Blog 16

“To Build a Fire” is a short story by Jack London about a man traveling through the Yukon Peninsula in freezing weather. Throughout the story, the man faces death multiple times. He seems like he does not think that he will die on his journey because he does not really pack a lot of supplies. The only thing extra thing that the man actually brought was his lunch. The man is traveling through the Yukon all alone except for his husky dog who travels with him. He has to be very careful while he is traveling because in some areas, there are places of very thin ice with water under it. He has to be careful because if he breaks the ice and falls through and gets wet, then he will probably get frost bite. In one area, the man did not want to walk over some ice because he was not sure if it was thick enough for him to walk over, so he pushed his dog forward to test it out. His dog reluctantly walks over the ice and it breaks. His paws got wet, but he did not get frost bite because he kept biting off the ice that was forming between his toes. In the end of the story, the man ends up dying in the middle of the night. The dog was not very attached to the man so he just leaves him when he knows that he is dead. I thought that this story was kind of messed up. The man should have prepared more for his journey. If I was going to go on this journey, I definitely would have packed more than just my lunch to bring with me. I also thought it was messed up how many times the man tried to sacrifice his dog in order to keep himself alive. He tried to push him in the cold water so he did not have to risk it.

This story had a lot of nature in it. It reminded me of Thoreau and Emerson because both of them wrote about nature a lot probably because they lived in nature when they left society. I think that the subject of nature is what made these authors similar.

Bibliography

London, Jack. "To Build a Fire, by Jack London." The World of Jack London 2012®. Web. 08 Mar. 2012.

blog 15

Anton Chekov’s short story “The Darling” is a story about a girl named Olga. The story talks about a young girl, who is always looking for a new man to fall in love with. Throughout the story, Olga falls in love with many different men. The first man that Olga falls in love with is her father. After her father passes away, he leaves her their house and she marries a man named Kukin. Kukin is a theater owner. Him and Olga get married and they are both very happy but they both know that there is something wrong with their marriage. Olga helps Kukin with his business while they are married until one night when Kukin was gone on a business trip, Olga is awoken in the middle of the night with news that Kukin had died. After only three months, Olga gets over Kukin and marries another man, Vasily Pustovalov who is a merchant at a local timber yard. Olga works in her new husband’s office and starts to think and act like him. She even begins to share all of the same opinions as him and she completely forgets about her old husband, Kukin. Olga and Vasily lived married very happily until one day, Vasily got sick and died. Soon after, Olga forms a friendship with a man named Smirnin, who, earlier in the story, Olga had advised him to forgive his adulterous wife for the sake of his son. Olga and Smirnin quickly become lovers, until Smirnin decides to reunite with his wife. Olga invites Smirnin and his wife to move in with her in her home. When the couple and their son are living with Olga, Olga falls in love with the son, Sasha.

I think it is very sad that Olga goes her whole life never thinking for herself, always just adopting the thoughts and opinions of the men that she falls in love with. I think that the author, Chekov was trying to express the importance of thinking for yourself and trying to be an individual when he wrote this. Olga was never truly happy with herself and therefore, she always had to have somebody else telling her how to feel. I think that this goes along with Emerson’s philosophy of individualism. Emerson valued being an individual a lot. He thought it was very important to think for yourself. “Emerson states that the strong individual is the result of strong, personal truths, and that strong individuals are necessary for a strong society. The danger, he warns, is in conformity because through conformity, the individual is lost.” (Brugman). I think the importance of individualism is a value that both Emerson and Chekov share.

Bibliography

Brugman, Patricia. "Individual and Society in 'Self-Reliance'." McClinton-Temple, Jennifer ed.

Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. (accessed March 6, 2012).

Chekov, Anton. "Short Stories: The Darling by Anton Chekhov." East of the Web. Web. 06 Mar. 2012.

Blog 14

“Richard Cory” by Edwin Robinson was a short poem written about a very rich man who everyone liked. Richard Cory was young, rich, and likeable. He was very popular in his town, everyone knew him and admired him. Everyone in the town wanted to be him. In the poem it says “he was always human when he talked.” (Robinson).  I think this means that he was always nice to people and treated everybody nice. He was the richest person in the town and a lot of people in the town could not even afford to eat meat. Everyone in the town thought that since Richard had so much money, and could afford nice things, that he would also be the happiest man in the town, but that was not true. Apparently, Richard was not very happy with his life, because he ends up killing himself at the end of the poem. I was very surprised when I read this because he seemed like he was very happy. The way that he was described in the poem, he sounded like he had a very good life. He was popular and everyone loved him. The fact that Richard Cory shot and killed himself means that he probably was not very happy with his life after all. I think that he just appeared to be happy on the outside to hold his reputation. I feel bad for Richard Cory because he was so focused on having a lot of material goods and being rich that he missed out on the good things in life that you can not buy with money.

The poem “Richard Cory” reminds me of Thoreau. I think that since Edwin Robinson made Richard Cory end up committing suicide, it shows that Edwin Robinson did not value money and material items very much and that he believed that there are other things in life that can make you happy. This is definitely something that Thoreau believed in as well. He believed that “America has been ‘ruined by luxury and heedless expense’” (Grant) and he accuses American men “of being obsessed with acquiring material goods; and of having a mistaken

conception of work, which exists only to feed artificial needs.” (Grant). I think that Thoreau and Robinson had some like philosophies on wealth and material items.

