Justice

“Because I hated you so much, I studied you. I listened to everything you said; never missed a broadcast. Did you know that until this very moment, nothing would have delighted me more than to prove that you were a spy—to see you shot. Now, I couldn’t care less if you were a spy. Do you know why?”

“No”

“Because now I know that even if you were a spy, you could never serve the enemy as well as you served us. All of the ideals that made me proud of being a Nazi, they came not from Hitler…but from you. You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane.”

0:30:30

Campbell’s father-in-law tells this to him when Campbell goes to visit their home after the news arrives that Helga has died. Campbell realizes for the first time in the movie that his greatest enemies may be those that are very close or closely related to him. This realization proves to be painfully true near the end of the movie. 

The power of words is illustrated in this passage. Campbell's job as a propaganda writer for the Nazis was to write speeches that upheld the Nazi principles and views that would be broadcast on the radio for all to hear. However, his job as an American spy was to insert seemingly random pauses and coughs. The meaning of these he never understood, thus the secret messages he was sending out he himself did not know. For him, all he could know and control were the words. And being the talented writer that he was, his propaganda was extremely effective; later in the movie when he sees his speech replayed at a Nazi meeting, he is shocked by the brutality of his own words. He sees for himself the person that he was to the world minus four people, including himself. The words that he wrote for the Nazis were more powerful than any secret message that he was sending out. He informed a few military powers in America, but inspired every Nazi in Germany. It is at this point in the movie that he stops writing, having realized the terrifying power of his words. 

Campbell had only meant to do what he was told by his superiors. Write propaganda. Pause here. Cough here. However, his simple obedience of orders earned him credit of a portion of the six million humans killed throughout the war. It is this truth that his writings fueled and propelled the Nazi movement and Holocaust that leads him to turn himself in at the end and ultimately commit suicide--a justice he feels he deserved.

Q: What justice do you think Campbell deserved?

So Long Forever

            “The guards drew together instinctively, rolled their eyes. They experimented with one expression and then another, said nothing, though their moths were often open. They looked like a silent film of a barbershop quartet.

‘So long forever,’ they might have been singing, ‘old fellows and pals; So long forever, old sweethearts and pals—God bless ‘em—” (227)

The night of the bombing, Billy was hiding down in the underground meat locker with the other American prisoners of war. There were only four guards with them—only four guards that would be surviving the night.

Billy watches the guards as they, along with everyone else, wait in terror for the bombs to finish falling. The guards are at a loss of words, which is what ends up reminding Billy of the silent movie of a barbershop quartet; this illustrates the author’s initial warning from chapter one that there isn’t anything intelligent to say about a massacre.

This moment is preceded with a build up of different scenes of Billy and Valencia’s anniversary party, where Billy is overcome with uncontrollable tears when the barbershop quartet sings. In the moment he can’t understand why he’s so affected by the performance, but eventually he is able to look back and see that in his memory the destruction of Dresden is denoted by this image of a barbershop quartet silent film. Seeing four men with their mouths open reminds him too clearly of the four guards that night of the bombing that his emotions finally reveal his grief over the death and destruction of the war.

The awkwardness of the guards seems childish in the way that they roll their eyes and experiment in trying to find the right facial expression for such a moment. They don’t know the words to say, the feelings to express, and in their ignorance they find the innocence and vulnerability that comes with war during times of mass and imminent death. This again references the subtitle of this novel, The Children’s Crusade. Vonnegut portrays this moment through not the use of words that incite emotions of danger and fear but through a comparison to a barbershop quartet singing “So long forever” in a silent film; he thus creates the perfect atmosphere for a truer understanding of what war does to men.

Q: This is one of the few times that Billy is presenting a memory purely as a memory rather than a time-traveled experience. What is the significance of this specific event being remembered “shimmeringly” rather than just another time jump?

Mania

Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that, in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, life is a joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. (283)

            Lolita was always the prized doll of a possession that Humbert sought to keep and store away forever. Throughout the book he had been obsessed with keeping her to himself and away from everyone else, trying to preserve, in a sense, her nymphet-ness. However, in this passage, as reality begins to fall together in front of him, Humbert realizes that Lolita—or Dolores Haze, rather—was not just a fantasy, not just a wish he couldn’t keep, not just a sex toy. She was a child with a soul and spirit that, in being isolated with the perverted HH, was twisted and left devoid of true love and hope. His preoccupation with her as a thing left her disregarded as a person. Previously in the novel, Humbert always focused only on objectifying Lolita rather than understanding her, and while he did drop notes here and there on Lolita’s personality, they seemed to be brushed off as only nuisances. In the same way that Humbert had turned a blind eye to his own flaws, he never acknowledged (or at least was always reluctant to acknowledge) Lolita’s fatal flaw: she was a person, Dolores Haze, with a life to live and that would neither forever fall to his coercion nor stay preserved in her nymphet shell. But here he does admit to being flawed (in his putrefaction) as well as acknowledge his role in the destruction of Dolores’ childhood, proving that he at last has some self awareness of his actions. He sees this as an undeniable fact, and with it comes the pain and chaos of emotion (and possibly guilt, though the reader can only hope) as reality hits him hard enough to leave him shocked at the ugliness and imperfection of the truth that he had so long hidden away under his madness.

