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Should We Be Sympathetic Towards Lee?

There’s been a lot of discussion in class recently about Lee’s character. Today we ended our class with the question to ponder: Are we sympathetic to Lee? Some people were saying that they feel bad for Lee because he can’t do anything right. Throughout the story he always seems sort of like a failure and this brings some humor to the plot but also makes Lee more of a three-dimensional person. One could argue that we should be sympathetic to Lee because he is left in the dark for the assassination plot and is being used by the other conspirators. He seems almost harmless in his personality because he screws up most things he tries to do. Also some bad things happen to Lee to make the reader feel empathy towards him. We see that Lee was bullied as a child and later was sexually assaulted by David Ferrie. Lee also lacks a strong role model and all of the father figures he looks up to end up manipulating, betraying, or hurting him. It is also possible to feel bad for Lee because he exp...
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A Very Believable Conspiracy

Recently I asked my parents what they thought about the government report on the JFK assassination. Neither of them think that it tells the whole story and I was interested to hear that my dad’s speculations lined up pretty well with what seems to be the current plan in Libra to try to kill JFK. My dad thinks a couple things could be possible including that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t work alone, was probably supposed to die before being taken into custody, and that Jack Ruby was sent by whatever group planned the assassination in order to kill Lee Harvey Oswald before he talked. Hearing him say what many other Americans believe, that the government report isn’t the whole story, and some of these pretty common conspiracy theories was interesting because they aren’t far from the conspiracies that DeLillo is putting forth. The difference is that when most people say these things they just are speculating and don’t put forth any facts but DeLillo frames the situation with what seems lik...
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Relationships Between Centuries

In our discussions in class we’ve touched a lot on the parallels between Alice and Dana and Rufus and Kevin. Not just how Alice and Dana are similar to each other and Rufus and Kevin are similar to each other, but how Alice and Rufus’s relationship is like a 19 th century version of Kevin and Dana’s relationship. Alice and Dana are quite similar in how they look and wear their hair, which is pointed out several times in the book, but also in the fact that they were both born free and then pushed into a life of slavery. They also both felt the need to escape from this new life they were pushed into, Dana by harming herself to return to the 20 th century and Alice by eventually hanging herself. Throughout Dana’s stay in the 1800s, she beings to see similarities between the Weylins and Kevin, the way that they talk or the color of their eyes, these similarities hint to her larger concern that Kevin will become like them if he stays on the plantation for too long. For Rufus, the onl...
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How to Cope Like Billy Pilgrim

In Slaughterhouse Five I was shocked to read that some of the Kilgore Trout books had similar plots to what Billy has been describing about his experiences on Tralfamadore. Throughout the whole reading and our discussions in class I had taken up front that Kurt Vonnegut was telling us that the alien abduction and Billy’s experiences on Tralfamadore were real within the context of the novel. At first it seemed clearly NOT real that there would be aliens in book but hearing that Billy Pilgrim was unstuck in time, and hearing the Tralfamadorian interpretation of time, the story started to add up and I began to believe it was real (in the story, probably not real life).             Once we were told about the book plots that followed the same storyline as Billy’s time in outer space, I felt kind of silly for just accepting Tralfamadore plotline as truth (honestly I wanted it to be real). But it was a truth of some sort, it may not ...
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Smooth Mumbo Jumbo

On Thursday in class Kat and I presented the article "Crossing Western Space, or the HooDoo Detective on the Boundary in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo" by Richard Swope. The group before us with Maggie, Sophia, and Irina talked about some similar ideas that our article had brought up, so the conversation connected well throughout the hour and I was hoping to continue that discussion here. Both groups talked about how Papa LaBas is like an unconventional detective in the way that he uses spiritual guidance of loas and his “knockings” to do detective work, whereas a typical Atonist detective would use hard evidence and scientific research. Also, as several people pointed out in class, he tended to accidentally find things/ have everything explained to him, which is not how usual detective stories work. To expand on the discussions in class, we talked about how Mumbo Jumbo is satirizing and almost directly confronting the ways that Atonists (or Western civilization in gene...
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