American Literature (F)

Beloved is largely looked at as a devilish ghost that has the power to be apart of the 124 families while being supernatural. Beloved has a way of entering and taking up a large part of our thoughts and forcibly our actions. At the end of chapter ten, a large and moving part of this book happens. Beloved goes into the shed at night when Paul D is about to go to sleep and begins to seduce Paul D. He stands there in the purpose of not letting Beloved get into his head. He is unsuccessful, Beloved seduces him and leads to him having sex with beloved. Paul D refers to something as a metaphor and it represents a larger theme in this book. How Paul D explains that he is a rusted tobacco tin and that he is rusted shut so that Beloved will not seduce him. She breaks the seal and the tobacco tin is cracked open, breaking the seal and causing Paul D to engage with Beloved. This represents a larger theme of how Beloved controls everyone. She controls and takes advantage of any weakness that others around her demonstrate. Beloved has the ability to control everyone even if they don’t know it. How Sethe has to put in the thought of is this going to make beloved mad or angry is something Sethe and Paul D do all the time. Beloved has raised an ego that everyone knows her by and it is one that has caused every one to see, think, be around beloved all the time because she is not only a ghost, she is everywhere.

Beloved raising an ego for her that has people standing on their toes when they think of her is something truly crazy. She has taken a strong group of many friends and destroyed it. Making every person in that group paranoid about what beloved is going to do next, what terror beloved is going to cause them now. When you instill that much fear into a group of people, you are causing so much harm it is unbelievable. The idea I am trying to convey is that Beloved, in general, has caused a lot of harm to this friend group and community. The opening of the rusted lid was a big event in that Beloved seduced Paul D, a man of strength, and caused him to want to have intercourse with her. She is sly and seductive and it caused the book to have so much anger and drama.

The theme of how a figure like Beloved and her impact on a community is so negative that they were unable to recover from such an event. The point I am trying to convey is that this action so simple like seducing another person, causes everyone to become scared, and although Paul D is the only person who is violated, the group of friends and the overall community should walk out scared and violated. Beloved is not a monster, but her actions over the course of the book cause her to build a reputation of hate and negativity. This strongly affects the people that love or used to love her, ultimately causing a vast impact on the community as a whole. This takes an ordinary community and causes it to be damaged and hurt. The way one event can be taken to hurt a great community is truly disastrous and sad. Beloved could’ve had a positive impact on the community but her impact on many people was very negative Although Beloveds identity is unknown, she has been known to different people like the ghost of a loved one of Sethe. This has room for people to love Beloved despite her benevolent actions. This greatly changed the plot of the book and caused the community to suffer.

Soldiers from the Vietnam War experienced things that no one should ever experience. At the time Vietnam was horrific, the war and the instances within the war that Tim O’Brien portrays is miserable. In Spite of his use of meta-fiction within the whole novel, his emphasis on negative “Fake” events seems to bring readers to the realization of how negative and atrocious the war really was. He speaks about how many individuals who go to war never come back, metaphorically because of the trauma that they endured. Tim begins to give us an understanding of the weight that they carry throughout the novel. He gives inanimate objects that are carried and metaphorical objects that are carried. Chewing gum, marijuana, mosquito repellant, and pocket knives are some of the real things that they carried. These are just essentials that were needed in order to participate in the war, to make it a little more enjoyable. When O’Brien describes his experience of when he received his letter, he shows the negativity towards the letter by explaining how he is going to pass the border at Canada and escape from the war. This event portrays how when soldiers were enlisted in the war without question how negative and terrible it would feel for people of that time to receive that letter. Solder’s like O’Brien in Vietnam carried many real objects but the ones that they didn’t carry and developed over war, lasted a lifetime.