This passage shows HH’s revelation of the novel’s theme of obsession as a blinder of men. The title “maniac” is inflicted on Humbert himself and he states that in being such a maniac he has caused irreversible and eternally staining damage and deprivation. He also says that in order to relieve the misery of this revelation, he must create something of it in art. This seems a bit ironic in that to create such a piece of art, one must relive and reevaluate everything that happened and apply creativity to fantasy where needed—an act that seems to further obsession rather than to cure it. However, this perspective on the way that art can be used to excuse some of the uglier things in life explains Humbert's illustration of this tale in the way that he tells it. He constructs this story so that he can be forgiven, thus ensuring a telling that portrays him as a romantic, sympathetic, and beautiful soul. For this reason, the benefit of the doubt is kept away from the words as the reader goes through the novel, and much of the smear between reality and artistic creation is questioned by the spectators. 

           

Q: How do you think things might have been different if Lolita was never able to escape from Humbert?

Olivia Lin

:) BRAVE NEW WORLD 2

            “And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow tow or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is.”(213)

            Mustapha Mond is explaining to John the wonders of soma and its benefits to society. He says that this drug is a large part of what makes everyone happy now and that life is simply better without the nuisances of negative feelings such as anger, jealousy, and impatience. However, John refuses to accept this and sees soma as nothing more than a leash forced onto humanity by the governors of this society.

Soma has become the Brave New World society’s religion. It fulfills all the roles of religion in society. It provides something to rely on in any time of need. It is the answer to all of life’s mysteries and problems. It is also a major tool of control used against the society. This passage lays out the connection between religion and control as well as shows the way that the Brave New World society has utilized technology to engineer a religion that is just as, if not more, effectively available and “worship-able” as Christianity. Truly, it is “Christianity without tears” (and almost everything else).

            This passage blatantly illustrates the way the essences of humanity have been erased in this mass-produced society. Throughout the novel, it had already been established that individuality was the first to go when this societal reform started. With the introduction of soma, honest feelings, virtue, and morality were also erased. While Mustapha claims that this is the solution to society’s problems, John rejects it and believes that the sincere contrast of pain and pleasure, happiness and despair, is more desirable than this life-duller. There is no longer any morality but soma, no other consolation but soma. In a way, soma is the physical manifestation of the stability that this society seeks and achieves. It is a stability that means neither true happiness nor sadness and is too superficial to understand the potential and beauty of the soul.

Brave New World 1

“‘I want to look at the sea in peace…It makes me feel as though… I were more me, if you see what I mean. More on my own, no so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell in the social body. Doesn’t it make you feel like that, Lenina?’

But Lenina was crying… ‘How can you talk like that about not wanting to be a part of the social body? After all, every one works for every one else. We can’t do without anyone. Even Epsilons…’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Bernard derisively. ‘“Even Epsilons are useful”! So am I. And I damned well wish I weren’t! … What would it be like if I…were free—not enslaved by my conditioning.’” (90)

In this scene Bernard is letting out emotions that have been pent up and torturing him to Lenina, a girl who happens to also be a little different from everyone else. However, he overestimates this difference, as Lenina is only very slightly able to think and act away from the norm. This scene really points out the dystopia of the novel because Lenina’s reaction is so strange and different from what a girl’s typical reaction would be were Bernard in our society. When someone opens up to another person this much (in our society), it is an indication of trust; an expected reaction would be sympathy or inspiration. However, Bernard receives only the conditioned disgust of Lenina. Furthermore, this is the first time in the novel that anyone talks like a real human being rather than a robot or twisted mad scientist, and all Lenina manages to do is repeat her conditioning. The contrast of such raw honesty and rigid repetition brings out the frustration of a soul trying to emerge in a society that tries to suck it away.

Conformity and sameness make up the essence of the Brave New World society. Because there are no individuals, there are no problems. There is always a solution because no one has unique problems. In this passage, Bernard is wishing for what is obviously missing: individuality. He puts an interesting twist on it in this passage, though; he compares the societal system to slavery. In this perspective, it seems undeniable that the citizens are truly mindless slaves forced from birth into jobs and mindsets. Bernard wants to be more than a part of a whole, not one of a million but one in a million. He wants to escape the purpose of being useful in order to find a purpose of his own. However, his wishes can never be fulfilled because, as this passage illustrates perfectly, morals can be defined and molded by society and its controllers; thus, Bernard’s feelings are deemed immoral and punishable. Huxley frighteningly proves that the Brave New World society can be possible because of the subjectivity of morals.

Q: Is a life you cannot control, being brainwashed and conditioned, worth living at all? 

--Olivia Lin

Summer

The Bluest Eye: Summer

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved.”

Throughout the novel, we see each of the characters look to define love. Could it be the passion of lust, the feeling of care in sickness, or the approval of onlookers? In this final statement on love, it is explained that a definition for true love can never be found because love is so ambiguous. While typically love is portrayed as a positive, healing emotion, it is explained here that love will be only as compassionate as the person. It can be as equally degrading as it is inspiring in the same way that people can be equally supportive or destructive. In the case of Cholly Breedlove, he loved Pecola but because he was a violent and immoral man, his love towards her was violent and immoral.

This quote also presents the idea that mere love could not have saved any of the relationships in the Breedlove family. Broken souls cannot be mended simply because of a love that exists between family members. The quote explains that love does not automatically come with “gifts,” since everything lies in the virtue of the lovers; without supportive investment in each other, or any belief that such investment would be worthwhile, love will never be redemptive. It also says that “the love of a free man is never safe,” referring to Cholly. His freedom is again stained with danger as his love towards both Pauline and Pecola oscillates violently between tender passion and unrestrained anger. This leaves the reader with the impression that perhaps there were not crimes of hatred and discrimination committed between the characters but crimes of hopelessly torn love.

Q: Why does Pecola’s imaginary friend say that Pecola did not need her before she got her blue eyes?

Olivia Lin