World War I

To the Lighthouse, tells the story of a family as they go through the war and lose people. The subject matter of loss is shown clearly through the novel, through the eyes of Lily. Woolf uses a fractured tone to demonstrate how broken the family is due to the missing people. The glue of the family is gone and all that is left is the shadows of the memories they left behind. These shadows haunt the current characters and make it almost impossible for the characters to move on with their lives. 

Woolf also uses the idea of the trip to the lighthouse to bring the family closer together. The family has been fractured due to its losses and is still reeling from them. The family is pulled in hundreds of different directions and is trying to find some common ground so they can go forward. The trip to the lighthouse is giving the family a chance to talk about what they want out of life and what direction they want to go in. This speaks to the War and its aftermath. People were so fractured and lost that they did not know which way to go and ended up alienating themselves, the opposite of what they wanted in the first place. What people needed was a chance to regroup after WWI and focus on healing the cracks in their society.  

The Metamorphosis thematically relates to WWI because it is all about change and transition. WWI was a transitionary time for everyone, especially after the war. People did not know what to do, just like in the Metamorphosis. Just like Gregor's family got used to him being a bug and missing from the family, people got used to relatives, friends and acquaintances missing. The entire World was in a state of transition but none more so than Britain and her inhabitants. 

In the Sun Also Rises, the War has affected the characters in different ways. It has affected Jake in the fact that he cannot have healthy realtionships, due to his war wound. He is damaged and cannot drag anyone into a relationship with him, even so. This causes Jake to withdraw from his friends and the rest of society. He has issues with being on the fringe group of society. 

Britt is also damged due to the war. She has a problem with staying in relationship. She is in love with the idea of being in love but cannot find anyone who meets her dream and reality. She is fickle in her affections and not many men can keep her attention for very long. This is due, in part to the war because she is now afraid that everyone she loves will leave her. So, Britt pushes everyone away, one -by-one in order to keep her sanity after the war. 

Eliot uses the technique of quotations to critique the Western traditon by using quotes from what people considered the low culture. He did not draw on the higher culture of the typical Western tradition, but on the lower form of culture. This drawing upon the lower culture implies that the higher, more noble culture of the high traditions of the Western Tradition have failed the people and cannot help them cope with WWI. 

This is a critique of WWI because it says that WWI has reduced the populice into becoming more and more mechanized. The image of this glorious Western Tradition has been blown away due to the mechanized lifestyle the war has brought in. Also the amount of men dead due to the new improvements have created an obssesion with the lower culture due to the fact that it is crude and real, while most of the Western tradition is noble and idealistic, 

The aspect of the war that is the most interesting to me is the idea of trench warfare. It was a revolutionary technique that drew out the fighting. It caused so much disease, and destruction of the land. Europe was in shambles after the war due to all the trenches dug into the land. The trenches also had a dehumanizing effect because they forced men to live in close quarters, often in the mud, with various diseases being spread around as well as dead bodies. This idea of trench warfare is interesting to me because of how it was used and the effect it had on the men. We can see this through the various pieces we have read. It had an overall dehumanizing effect and left its mark on many young men. 

  http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=130270396...

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=130270396...

      On pages 11 and 12 of The Crisis I found a interesting section titled "The Ghetto".  It seems to be a recent list of discriminations against African Americans.  One of the most striking cases of discrimination is one on page 11 that says, "A year ago, Arthur Little...married Alma Wade.  Two months ago Mr. Little refused to live with her longer, alleging that she is colored.  Mrs. Little is now trying to find out whether she is 'white' or 'black".  Today, this seems an absurd reason to leave a woman.  It seems completley unreasonable to suddenly no longer want to be with your wife because you think, seemingly out of nowhere, that she is African American.  How is this something that one just suddenly stumbles upon?  Were there set behaviors that were seen as only white actions or only black actions, and taking part in one or the other dictated how others classified your race.  Also, this seems reflect on a problem outside of intense racial discriminations: it appears that some people were having an identity crisis.  Since being either white or being black had such strong consequences, individuals would have probably been faced with a dilemna if they were darker skinned than the average white person, perhaps had different hair, or different face and body shapes from a typical caucasion person.

       The paragraph that addresses opposition to having a moving pictures show in a certain neighborhood reminded me of a scene from one of my favorite TV series, Parks and Recreation.  During a town hall meeting, an elderly woman expresses her adament desire to keep a basketball course off of a park that is being built by her home because basketball courts attract certain "undesireable" individuals that she doesn't care to have around.  These is clearly satirizing these same old, and frankly insane prejudices that are being expressed in The Crisis.  To me, this sort of publication humanzies Africans Americans during a time when they were seen as less than human, or at least less human than a white person.  Nowadays these sorts of claims seem totally absurd and it is hard to believe people once thought this way.