The physical things they carried were simple, marijuana, pocket knives, mosquito repellant, and chewing gum. Many of the soldiers carried these items because they come in handy. Many of the characters carry objects based on their priorities. Ted Lavender was the only one in the war who carried tranquilizers, he used this to take the edge off of all the pressure and stress from the war. Henry Dobbins carries extra rations because he wants to be prepared for anything that happens. Henry also carries his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck to bring him some support and hope about home. Kiowa carries an illustrated new testament because it was a gift from his father that he wanted to remember him by. All the men carry an M16 and some carry objects that would be helpful in the long run like, tents, raincoats compressed into a poncho, some even carry grenade launchers. Depending on your role in the war you carry different things, Jimmy Cross carries compasses. Rat Kiley carries morphine, malaria tablets, and supplies for the injured. Other people’s objects were used widely among each other when Ted Lavender got shot, all of his friends around him waited for a helicopter but smoked his marijuana to reduce the stress of the situation. In the end, before Ted got picked up, they were perceived as laughing and joking around about the situation. When each of the characters carries objects of their own, they come together and have many objects that can help many people. Whether short term or long term, the objects that they carry allows for trust among each other. Trust in this war is essential because the brotherly ties that they create causes for a better experience in the hardships that they are enduring.

Negative and difficult events happen throughout the war; moreover, the objects that they carry contribute towards the things they don’t carry, yet feel. Every character carries the weight of the back home. The Jimmy Cross lives his life as the lieutenant, the object that he has to carry is the responsibility for the men’s lives. He is the man that has to deal with every time someone gets shot or hurt and has to make the executive decision towards how to move forth. They carry the weight of expectations and the weight of everyone watching back home. They carry the weight of supporting your fellow soldiers. The weight of not knowing what you will come home to after the war.  O’Brien one night received a seventeen-page letter from Norman Bowker explaining how his life is useless after the war. Norman came back home and tried to get a job. When he finally got a low-income job he then found that he could not maintain it. Keeping a job after the war was difficult because the employees working with you did not support the war as well as everyone around you. Not only this but the result of how PTSD affects your daily life causes you to go crazy. The objects that they don’t carry are the ones that affect them the most. It is the object that they are always thinking about and eventually consumes you.

The effect of the things they carry is everlasting throughout their life. The literal things they carry is for support and to keep the soldiers sane. The metaphorical yet real weight that they carry has an everlasting effect. The weight they carry leads from the war to home too. Solder’s like O’Brien in Vietnam carry many real objects but the ones that they didn’t carry and developed over war, lasted a lifetime. War is traumatizing, it is miserable, Tim’s description of war and the effects on him and everyone around him are dramatic an especially real. We need to step back, read this book, move past the common use of metafiction and pay attention to the ideas and moments of reality that go right over our heads.

By Sam Gumprecht

Today’s society claims to be far off from the horrifying and wild society of the Puritan times, but that belief is false. There are many elements that make our society different from that of the witch hunting, self concerned Puritans, such as a more free moral system that’s open to interpretation. The Puritan society kept more people in line with its rigid, religious structure compared to our fluid system. Furthermore, just because today people do not say things to others’ faces like the Puritans did does not make us more moral. We claim to be more accepting, but just because we shove aside topics that are sensitive doesn’t mean people are ok with them. Though both societies had lots of differences, both are equally as immoral. Our society today is directly rooted in the past Puritan ideals, yet we choose to disassociate with it. Today our society is just as corrupt in its morality as it was in Puritan times because our moral dilemmas haven’t disappeared, they simply morphed into new versions of the same old problems..

The first morality issue that has morphed from the Puritan society into today’s is the act of falsely criminalizing innocent people. In the Puritan towns a plague of witch accusations swept over the people, as explained in the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Those who ranked higher in the social hierarchy of the town would accuse those who they thought were suspicious or easy targets of being witches. Accusing someone of being a witch essentially was one of the worst things to be accused of back then. Some of the innocent people were put to death and others thrown in jail for long periods of time. Today we have a different version of falsely accusing people. Many innocent, young black men are being shot and killed by police officers, just because they “seemed” dangerous. The involved police officers unjustly accused the men of being unsafe based solely on how they looked or what the officers thought they were doing. They targeted them just because they were different in the society and making assumptions criminalising them. The new problem doesn’t seem much better in terms of morality than it did back in Puritan times. (Miller)

