Would You Walk Away from Omelas?

     The story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" brought around an age-old ultimatum between the common good of society that comes at a highly unethical cost. Omelas is a utopian town of peace and happiness, the ideal place for any person, where the people are educated, sophisticated, and refined. However this profound happiness is not free by any means, and comes at a costly price that may not seem very noticeable or grotesque, but can also be viewed as obscene and disturbing. The fact that a child has to be sacrificed to a life of torture and sadness is pitiful, and shows that Omelas truly isn't filled with the best people in the world. Yes, its an easy decision to say that one life isn't as valuable as one million, but something that makes a society prosper is nationalism, or a sense of unity. People need to see the nation they're a part of as a family, where each they've never met is part of their collective family.
     This is something that I think makes our country great. Forget the numbers, economic charts, and military statistics; a society's strength and well-being is measured by the unity of their citizens. Which is why i think if the USA were like Omelas, I honestly believe a vast majority would "walk away". As seen through the recent tragedies such as the Boston Marathon incident, it is shown that people are willing to risk their safety for people they don't even know, instead of just living their life safely. The fact that it seemed like there was an even amount of people running into the rubble to save people as there was running away in fear, shows the integrity and bravery our country holds. That's why I still believe that our country is the greatest, despite economic recessions and relapses. 'Merica.
     Its a hard decision that would be made. Whether to live life peacefully and be happy, or to make a stand to the inhumane actions that occur. I feel like I would be able to say no to Omelas and travel into the unknown, but it is much easier said than done. I just wanted to talk about how I thought that at the end of the day Omelas is not a Utopia, due to their acceptance and cooperation with such tragic consequences. I would like to think under the circumstances, our society would protest and leave as well, but who really knows.

Foreshadowing the Shadows of Connie's Life

For this blog post, I wanted to talk about the story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”. This story contains a much darker-tone and somber plot progression, as this mysterious man named Arnold consistently freaks out Connie more and more as the story moves along. For this post, I wanted to concentrate on the flashy gold car, and how it is a symbol of Arnold himself.

For starters, this gold car is extremely over-the-top looking, and gives Connie some warning signals that there maybe some mysterious danger surrounding Arnold. She said that the color of the car blinds her and makes her eyes hurt, maybe a correlation to how Arnold makes her feel dizzy and uncomfortable. Another characteristic of the car that relates to Arnold himself is that the car is kind of old and outdated with the slogans/sayings written on the sides. For example, the phrase “Man the Flying Saucers” is on the front fender, which was a saying her friends used to say, but has become “old” as society would put it. To me this relates to how Arnold is probably much older than Connie, even though he wouldn’t say his real age. Arnold refers to the car as a way of transportation for Connie to enter her new post-abduction life, whatever that may entail. This makes the car and everything about it, gain a negative aura, and make it a symbol for everything that is bad about Arnold.

I think Connie should’ve known from the beginning, once she saw the gold car, that this was extremely bad news. What really hurt Connie and made her get into the mess she did, was the fact that she was too nice. I know she didn’t show interest in Arnold, or lead him on in anyway, but she could have just ran away, notified the police or someone, and avoided her problems. Maybe this was a classic ironic example of the “nice guys always finish last” mantra used by the author, Joyce Carol Oates.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the stories we read, although always involve our themes of Lust, the Gaze, Beauty, etc., also feature a nice satirical commentary about an aspect of society. Whether it was the story about Communist China, or in Barbie-Q, where it is shown how people in our society crave unnecessary material possession, it seems most of our stories focus on another sub-lying theme of society, but I heavily digress. I just wanted to talk about the car in this story, and how re-reading the story let me see how the car gave foreshadowing clues to the fact that Arnold was bad news. Also the fact that Connie could’ve just ignored the creepy man, or tried to escape her doom. However, instead we are just left with the definition of an open ending, where we have no idea what happens to Connie, or what is to become of her “new life”.

