I’m not sure I understand exactly what Kathy’s job is, exactly. I know that she’s a “carer” and that she takes care of “donors”? But what exactly does that entail? What do the “donors” donate exactly? There’s a mention of someone “completing”? I understand that she cares for people, but what do the “donors” donate exactly? I’m just a little confused about that.

“The truth is that very few understand the truth about forgiveness. It is not the culprits who need to be forgiven; rather it is the victims, because they are the ones who cause all the trouble.”

I felt like this quote was too important not to be mentioned. When I first read this part, I was, for lack of a better word, horrified. Grace basically says that the victims should be quiet and just take it. This notion of having to forgive the victims because it is they that “cause all the trouble”, is horrifying to me. If these victims don’t cause trouble, if they don’t raise their voices and speak out, then they could suffer over and and over again. Grace is also a victim, throughout the book, there are many points where it is implied that she gets assaulted, by the guards, the doctors, and she pushes it off as a dream. This quote brought Grace’s character in perspective to me. She’s been victimized all her life and has now come to see it as causing trouble for others when she is in trouble herself.

Group Members: Emma Daklouche, Chelsea Dixon, Derrione Mobley, Courtney Parks, Alisha Sanghani

Quotes on Memory:

1. “When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
   1. Memory changes based on perspective. She may not remember something later on that happened in the moment or she may remember something that happened and that she forgot about when she was living the moment. “Hindsight is 20/20” scenario.
2. “A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.”
   1. Her memory protects her and imprisons her. She is limited by her own thoughts, the truths that she perceives and the truth that is there are different and thus information is limited and she could be at a disadvantage by it. The more difficult stuff that happens to Grace becomes a dream and thus it never really happened. There is a scene where she’s in a dream and it sounds like she got assaulted (pg. 279-81), and she simply repressed those memories. Her dream is very descriptive and sounds like a memory and not a dream. If she doesn’t tell anyone that it happened, if she doesn’t accept it and take measures to protect herself. 

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.” 

I know it’s not between 200-255, but it’s only a bit further ahead in my book, and I really liked this quote, so I decided to do a post on it (please son’t take off too many points?). I like how the quote mentions that while we are actually living in the moment, it’s not a story. That while the event is taking place, while we are going through the actions, the motions of living out that “story”, she explains that these moments are not a story. A story is something that is told after the fact, something that is more organized and away from the chaos of actually living through (if it’s a true story) it. However, while we are actually living through the moments that the story is telling, those moments are not organized, they aren’t clear cut, they are chaotic and uncontrolled, confusing and full of emotion that a story-telling might not have. Telling the story after the fact, only catches a fraction of the emotion that goes through with actually living through the moments. 

Alisha Sanghani

Carley Williams

Alma Baste

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

1. How do Shiva and Tai impact Saleem’s views and memories of the events that occurred?
   • “I told you the truth,” I say yet again, “Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent versions of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own” (pg. 211 – in the chapter: At the Pioneer Café).
   • “
2. How does Aadam’s loss of religion impact Saleem’s interpretation of history?
   • “And my grandfather, lurching upright, made a resolve. Stood. Rolled cheroot. Stared across the lake. And was knocked forever into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole” (pg. 13 – in the chapter: The Perforated Sheet).
   • “What leaked into me from Aadam Aziz: a certain vulnerability to women, but also its cause, the hole at the centre of himself caused by his (which is also my) failure to believe or disbelieve in God. And something else as well-something which, at the age of eleven, I saw before anyone else noticed. My grandfather had begun to crack” (pg. 275 – in the chapter: Reveltaions).

““I told you the truth,” I say yet again, “Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent versions of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.””

In this quote, Saleem is defending his version of events to Padma at the end of Book Two. What really stood out to me with this quote, is not the wording or the defense, but rather the utter truth of it. Every truth is subjective to the person saying it. It can be twisted, it can be transformed, yet it still remains the truth, because every memory is biased and each person sees the world, remembers the world in different forms of truth.

