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The Paradox of the Firefly, Greedo, and “the Other Boy”

One theme of Sag Harbor that comes up a lot, especially in the chapter “The Gangsters,” is the concept of being two opposite things at once—a “paradox,” as Ben puts it in “The Heyday of Dag” (Whitehead 57). Ben describes that he and his friends at Sag were to outsiders “the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses” (Whitehead 57). He then outlines the paths that they could take: embrace the beach part, the black part, or, as he puts it, “embrace the contradiction, say, what you call paradox, I call myself ” (Whitehead 58). Benji is a paradox, but he can embrace both parts that of himself that are seemingly paradoxical—he can be both a black boy and have a beach house. To him, this concept is not impossible. Ben continues to embrace apparent paradoxes in “The Gangsters,” with a firefly he sees during the BB gun fight, and the changes made to Greedo in the rerelease of Star Wars . While looking at the firefly, he contemplates how the firefly was named after the part that ...
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The Scrap and Margaret Thatcher

One element of Black Swan Green that I found particularly interesting was the evolving political views of Jason, especially Julia’s influence on them. I started tracking this particular thread of the novel, making note of every time Margaret Thatcher is mentioned. The chapter “Rocks” was especially insightful, as Jason started the chapter saying things like, “The Daily Mail ’s dead right,” “Mrs. Thatcher’s bloody ace ,” and talking about “Loony Lefters” (Mitchell 101). By the end, he’s talking about the reports the Guardian made about the lasting damage of the Falklands War.  But this is not the first time he questions his beliefs. One moment that stood out to me was when he questions Thatcher’s words in “Bridal Path.” There are two important pieces of context for this moment—the scrap between Grant Burch and Ross Wilcox, and Tom Yew’s nightmare. I will mostly focus on the scrap (or at least try to). One way of looking at the scrap, which was brought up during class, is as a ...
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Alison Bechdel is In Search of Lost Time

  The graphic novel Fun Home is filled with constant literary references. One of these, and the one I will be focusing on, is the novel Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. Alison Bechdel spends many pages unpacking metaphors for her relationship with her father that can be found in the novel, such as the concept of “inverts.” Alison and Bruce are not only “inverts” in Proust’s sense (that is to say, homosexuals who express their gender oppositely to their sex), but they are also inversions of each other, and through that they have a connection, though it causes many conflicts between them. She ends this comparison to the novel by talking about the new title for the novel, translated more literally from the French: In Search of Lost Time . I believe that the entirety of Fun Home is Alison’s own Search of Lost Time . The original French title is A la Recherche du Temps Perdu . Alison explains, however, that Perdu does not just mean “lost,” as it had been translated. ...
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Electroshock Therapy and the Rosenbergs

The Bell Jar opens with a description of what happened to the Rosenbergs—execution by electrocution. Esther describes how the idea of it horrified her, and how she imagined “being burned alive all along [her] nerves,” something that “must be the worst thing in the world” (Plath 1). Now, one of the things Esther is most terrified of in the novel is electroshock therapy. After her terrible experience with Doctor Gordon, she wants to never go through it again, making Doctor Nolan promise to not make her go through them again, at least not without a warning. I think there are parallels between the Rosenbergs and the electroshock therapy, and I think they’re pretty interesting to explore. I first began to think about the parallels between the shock therapy and the Rosenbergs when I read about the treatment she got from Doctor Gordon. Esther describes it, saying, “with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant” (P...
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The Guilt of Participating in System You Despise

It’s fair to say that Holden Caulfield hates private prep schools and the culture they create. He tells the reader so countless times throughout the novel. He himself is a bit of an outcast at the school, as he gets shunned by the fencing team when he leaves their equipment on the subway. He also chooses to avoid going to the football game at the very start of the novel. He is not nearly as “cool” as his roommate, Stradlater, who is part of the basketball team and actually gets a date, in Jane Gallagher, and uses his coach’s car for this date. Despite the ways in which Holden does not fit in, he is still not at the bottom of the social chain, and he feels guilt for both the ways in which he benefits from the system and the ways in which he is too cowardly to stand up to it. When complaining to Phoebe about why he hated Pency, Holden says, “they had this goddam secret fraternity that I was too yellow not to join,” but they wouldn’t let Ackley join “just because he was boring and pim...
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