Gimpel the Wise

"Gimpel the Fool" was definitely a unique read based on the norm that is the short story. To make a short story shorter, it basically involved a man named Gimpel, a pacifist who believed everything that everyone said, knowing full well that he'd be "tricked" by the townspeople. Instead of making it an argument, he just always falls into a trap of getting fooled, even though he knew what was going on. After the first time reading, the story almost seemed atypical for the norm of sending a positive message, whereas instead it basically portrays that ignoring bullies and being afraid to stand up for yourself will only lead to bad news. We are all always brought up to be the bigger person because it will work out in the long run, but in this story Gimpel never really gets his the ends that would justify the means.
However, when I read it again, I noticed a certain passage that contradicts this. When he visits the Rabbi, he says "It is written, better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil. You are not a fool. They are the fools. For he who causes his neighbor to feel shame loses Paradise himself." These words by the Rabbi send an extremely inspirational message. This stood out to me, and kind of hit home that topic that is taught to us from both our teachers and parents. That bullies are the real fools, regardless of their so-called "power" over their victims. I was wondering why author Isaac Bashevis Singer would convey this message, until i read a mini-bio about him and found that he is from Warsaw, Poland and emigrated to the United States just a few short years before they were invaded by Nazi-Germany. This story must've been used as a medium to say that bullying gives no real gratification, a proverb that he himself has already realized through past experiences.
The fact that Gimpel repeatedly plays along into the traps of the townspeople, must be a metaphor for the fact that the Jews during the time had no choice of whether they were bullied/terrorized or not. These hidden messages encased in almost every short story we read, are what makes each one different yet similar, but still interesting and enjoyable. Gimpel the Fool was one of my favorites, so it was nice to kinda dive deeper into researching what's behind the writing of the story, even more in-depth than our awesome class discussions. (:

Reading into Cisneros in Barbie-Q

            Albeit assigned a long time ago, Barbie-Q was definitely one of the more enjoyable stories in the plethora of our collection built up over the semester. I liked the realistic relatable-ity it held, but still had uniqueness that separated it and made it impacting. I liked how Cisneros used the theme of, “Beauty” we’ve for so long discussed, through the eyes of a little girl and her passion for her Barbie Dolls. The protagonist was atypical of the normal materialistic person, as they were very poor. Yet they still desired simple luxuries over anything important. I wondered why Cisneros chose such a feminine topic and item to use in her story, and found that in most of her stories she uses the theme of feminism and feminine identity. I found it cool how she used Beauty within the eyes a feministic standpoint; it really made clear what she wanted to say, in such an effective way.

            I wondered why she emphasized feminism so deeply, because I figured there must be something in her past. So I checked online (yes on Wikipedia) and found that she was very excluded as a child, especially for being a girl. For example, her father would always refer to her and her brothers as 6 sons and 1 girl, instead of just 7 children. It is clear that Cisneros uses real-life memories and experiences to shape the direction and literary themes she navigates through.

            This helped shine through the realistic-ness of the story. Every “story” that we read is just a literary interpretation of an authors tone and style, based on experience and memories. We analyze the themes and symbols that they use in order to decode their messages. The funny thing with Beauty as a theme however, is that the concept of beauty truly in the eyes of the beholder, as the famous proverb states. In some cases, such as in this story and “The Necklace”, touched upon in my first blog post, the goal is non-essential materialistic items. However in both cases the characters should be spending their money on more worthwhile things, since the family in Barbie-Q is poor, and The Necklace family ends up poor saving up to pay for it back. I just thought it would be interesting the two different styles of both authors, Cisneros and Maupassant. Although they have different goals, styles, themes, and symbols, they both portray it through the same concept of materialistic beauty giving happiness more valuable then any thought-to-be necessary resource. Hope this post wasn’t too boring…!

