This is Gary’s special edition Thanksgiving blog!
Note: For this this blog entry, I will speak…sorry…Gary will speak of himself in the third person.
Note (again): Addressing myself in third person was extremely tiresome, so I gave up. Just wanted you to know that I was going to do it.
Love in the time of Cholera is an uplifting, wonderful story about the delights of first and true love…not. It’s depressing and frightening…and quite dark. It appears to be about the neverending hope and eternal happiness supplied by true love, but in reality we soon discover that it faithfully describes neverending hope… and the subsequent neverending hopelessness. Instead of filling our hearts with hope of a chance for true and unimaginable, unrealistic love, it smashes our dreams and tears our hope into shreds with it’s sudden shift to the stereotype of realistic love and marriage. Never has the void in me that I sometimes pretend holds emotion and sentimentality been torn as it was by Fermina’s rejection of Florentino.
It’s not so much that I felt for Florentino as I felt for myself. I had committed hours of my time to reading the hundred or so pages that led up to this event. I had invested my time, which could have been spent playing FIFA or Guitar Hero, in this book believing that I was working toward a final solution to this fifty page obsession that was Florentino and Fermina’s verbal fling, but I was wrong. Dead wrong. Or very seriously wrong, at least.
I know that the book started at the end of Urbino’s life and that we knew that Fermina and the doctor get together but I didn’t know it happened like this. When so many tragic stories end with forced marriage breaking up a physical connection but leaving an eternal love intact, I didn’t expect this one to break apart in a sudden change of heart on the behalf of the hot girl. That’s not uplifting. That is devastating. Yes, devastating (and I mean the total destruction, nothing left, nuclear winter, Sherman’s march to the sea devastating). Who cares if the star-crossed lover is devastated. I am devastated. All of my attention and effort was wasted on an ending that I would have guessed from the get go. My outlook on life was not changed by Fermina’s rejection. It was sadly confirmed. If every story ended like this one, glasses would always be served half empty and the terrorists would probably be waiting for me at home.
I mean the happy ending is an archetype for a reason. Real life ends like this book does. And real life sucks. Why would I waste my actual life reading about a realistic ending. I could just watch the news. Go on, call it great literature. I call a perversion of the human spirit.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Friday, November 2, 2007
La Familia
The Compson family disintegrates because of one reason. Every single member of the family fails to live up to the expectations of their role within the family setting. Every single member fails to do their duty and sacrifice for the survival of the family. They are all too selfish, in their own particular ways, to give up their pride and beliefs and be what the family needs them to be.
I’ll start with the parents. Mother is terrible. She does not at all resemble her namesake and does not fulfill any of her position’s requirements. It’s ridiculous. I do not feel that I even have to state any evidence to support the fact that she is selfish and does not sacrifice anything for well-being of her children or her family. She treats Benjy as an embarrassment and a trouble. We could not expect a stranger to show less compassion than Mother shows towards Benjy. She had no business becoming a mother and would be a far more suitable candidate for a high-class call girl than a home-maker or a family woman.
Her favoritism towards Jason is also beyond reason and propriety. Parents are not supposed to pick favorites. That’s a given, but it’s the real world and I can’t expect every action of every parent to be unbiased. Mother’s preferential treatment of Jason is so blatant that it has become a weapon that mother uses against her family and her husband. Her favoritism for Jason also displays her lack of judgement as Jason is nothing but a bitter little stool-pidgeon anyway. Mother’s support of this cowardly, base behavior does not help the situation either.
Father is also flawed. He is detached and aloof from the needs of his children. When his children need guidance and personal reassurance—as in the case of Quentin—he offers only his often pessimistic or fatalistic opinion. Sometimes, his children need to hear a certain thing, and he offers them only an extremely limited and in some cases harsh point of view. However, he is not harsh in the discipline of his children. In fact, his forgiveness of Caddy is admirable and very compassionate but he seems out of touch with the emotional needs of all his children—Quentin in particular. He forgoes his responsibility to console all of his children and instead sticks to his logic and pessimistic disposition when confronting his family. He also fails to take control of the situation—in this case the Caddy predicament--and be strong for his family. Instead, he drowns his sorrows in whiskey and abandons his responsibility as leader of the household. He forgets the problems of the family and, in a selfish way, concerns himself only with his grievances and turmoils.
The children also contribute to the family’s demise. Each child acts selfish in his or her own way. Caddy’s initial affair with Dalton Ames, although not evil, still begins the selfish trend. She, whether consciously or not, rejects her role in the family and focuses on her own life and passions. It may not be a malicious decision but in a family environment as fragile as the Compson’s, it was a tragic choice with dire consequences. She is then forced to abandon the family when she marries. Quentin, in his own way, also decides not to sacrifice his concept of honor for the good of the family and in turns runs away from his problems, whether real or imaginary, by killing himself. He also abandons the family in this way. Jason, on the other hand, does not physically abandon the family. His providing for the family after the death of Quentin and Father are to be commended, but he has long abandoned the family in an emotional sense. He does not make any effort to emotionally rebuild the shattered lives of his brother, sister or her daughter.(648)
I’ll start with the parents. Mother is terrible. She does not at all resemble her namesake and does not fulfill any of her position’s requirements. It’s ridiculous. I do not feel that I even have to state any evidence to support the fact that she is selfish and does not sacrifice anything for well-being of her children or her family. She treats Benjy as an embarrassment and a trouble. We could not expect a stranger to show less compassion than Mother shows towards Benjy. She had no business becoming a mother and would be a far more suitable candidate for a high-class call girl than a home-maker or a family woman.
Her favoritism towards Jason is also beyond reason and propriety. Parents are not supposed to pick favorites. That’s a given, but it’s the real world and I can’t expect every action of every parent to be unbiased. Mother’s preferential treatment of Jason is so blatant that it has become a weapon that mother uses against her family and her husband. Her favoritism for Jason also displays her lack of judgement as Jason is nothing but a bitter little stool-pidgeon anyway. Mother’s support of this cowardly, base behavior does not help the situation either.
Father is also flawed. He is detached and aloof from the needs of his children. When his children need guidance and personal reassurance—as in the case of Quentin—he offers only his often pessimistic or fatalistic opinion. Sometimes, his children need to hear a certain thing, and he offers them only an extremely limited and in some cases harsh point of view. However, he is not harsh in the discipline of his children. In fact, his forgiveness of Caddy is admirable and very compassionate but he seems out of touch with the emotional needs of all his children—Quentin in particular. He forgoes his responsibility to console all of his children and instead sticks to his logic and pessimistic disposition when confronting his family. He also fails to take control of the situation—in this case the Caddy predicament--and be strong for his family. Instead, he drowns his sorrows in whiskey and abandons his responsibility as leader of the household. He forgets the problems of the family and, in a selfish way, concerns himself only with his grievances and turmoils.
The children also contribute to the family’s demise. Each child acts selfish in his or her own way. Caddy’s initial affair with Dalton Ames, although not evil, still begins the selfish trend. She, whether consciously or not, rejects her role in the family and focuses on her own life and passions. It may not be a malicious decision but in a family environment as fragile as the Compson’s, it was a tragic choice with dire consequences. She is then forced to abandon the family when she marries. Quentin, in his own way, also decides not to sacrifice his concept of honor for the good of the family and in turns runs away from his problems, whether real or imaginary, by killing himself. He also abandons the family in this way. Jason, on the other hand, does not physically abandon the family. His providing for the family after the death of Quentin and Father are to be commended, but he has long abandoned the family in an emotional sense. He does not make any effort to emotionally rebuild the shattered lives of his brother, sister or her daughter.(648)
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