Thinking of these opposition in several texts throughout the Post-1945 US Literature Course, choose A. or B., relating any of your writings with at least 3 of the texts we have studied:
1. Write a commentary on the struggle of the approaches to life, movement, mobility and community in your preferred texts in this class.
2. Write a creative text dramatizing the struggle between these notions.
1.
ReplyDeleteStruggle of the approaches to life, movement, mobility and community are themes present in some of the works that were read in class. The works that my commentary is based on are "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac , " The life you save may be your own" by Flannery O'Connor and " Suddenly Last Summer " by Tenessee WIlliams.
In the book "On the Road" , the main character Dean, suffers from all the issues mentioned above. He struggles getting his life together and making the right decisions, he is always on the move due to many factors, and he's kind of an outcast because a man like him is generally not looked up to in our society. He is always on the run, either because his wife kicks him out or because he's on a new adventure with Saul and he struggles with drug/alcohol addiction.
In " The Life You Save May Be Your Own" we have Mr Shiftlet who also struggles because of his amputated arm and lack of money. He marries the mute/deaf girl Lucynell just for money and he runs off in his car. Like Dean, Mr Shiftlet is also an outcast , although for different reasons, but as a handicapped man with an amputated arm , he is unable to find work or a wife so easily so one could say that he also struggles to fit within the community.
In "Suddenly Last Summer", Catherine is trying to explain what happened to her cousin Sebastian but no one believes her, she is branded as an outcast to such an extent that she is sent off to the mental hospital where they intend to perform a lobotomy. Movement/mobility is present in the play because we get flashbacks of what happened in Spain as well as other locations.
In conclusion all these works contain the themes mentioned above , although they embody them in different ways. Individualism , sense of self and the un/reliability of truth are present in all of the works studied, which is very common for contemporary American literature.