to the perfect, golden girl. To Princess Daisy Fay. Only the best of the best for the best. Beside him, Nick struggled to hold in his laugh. Of course, he was to marry Nick’s cousin. The only problem with this whole arrangement was the stupid courtesan. The young lady who, Nick very well knows, would throw a fit beyond belief if she found out about this new development. This must have been a fitting punishment then for what he’d done with that lady. “Serves you right for the way you’ve treated Lady Myrtle. Now you get the privilege of marrying a woman no o...

Hello! I am once again here to whine about The Great Gatsby, and while I think talking about how rich kids have severe parental issues is cool, I don’t exactly think I have an opinion about that (sorry Annabella).  Let’s be real – if I could grow up filthy rich, with the condition being that I see my parents once a year, I would take it. Instead, I want to talk about Gatsby. I get that, in the story, Gatsby is supposed to be the hero, but I prefer to think of him as a second lead - the one who went from rags to riches, who almost got the girl, then had everything ripped out of his reach. Obviously, this would make Tom the main character of the story and while the man is despicable, I don’t think I would mind too much.   At the end of the story, it’s again Tom who gets Daisy, not Gatsby, despite everything he sacrificed for her. In fact, I was glad that Daisy ended up with Tom. Fitzgerald really emphasized the idea that the past is the past. Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship ...

Ok, let’s talk for a second. I was reading the Great Gatsby on a Saturday night-like most people with any ounce of brain matter do-when I came across a peculiar refence to “the valley of ashes”. The first time I read it, my mind assumed that Nick was mentioning the city of New York, describing it as dark and gloomy. His reference of Doctor TJ Eckleburg’s eyes on a billboard solidified those beliefs. In reality, it turns out that Nick was employing the tool of irony. The nineteenth century was the center of the industrialization movement and the color of ashes-grey-represented the dust from the factories. You could even look at it from a different perspective – a valley is located between two mountains. The mountains, in the case of The Great Gatsby, reference the filthy rich of society including Nick, Daisy, Jordan, Tom, and Gatsby himself. The valley on the other hand represented the working class. The people who worked the factories, and the factories that made it a “valley of ashes”...