Another issue that flows from one society to another is how, as a whole, society shames women. In many public cases of sexual assault or something to do with a relationships between a man and woman, the women are shamed more often than the men. In the Puritan society men were held in a high authority compared to women who were expect to sit pretty and tend to the house. That meant women were the subjects of blame nine times out of ten, a prime example being Hester in the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hester committed adultery, and her partner was Dimmesdale. But only one of them received the brutal social shaming and ostracization, and it was Hester. Even when the time came for Dimmesdale to finally come clean about his sin, the people still praise him, and he dies avoiding the shame that came with the reveal. Throughout the whole novel, Hester is left to bear the wait of a sin of two people and the society chooses to ignore the other half of the relationship. (Hawthorne) In today’s society we have the same problem it has just moved to modern circumstances. We have moved on from sending women out to the woods to wear a red letter in solitude, to publicly shaming them on national television. A current example of women being shamed is the public dispute between Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. She accused the then-running Supreme Court justice of sexual assault and immediately was attacked. Claims were made that she was doing it just to throw the election, that she was lying, or plainly just attacking her. “Ford’s voice was called ‘manipulative,’ a distraction, and an indication that she was lying under oath by some commenters” (Sole).  Once again society is shaming the woman and not the other half of the dilemma. Shaming women nowadays and back then doesn’t really seem like much progress for our society. We need to learn how to hear both sides and not judge automatically just like how the Puritans needed to learn back then.

Another flaw that morphed from the Puritan past into today is plainly judging those who are not the same as everybody else. In the novel The Crucible the people of the society that didn’t fit exactly with everyone else were targeted by the more powerful. These people were either accused of witchcraft because they didn’t fit in or were ostracized by society. John Proctor in the novel is one of the people in the society who just didn’t quite fit in. “In Proctor’s presence a fool felt his foolishness instantly” (Miller 20); this explains how Proctor stood out, by not letting anyone slide with anything and just didn’t go along with everyone else’s ideas. This meant he experienced a lot of calumny towards him from the other people in the town. Another figure in the society who was judged for being different was Tituba, the Parris’s slave. This one is obvious; she was an outcast because she had a different skin tone. She was another blamed for being a witch purely because she was different. Lastly is Sarah Good, a sweet homeless lady who had never done anything wrong to anyone in the society and was purley targeted by the witch hunt because she was different and vulnerable (Miller). All three of these people were outcast simply because they didn’t roll with the rest of the society and fit in.

Just like in the Puritan’s judgemental society, today we judge those who are different than us, such as assuming that all Muslims are terrorists, trying to show women that beautiful is only stick skinny, or not allowing the LGBTQ community to fully be themselves. All of these instances are our society forcing out those who aren’t the cookie cutter society participant. The society went from judging and accusing those of witchcraft who were different to modern day society judging those who don’t fit the mold of current society.

Just from these three examples of judging those who are different, unjustly making assumptions about others and blaming others who aren’t equal as us; it shows how our society is not any better than it was all those years ago. Our society has morphed, like a lot of other aspects of our world today, into a different version of moral issues. Though we want to tear away from the deep set roots of our society’s puritanical morals, we can’t they grow and morph with our society.  

Works Cited

(2018) Christine Blasey Ford is being shamed for her ‘annoying’ voice. AOLcom.

https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2018/09/28/christine-blasey-ford-is-being-shamed-for-having-vocal-fry-heres-what-that-is/23544861/ [Accessed November 9, 2018].

Miller A (1996) The crucible (Penguin Books, New York, N.Y.).

Hawthorne N,  (2009) Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (Wiley).

Throughout modern history, we are filled with lies, truths, and assumptions about history. Many historians have made strong attempts to find the history of the United States and to discover how we have progressed over time. History is very accurate with many individuals living through important times in our history but nothing is compared and as relevant as modern day history. We are living in and through history and it is something that we fail to recognize. The United States has one of the deepest and well-thought histories has led us to have very accurate assumptions and facts about how we have progressed as humans. All the terrible and outstanding events that have happened have led us to where we are today. The time period that we are living in as of now is filled with great events that have positively affected our daily lives; many events also has led us to negatively affect our lives also. The most relevant and accurate understanding of our lives is right now, many of us tend to try and rewrite history but it is something that we fail to accurately depict. Modern day history has changed into many conflicting topics and ideas, I will try to accurately depict modern day times.

Conflicting topics have lived with all United States individuals throughout all of the time. How individuals identify has certainly been one of the most conflicting and widespread topics of our time. In the early 1900s identifying by anything other than male and female was hated on. In fact, you weren’t allowed to identify by anything other than male and female without receiving immense backlash. In that time period though, the United States had many more widespread problems besides gender identification. Slavery and race identification was by far the most conflicting topic. Even now, colored individuals seem to have daily life problems with their race. Our modern-day events have seemed to accurately tell us that we still have racial problems and they seem to not go away. All over the news almost every day we see black men getting shot by our law enforcement and it is something that is not going away.