     I have to admit, I still do not feel 100% comfortable with this poem.  With that said, I will take a shot at the question posed for this blog assignment.  To me, the quotations create tension and anxiety in the poem.  The most obvious point are the lines that say "Hurry up it's time".  These lines seem to interupt the activity taking place in the poem and so gives the reader a sense of being rushed on to the next thing or being pulled away from their present focus.  The effect of this can be unsettling.  The exchange between the narrator and his wife also cause a great deal of tension.  The reader gets the sense of something just not being right.  The way the wife keeps asking if her husband is thinking anything, if he feels anything gives the reader a picture of a man who is totally broken down and disconnected from the world around him.  This is a disturbing thing to think of.  What came to mind for me was horror movies where a victim is begging for the killer to have mercy on them but the killer is stuck in his own monolouge and pushes on seemingly oblivious to what the other person is saying or feeling.  The only thing they are aware of is the thoughts in their own head and the words coming out of their own mouths. Clearly, this whole conversation in the poem left me feeling very unsettled.

     As many have already said, the most strinking part about the first two sections of this book is how time is decpited in each.  Through the contrasting time sequencing in the two sections the reader gets a sense of what some common responses would have been to World War I.  In the first section, The Window, time passes slowly as we are let into the inner thoughts of the characters.  Each character seems to have time to reflect and time to analyze the world around them.  Things still have meaning.  For Mrs. Ramsey, the mystery of her children's futures is what has meaning for her.  She wonders what they will  become in this pre WWI time.  For Mr. Ramsey, he finds meaning in the leagcy that he can leave behind through having had a family.  While he has lost hope in the great person he had hoped to become and in reaching that ever elusive "Q" he still gains some hope when he thinks of the legacy he can acheive through his family and children.  For James, he is able to find meaning in his father's actions.  He harbors resentment for his father because he thinks he is intentionally mean and cruel simply because he can be as the head of the house.  For each character, time isn't necessary to think about because everything seems to be running like life as usual.  

     All of this changes in "Time Passes".  Everything happens in fast forward.  There is no time to think, to contemplate, or to analyze.  Everything that happens simply happens without much explanation.  To me, this emphasized the issue of coping during and after the war.  Civilians and soliders had no way of preparing themselves for the massive death toll that would occured.  Such cruelty has no explanations. And so, famlies and veterans were faced with the delimna of simply not being able to process so much pain, dispair, confusion, and change.  Processing and coping takes time which no one had because of how quickly the deaths were adding up.  This is why I think everything is so superficial in "Time Passes".  The deaths that occur happen so casually and do not warrent much thought from the text.  They just happen and that's the end of it.  There is simply not enough time nor mental capacity for pain to process everything that has happened and so everything is simply another bullet point in the awful and scarring events during and after the war.

     While it does not come straight out and say this, I found traces of PTSD in "The Metamorphosis".  In many of the readings we have covered this semester such as The Sun Also Rises and Testament of Youth, there is a sense of disconnect and unreality that can be attributed to PTSD symptoms.  This is no different in "The Metamorphois".  PTSD caused a barrier between the person suffering and everyone and everything else around them as well as from themselves much like when Gregor is beginning to transform into a bug.  One day, everything seems fine, and then the next he wakes up and finds himself unable to function as he once did.  His body is something completely different and foreign from what he was used to.  He has become a stranger to how his own body works.  He slowly begins to lose the capability to communicate with his family.  He has no way of staying connected with those who did not face the stresses he did of keeping a family together financially.  Even though he had lost the ability to communicate and still could not fully grasp how to manuveur in his new body, he still tried to go on with his day as usual.  He was trying to figure out how he could catch a train and go to work, despite what had happened.  This is also very reminiscent of post WWI times and PTSD.  Even though life seems unreal, foreign, disconnected, and hopeless it still goes on.  New day after new day will continue to come and go so you must find a way to cope with that.  

I am sorry that I will have to miss class on Thursday and wanted to say how much I have enjoyed this class.  I have learned a great deal from Prof. Drouin as well as from all of you through our discussions and posts.  I now understand why Hemingway called his contemporaries "The Lost Generation" and much more.  I especially liked seeing the original WWI posters in the archives and felt that we got a real sense of what people read and were exposed to then. Absolutely loved reading Vera Brittain and her spellbinding account of her experiences during the Great War. The order of our readings led us into the next topic so easily and effortlessly. I think Dr. Drouin is an outstanding teacher who guides his students to discover their own "truths" in a piece without forcing his own opinions. But, at the same time, he navigates the obscure and helps us wade through the fog. I'm happy I was a part of the class this semester and I hope all of you have a fun and "lively" summer.  Good Luck!