If a soldier is killed in war, who do you blame? Their comrades? The man who drafted him? Or the man that started and continued the war? Each of these may or may not have played a certain type of role that could lead to the soldier’s death. Each of them is a truth that could be used to blame the death of the soldier on them.

A man could blame himself for killing a person, but when asked what he did, he could simply say that it was his idea to use a certain tactic that relied on a back-up that he was sure would work, but, in fact, failed, thus resulting in the soldier being killed. Do you blame the man with the plan or the back-up that refused to show for the soldier’s death?

The truth of the quote is that memory modifies what we remember, painting a villain, a hero, a bystander in negative or positive lights depending on emotions and your own view of the events. 

“it’s my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of time.” 

This quote really caught my attention, because it talks about how circumstances can change. How, even if we are no longer in one place or grew up away from where our parents originally came from, those places of the past are still a part of us. We grow up in the home of our parents, and the places that they grew up in, influence the way they raise us. Culturally, India is very different from Britain, they have a different set of values and different rules of society than Britain, those values are embedded in our parents who grew up there, and those same values are given to us as we grow up. No matter where you live now, what you do, you should always remember your roots, even as lost as they are, they are still a part of you, no matter how “fragmented” your memory of those roots may be.

The reason I’m focusing on narration in Mrs. Dalloway is because I think it is one of the more important aspects of the book. Without the narration, this particular use of said narration, we would not get as much depth to the story as we do get. Woolf uses a third person point of view along with a heavy helping of free indirect discourse throughout the story. The use of free indirect discourse combined with the third person narrative is so that the readers get a sense of movement in the physical realm as well as knowledge of the character’s thoughts. It also lets us know the parallels that are there between Clarissa and Septimus. The narration also lets us see scenes from different point of views. Earlier in the book, we see the car backfiring scene from both Clarissa and Septimus’s POV and their thoughts on the scene. Different scenes later on reflect the parallels brought on by Clarissa and Septimus which we only know because of the way Woolf uses the narration and free indirect discourse to her advantage.

Two authors. Two articles. Both of them with good points.

Teahan looks at the the Governess and thinks of her as a reader. Many times throughout the article, she mentions “her troubled career as a reader”. It is interesting she seems to think of the Governess as such, because when someone reads a book, they think of the characters as acting out the story, not as them in a similar position to themselves. Teahan also seems to think about the metaphors in place, her belief is that Bly represents a sort of state of mind, “Windows, doors, gates, and staircases are transitional…(pertaining to limits, boundaries, and thresholds)” (Teahan 360). Following through with the idea of the Governess as a reader (a troubled one, but one nonetheless), Teahan makes it out as the Governess simply reading too much into everything. 

Renner, on the other hand, does not think of the Governess as a reader, but rather a case of sexual hysteria, which is very interesting. According to the Governess’s background, she is the youngest of her siblings, a woman who grew up in the country, and led a rather sheltered life. She comes to London to find work and in the processes falls “in love” with her employer. Now, Renner believes that the Governess’s ghosts are a “projection of her own sexual hysteria in the form of stereotypes deeply embedded in the mind of the culture” (Renner 271). The first part, her background, that comes in to play, Renner says represents a naïve girl’s romantic dream. An ideal only represented in fairy tales. The ghosts that come after, are a representative of different aspects of romantic interactions. Quint becomes the frightening and deviant sexual manifestation of her imagination, come to prey upon her. This is further proven by her description of his red hair. According to Renner, red hair has had a long standing bias of being the “devil’s hair”. Thus, for Quint to have red hair, he must represent the less than ideal romantic side of sexual interactions. 

After reading both articles, I would say I prefer Renner’s point of view. In that his makes more sense to me, there is more proof (I suppose is the word) of the Governess being a case of female sexual hysteria, than of her being a reader with Bly representing her state of mind. Although both views bring up interesting points on her mindset, ultimately, Renner’s information on the culture and the information on James’s background, make it more plausible for the sexual hysteria than anything else.