Trevor 

G.O.O.D. Country People

Out of the two O'Connor stories we read, Good Country People really stood out to me. It was an interestingly shocking story to say the least... going from a perfectly reasonable story with no rising action, to an intense climax that ends in a legless woman who failed to be seduced by a bible salesman, had her prosthetic leg stolen by him. Part of that really spoke to me though. This was that the only villainous antagonist in the story was supposed to be this "good ole" country boy “that went to Sunday School and that read the Bible every evening. He was now nineteen years old and he had been selling 5 Bibles for four months. In that time he had sold seventy-seven Bibles and had the promise of two more sales. He wanted to become a missionary because he thought that was the way you could do most for people. “He who losest his life shall find it,” he said simply and he was so sincere, so genuine and earnest that Mrs. Hopewell would not for the world have smiled.” (O’Connor 4-5) At first I thought it might have been O'Connor displaying her feelings about certain religious views. So I decided to do some further research on her to see what her past was like. I checked Wikipedia’s page on her and found "From 1956 through 1964, O'Connor wrote more than one hundred book reviews for two Catholic diocesan newspapers in Georgia: The Bulletin, and The Southern Cross. According to fellow reviewer Joey Zuber, the wide range of books O'Connor chose to review demonstrated that she was profoundly intellectual. Her reviews consistently confront theological and ethical themes in books written by the most serious and demanding theologians of her time." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flannery_O%27Connor#A_Catholic_life). I was really surprised when I found this out, and was wondering why she would do this. I dont think the timing of the story has to do with it, as it was written in the 50s. I also wanted to comment on something mentioned in class about her story structure. I think why I found her stories much more entertaining than the others was because they were written much more uniquely. It kind of drags on until the end, then leaves the reader mind-blown. I wonder what’s different about O’Connor that makes her structure so different. Any thoughts would be great!

She's a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie World

After reading “The Necklace”, a late 19^th century short story by French author Guy de Maupassant, a lot of attention is usually paid to the main character, an appearance-driven woman by the name Madame Mathilde Loisel.  While Madame Loisel may exude the personality of an affluent and sophisticated woman, she is quite the contrary. Her husband, a lowly store clerk, tries to do what he can to appease her materialistic needs, but alas cannot. When her husband comes home one day trying to energize a spark in his spouse by showing her an invitation to a party, she very hesitantly accepts it, under the condition that she gets all of the money her husband has been saving. In essence, Madame Louisel is consumed with materialistic goods, a concept all too familiar in the present day.

Louisel wallows in self-pity all her life about how she deserves better for herself, and is only happy when she pretends to be something she’s not; a well-off woman of means.  This is why I don’t sympathize with her at all, because karma bit her right in the you know where.  She tried to fool everyone at a party by spending all of her husband’s money in the process for one night of a glorified game of dress-up, just to "fit-in" like an outcasted high-schooler does. This need for materialistic possessions is what’s wrong with society, as Louisel felt she was “born for every delicacy and luxury” (pg. 1) At the party, her Cinderella story was in full affect, as “She danced madly, ecstatically, drunk with pleasure, with no thought for anything, in the triumph of her beauty, in the pride of her success, in a cloud of happiness made up of this universal homage and admiration, of the desires she had aroused, of the completeness of a victory so dear to her feminine heart. (pg. 5)”

This self-absorbed behavior represents just how appearance is an extremely overvalued part of life. Loisel can only be happy if she has on her gold and jewels (even if they’re actually fake), and on the other 364 days of the year she sobs in depression of her lack of possessions. Over 100 years later, nothing has changed. Everybody needs their 50$ designer jeans, 200$ sunglasses, etc. Not saying that I am any better than Madame Loisel herself, I just thought it would be interesting to delve into the fact that most people could probably relate to her… just maybe switch out her fashionable necklace for the new iPhone or Michael Kors bag.

About Me

Hey guys! As you may already know, my name is Trevor Johnston, and I'm here to bring you the scoop with short stories. I'm a Freshman from North Smithfield, RI and living on campus for my first year here at URI. I'm going to be using this blog to share what I think of the assortment of short stories we will be reading. I hope to make my blog posts somewhat interesting, so people don't dread forcibly reading everyones blog. Well that's pretty much it for me, I hope to get to know everyone throughout the semester and look forward to what's ahead!