In September 2015 I am an African American man, who lives in New York. I currently work at Mcdonalds’ and recently graduated high school. I am the first in my family to graduate high school and am planning on going to community college. My family and I live in a low-income neighborhood and have trouble paying the bills. I have a wealthy grandfather that lives in new york and he is paying for my community college tuition because he is extremely proud of me. My neighborhood is filled with drug and alcohol abuse and I have tried everything to keep myself away from it. Everyone in my family does not support me going to college and wants me to join their drug group because they don’t believe I can make it that far. I always say that I plan to become a business owner and have high aspirations with my life.

Every day I face extreme hardships; driving to college is by far my scariest moment. At 6:30 in the morning I have to drive down streets and down alleyways just so I can make it to the place where I can be most successful. Success is not given in modern society, I have everyone on my butt about joining gangs and organized drug groups and I have to always find an excuse. “My mom is expecting me home for dinner now”, or “I’ll think about it and get back to you.” I live my life scared yet excited to move out of this terrible place. The cops see me as a good kid but I constantly see them roaming up and down our roads trying to catch people. My current life right now is not abrupt, I have a goal and I will achieve this goal.

TW: suicide, self harm, hospitals, mental health in general

I consider the end of my childhood to be in May of 2017. Summer of 2016 through summer of ‘17, my sister, mom, dad, and me were on a trip in an RV throughout the United States. This whole time, I had been struggling more and more with my mental health. I had fallen into unhealthy coping mechanisms and was extremely suicidal and anxious all the time. While the air started to get warmer and the earth exploded into the colors of flowers and the scent of freshly cut grass and the chirping of birds early in the morning, I was self harming, not eating, and writing suicide notes pretty frequently. I would take them and stick them in a notebook that I kept by my bed, along with a log of what I’d eaten for the day. I just kept falling deeper and deeper, and I didn’t know how to save myself. While all of this was happening, no one in my family knew I was struggling. That all changed the day of May 5th, 2017.

That morning, I was getting ready for my APUSH test, and I left my phone up in my bed because I couldn’t bring it into the testing room. For months after I would regret leaving my phone ringer on so much, but now I recognize that it probably saved my life. While I was in the test, unbeknownst to me, my phone rang. My mom went up into my bed to answer it and found my notebook. My parents went from thinking that I was a healthy and happy cis girl to knowing that I was a severely depressed trans teenager in the time it takes you to read half a handwritten page. When I got out of my test, they told me that they found my notebook, and read through all of my notes. They wanted to talk to me, to ask me why I was so depressed when I seemed so fine all of the time, and why I didn’t tell them. They felt like I betrayed their trust by not telling them that I was struggling, and I was angry and I felt like they betrayed my privacy by reading my private journal. I was so hurt and honestly shocked that they found the most private things I had, and read them, that I wouldn’t have a real conversation with them for days. Avoiding the eyes of my parents because they knew my biggest secret was tearing me apart, and I just continued to get worse. They rushed me home from our trip, and sent me into therapy, but they really didn’t get that I had a seriously life threatening problem until a couple of weeks after, when my new therapist told them I needed to be in a hospital because I was unsafe and had suicide plans. They told me I probably wouldn’t be admitted because I wasn’t that bad, and that I didn’t really need to be there. Their favorite line was “it just seemed like you were doing so well!” When I arrived at the hospital, after seven hours of waiting in the dark and imposing part of the ER devoted to children’s psychiatrics, I was admitted as soon as we talked to a nurse.

The hospital is what I really consider the end of my childhood. I was one of the youngest people there, and it was altogether terrifying. I could have never imagined what it would be like to sleep alone in a room with bars on the windows until I’d done it, and I was scared out of my mind. But for me, the worst part was coming home.

All my life, my parents had given me a lot of trust and independence, and after the hospital it was gone. It was so painful for me to see that no one believed me anymore, and that my level of supervision was exponentially larger. Even now, two years later, I’m regaining trust my parents had for me. They check my scars when I act ‘suspicious’ to make sure I’m not hurting myself anymore, and my phone still isn’t allowed to be plugged in in my room at night. The path to forging new trust is long and tedious, and I don’t think it will ever be the same as it was before they found my journal, but every day they trust me a little more. My childhood ended the day I had to step up and let myself get help.

