Well the year is finally coming to a close for real now ad this is the last blog I'm required to do. Last week was spent watching movies such as Death of a Salesman and The Importance of Being Earnest while our teacher was convalescing. I spoke about Earnest last week and how it rose above my expectations and that i actually found it rather humorous but i want to elaborate a bit more on it. What i was most surprised about this movie was the fact that it seemed so modern. You never would have guessed that it was written by the same guy that wrote The picture of Dorian Gray in the 1800s. The humor is modern and seems slightly dirty for someone from that era and it was the polar opposite of the tone of Dorian Gray, Wilde's other book. You wouldn't believe the same person even wrote it if you didn't already know that he did.
The other movie we watched, Death of a salesman, was also very good if a bit depressing. This was not the fault of the Movie producers or actors however as it is a slightly down play. Willie was played very well and the writers did a very good job of portraying his insanity to the viewer's by having asides with characters that aren't there and flashbacks of events that didn't happen with him and his boys. The play shows the slow decay of willie and how biff and the other family members do a poor job of helping him cope with it. He is slightly unreasonable however as he yells at his wife unnecessarily and gets unreasonably mad at his sons and other people around him. The play essentially shows the death of a salesman since willie is no longer capable of being a good salesman and traveling around so his employer has no choice but to fire him.
Its been a good year and a good four years in high school but its time to move on to bigger and better things as i move forward into college and beyond. All the books i read in this class and the essays i wrote will help me succeed in the future in english classes and hopefully in the rest of my life.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Monday, May 9, 2011
Reflections
Well the year is coming to an end. We have taken the AP exam and it is smooth sailing from here on in with only the last lecture project and the final left till we are done. It has been a good year and i have read some very enlightening books that i would not have read otherwise. In this hopefully but probably not, final blog i have decided to reflect on some of the more recent occurrences in the class starting with the most important and most stressful one, the AP exam. I don't think you are supposed to talk about the multiple choice due to the highly classified and potentially dangerous nature of these question so ill just stick to the free response.
The first two questions were, in my opinion, rather easy. They were both also almost exactly the same as they both said to analyze the complex relationship between the husband and wife. Neither of these two couples had particularly positive relationships especially the couple in the second essay since the wife said she wouldn't have married him if she had known how he was going to act. However they would also sometimes seem like they were getting along when they would reconcile with each other and would be all nice. All in all i think i performed pretty well on those two essays but i occasionally had trouble relating the examples and individual ideas back to the overall main idea of the piece.
The open question on the other hand was a different story. I knew what i wanted to write about i just had trouble remembering the details of the work that I chose, The Stranger, relating it all back to the theme of the work. I chose to write about this book because Mersault has to face justice and deal with it in his own mind. He has to justify what he did in his mind so that he can find peace and go to his death without feeling guilty about something. In order to do this he takes the existentialist view that you must take responsibility for your own actions and accept the consequences since it is your fault that you did the thing in the first place. Mersault does take responsibility and accepts the fact that he is going to have to die for what he did. He then goes to the guillotine with his head held high and without a feeling of guilt. We also watched the play The Importance of Being Earnest in class today that i thought was surprisingly funny and very interesting.
The first two questions were, in my opinion, rather easy. They were both also almost exactly the same as they both said to analyze the complex relationship between the husband and wife. Neither of these two couples had particularly positive relationships especially the couple in the second essay since the wife said she wouldn't have married him if she had known how he was going to act. However they would also sometimes seem like they were getting along when they would reconcile with each other and would be all nice. All in all i think i performed pretty well on those two essays but i occasionally had trouble relating the examples and individual ideas back to the overall main idea of the piece.
The open question on the other hand was a different story. I knew what i wanted to write about i just had trouble remembering the details of the work that I chose, The Stranger, relating it all back to the theme of the work. I chose to write about this book because Mersault has to face justice and deal with it in his own mind. He has to justify what he did in his mind so that he can find peace and go to his death without feeling guilty about something. In order to do this he takes the existentialist view that you must take responsibility for your own actions and accept the consequences since it is your fault that you did the thing in the first place. Mersault does take responsibility and accepts the fact that he is going to have to die for what he did. He then goes to the guillotine with his head held high and without a feeling of guilt. We also watched the play The Importance of Being Earnest in class today that i thought was surprisingly funny and very interesting.
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