Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe. Now there is a man you don’t meet every day on the street, partly due to the fact that he’s crazy, bizarre, and a literary genius. This man was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809 and became an orphan at a very young age when his mother died and his father had abandoned the family and let’s just say this, sometimes orphans grow up to be crazy, mad men. (AKA Voldemort) The most popular of his works is the Raven which was published in January of 1845. He also married his cousin and died due to unknown factors, but people suspect it was due to overdose, alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, or some other weird factor.

I have read much of Poe in a middle school English class. Poe has an amazing talent of drawing his reader in and keeping their attention. I do remember reading The Tell-Tale Heart before and it is one of my favorite stories of his. All during the story the narrator/main character is trying to convince us he is not mad, but doesn’t do a very good job of it. This reminds me of the movie “Chicago” and the song in the movie called the “Cell Block Tango” and how they try to convince you that they were right and killing these men, but we all know they’re guilty. So the narrator kills this guy and hides him under the floorboards, but the guilt eats him up alive because he can hear the loud heartbeat of his victim and eventually confesses. All during the story, I was thinking about how whenever I did something bad when I was a kid the guilt would just eat me up inside and I would end up confessing to my parents, even if they didn’t notice or expect anything.

Though I had read The Tell-Tale Heart before, I had not read The Cask of Amontillado before, but the story didn’t really surprise me. It was another story of revenge and is twisted and evil in a way. To get revenge on his friend, the main character puts Furtanato in a crypt and builds up the wall so he can’t get out, which in my mind is way extreme. I mean if I wanted to get back at someone, I would just teepee their house or prank them or something like that, not hole them up in a crypt and let them starve to death or suffocate.

            Edgar Allan Poe is a crazy man and likes to think out of the box and think of mad ideas of how to kill people. It works to keep his audience interested, but some part of me thinks that he had people he wanted revenge and that people in these stories of his may be real life people. However, I am only speculating and it could be that Poe was okay in the head and just had a vivid and wild imagination, but we’ll never know.

Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I can honestly say that I was a little confused by this story and didn’t understand what was going on. From what I got from the story, it was about a man called Goodman Brown trying to resist temptation of the devil from witches.

I know that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, but I’ve never actually read it. I know the story from what people have told me and from the movie Easy A. From what I’ve heard, it was an extremely boring and long book that was just too drawn out for the point of the book.

By the end of the story, I understood it. This story is like one of those books that really makes no sense until you finish it and then you’re like “ooh, now I get it”. The story was just this guy who had this temptation and went to a witch gathering and saw his wife there and then woke up in the street and thought it was a dream. Goodman didn’t want to sin but found it easy to lean toward it. In the end, he realized sin in the world, but instead of realizing sin and trying to fight against it, he accepted it and just condemned all his friends and family who sinned. He can’t appreciate his life at all because of the sin he sees in everyone else and takes his sadness to his grave and that is all that his family and friends remembered him as.

I think the point that Hawthorne is trying to make is that you have to accept that not all people are perfect. Everyone sins. If you only look at the sin in life then your life will be unhappy, but you should try to focus on the positive things and not dwell on sin.

William Apess’ An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man

I have read William Apess’ An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man in a previous class and really quite enjoy him. I really enjoyed reading this text for a second time a believe that I got a little more out of it than when I read it the first time. I appreciate his use of scripture, which he uses a lot of in this text because he was an ordained minister.

I know that not much is known about William Apess and what is known comes from his autobiography A Son of the Forest. I believe that he was born in a tribe somewhere in Massachusetts and also he ran away when he was 15 and joined the militia in New York and fought in the War of 1812. He was ordained as a minister somewhere around 1830 and in the same year, he published his autobiography.

There are a few things I like and dislike about Apess’ An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man. What I do like is, as I said before, his use of scripture to back-up his argument. I also liked how h was calling you out on your actions or the actions of the whites in his day. What I didn’t like was that it felt way to much like an essay, because of the format of it and felt too impersonal. I also didn’t really like that he asked like 10 questions in every paragraph. The questions he asks are rhetorical, but I believe he kind of over does it a little. I think the same can be said for the amount of scripture he uses. He went a little overboard on it. However, it does drive home his point of how the whites back then needed to man up and stop being such hypocrites, so I can forgive him of that.

Reply to Sarah Hatton

I also love the quote you chose from Henry Thoreau’s Where I Lived, and What I Lived For. It is so poetic and describes life perfectly. I believe the line is saying that you live life but when you look at it, you can see the emptiness of life or the shallowness of it. We are all consumed by the technologies of this world and the societal norm and I do agree with you that Thoreau wants us to live outside the societal norm, but like you said, that just isn’t possible because the world is changing everyday and we must learn to adapt if we want to survive and make a name for ourselves in this world.

I also agree with you on how you said that Thoreau’s argument is that we need to step out of time and not let it define us. In part, I believe this is true. We shouldn’t let time consume us. However, I do agree with you that this philosophy is not realistic in today’s world because of the hectic life style we all have.

I think Thoreau is kind of living in his own fantasyland. Part of me thinks that he is writing this text as his “perfect world” scenario, but sooner or later you have to come back to reality and see and take the world for what it is.

Henry Thoreau's "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"

I quite enjoyed Henry Thoreau’s “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”. I was refreshing to just read a story about the farm he bought and not have this huge meaning to the story. Also, he didn’t use huge words to make himself look more educated. I hate when people use bug words to make themselves look smarter. First, I don’t really understand what they are saying so I don’t really care about what they are writing and second, it just makes them look like they are trying to look smart but aren’t really succeeding at it.

            I really enjoyed the scenery that Thoreau put into his writing. I could almost see the house in which he lived in. It was really interesting how he kept referencing different things that really did not have any relation to each other. He referenced a lot of Greek god things. For example, on page 888 he referenced Atlas, which is a Greek God, who was forced by Zeus to stand on the earth supporting the heavens on his head and in his hands, which was a punishment for creating war against the Olympian Gods. He also references constellations, such as the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair and Aquila. Also, he puts in a lot of things from Hinduism, like he uses a different name for Krishna, who is the eighth avatar or Vishnu in Hindu mythology.

            A lot of the stuff he references and compares things to I don’t really know about so at times it was a little hard to discern what he was trying to say, but overall it was a good text.