Bibliography

Grant, P. B. "Individual and Society in Walden." McClinton-Temple, Jennifer ed. Encyclopedia of

Themes in Literature. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. (accessed March 6, 2012).

Robinson, Edwin. "45. Richard Corey. Edwin Arlington Robinson. Modern American Poetry." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online. Web. 06 Mar. 2012.

Blog 13

Spoon River Anthology is a story written by Edgar Lee Masters. It is a collection of poems written as epitaphs for all the people living in a small town called Spoon River. This book was very interesting because since it was about a small town, it had a lot of gossip about people in it and you could trace the gossip and read what everybody thought of each other. I read one about a man named Harold Arnett. Harold was a man who was living in Spoon River. He was very unhappy and he wrote his poem about his suicide. He describes his wife yelling at him for burning some potatoes and then he shoots himself.  I thought that him killing himself over that was a little crazy. After he shoots himself, I think that he regrets it. He says that it is “too late” and he cannot go back. He also says “Of what use is it to rid one’s self of the world, When no soul may ever escape the eternal destiny of life?”  (Masters).This makes me think that Harold regrets committing suicide. Another poem that I read was one about Archibald Higbie. Higbie hated the town Spoon River. I think that he traveled a lot and he was the kind of person who would rather live in a large town full of people and a lot of culture. He says that he “loathed” Spoon River and he liked when he would go far away to places like Rome, Italy, and France because they made him forget about the small town that he came from. I think that Higbie probably did not fit in very well in Spoon River. He probably looked down on the people there because they did not value culture like he did. 

I think that the kind of small gossipy town that Edgar Lee Masters wrote about is the kind of thing that Thoreau and Emerson were trying to escape when they left society and lived in the woods. I think that is how this story relates to Emerson and Thoreau.

Bibliography

 

Masters, Edgar L. "Masters, Edgar Lee. 1916. Spoon River Anthology." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online. Bartleby. Web. 06 Mar. 2012. 

Blog 12

“I Will Fight No More Forever” was a speech written by Chief Joseph in 1877. Chief Joseph’s tribe were in a war with the U.S army. The  U.S. wanted Chief Joseph’s tribe, the Nez Perce to move into a reservation. They did not want to go there, so they tried to move to Canada instead.  They crossed through Idaho and Montana having to fight the United States Army the entire way. Many of Chief Joseph’s people died and he did not believe that it was worth all of his people dying. His speech “I Will Fight No More Forever” was actually Chief Joseph’s surrender speech. He gave it on October 5^th, 1877. In his speech, he says that he is “tired of fighting”. He does not like to see his friends from his tribe dying in this war. He has seen so many people die and he says that it is up to the young people to make it stop. He knows that if they move on, they will die because they do not have blankets and they will probably freeze.  In his speech, he says that he wants to see his children. He thinks that his children may be in trouble or in danger. He is afraid that they may be freezing to death.

I think that Chief Joseph valued human life. He did not think that it was worth it to be losing so many of his men in the war. He would rather surrender the war than fight and have more of his men die. I think that Chief Joseph is similar to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the ways that they all value human life. They all believe that each individual person in important. I think that Chief Joseph and Emerson and Thoreau also have some conflicting opinions. Emerson and Thoreau both believe in fighting for what they believe in. They both wanted to fight the civil war and win because they did not like slavery and they wanted it to end. Chief Joseph, on the other hand believed that preserving the lives of his men was more important than fighting in the war.

Bibliography

Chief Joseph. "Chief Joseph." Welcome to Georgia State University. Web. 05 Mar. 2012.

Blog 11

“Two Views of a River” by Mark Twain refers to Mark Twain’s life when he was living on the Mississippi River. He talks about how he felt about the river when he first lived there. He talks about how his view of the river has changed over time. He says that he used to think that the river was beautiful when he first started living there. He talks about how he remembers a time when he was on the river and there was a beautiful sunset. “I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home.” (Twain).  When Twain saw this beautiful sunset, he was amazed at it and he could not believe it. As his life carried on living on the river, however, he realizes that his initial awe for the river starts to fade away after living there for a while. He describes how he just becomes accustomed to everything and he gets used to the way the river is. “I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!” (Twain). Twain says that he had memorized every feature of the river and eventually, it stopped impressing him. The river itself had not changed, but his view of the river had. I understand what Mark Twain is saying when he says that he stops noticing the beauty of the river. He was working on the river and he began to focus so much on his job and his work on the river and he stopped thinking about how beautiful the river is. It’s like when you want something so badly and then when you get it, it turns out that it is not what you really wanted. Twain wanted to work on the river and it turns out when he got what he wanted he realized that he actually lost something very great.

“Two Views of a River” reminds me of Thoreau’s writing. Thoreau writes a lot about nature and this story by Mark Twain includes a lot of references to nature as he describes the river and the surrounding land.

Bibliography

Twain, Mark. "Two Ways of Seeing a River, by Mark Twain." About.com Grammar & Composition. Web. 05 Mar. 2012.