Throughout Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, various gory, graphic, and disturbing images are described. But parallel to these horrors, O’Brien describes beauty: beauty in the mountains or the jungle, beauty in the relationships between his friends, beauty in the villagers, beauty in the memories they carry. O’Brien shows us the hell of war, but he also shows us the less hellish parts. War may be hell, yes, but war is not only hell. Nothing is just one thing, and O’Brien uses these contrasts in his writing to demonstrate the ambiguity of war and of life as a whole.

Tim’s memories of Vietnam are scattered. He remembers the pain, but also the milder moments. Though Vietnam was a war, it was also his life.

“I remember these things, too. The damp, fungal scent of an empty body bag. A quarter moon rising over the nighttime paddies. Henry Dobbins sitting in the twilight, sewing on his new buck-sergeant stripes, quietly singing, “A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow basket.” A field of elephant grass weighted with wind, bowing under the stir of a helicopter’s blades, the grass dark and servile, bending low, but then rising straight again when the chopper went away. A red clay trail outside the village of My Khe. A hand grenade. A slim, dead, dainty young man of about twenty. Kiowa saying, “No choice, Tim. What else could you do?” Kiowa saying, “Right?” Kiowa saying, “Talk to me””(O’Brien, 35).

This list-like format shows some of how his memories work. Everything is blended together, and there is no separation of the good and the bad. The dead man is right there by Dobbin’s singing, the grass swaying in the wind is complemented by the foreboding of the helicopter blades. His memories are ambiguous, just as the idea of the Vietnam war was.

As he moves deeper into the book, the bad gets worse. There is more death, more gore, more pain, but also more beauty. He starts to point out the flowers in the trees, the sunlight, the butterflies, the natural beauty that surrounds him. As the horror comes into clearer focus, so does everything else. When Curt Lemon, Rat Kiley’s best friend and a member of the platoon, dies, O’Brien’s description is layered.

“There was a noise, I suppose, which must’ve been the detonator, so I glanced behind me and watched Lemon step from the shade into bright sunlight. His face was suddenly brown and shining. A handsome kid, really. Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms”(O’Brien 67).

As he describes the death of a friend that the reader later on learns to be quite violent, his mind is drawn towards the beauty of his surroundings. He sees the sunlight, in this religious comparison of Lemon being drawn up towards the heaven in a beam of light, and lush greenery of the tree above him. Throughout the book, O’Brien talks a lot about the necessity of showing these beautiful things, too.

He once states that a true story is one that you feel in your stomach. By using these ideas of beauty and horror together, he brings the war closer to the reader. Readers may not be able to identify with the violence, but they can identify with the beauty. This normalization and demonstration that even though the soldiers are in horrific situations, life goes on shows the readers that soldiers are learning to live like that, and that their lives don’t stop just because they are at war. War is hell, but it also everything else in their lives. War is as multifaceted and layered as peace is, and nothing can be put into such simple boxes so easily.

In this same vein, in the chapter “The Man I Killed”, he describes the body of the young man.

“His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman’s, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him”(O’Brien 119).

As his mind reels from the panic of killing a man (in story truth, at least), he doesn’t just see the gore. His eyes are drawn to everything about the man, and that doesn’t stop at just the injuries. The truth of this man is not only death. If O’Brien were to just describe that, he would be betraying the emotion and the story-truth. This man is more than death. This man has a history, a life. This man is a metaphor for war as a whole.

Throughout this entire story, Tim O’Brien uses contrasts of beauty and horror to bring the reader closer to the truth.

“War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead. The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty”(O’Brien 77).

He is showing us the reality of war- war is just as multifaceted and layered as peace is, and the use of these contrasts make us feel, make us believe, and make us understand the reality as much as possible as readers.

One sunny and bright day, a young boy by the name of John was swimming with 4 of his friends, Jerry, Liam, Todd, and Skip. They were at a swimming hole about 1 mile from their neighborhood that they have swum at for the past 3 years. This swimming hole was very remote and not many people knew about it which was why John didn’t like going there, but he went with them anyway. John was a particularly curious fellow, he had a passionate desire to be adventurous especially in nature. This swimming hole had a huge twenty-foot cliff that the boys loved jumping off. Most of the time this went from a fun cliff jump to a competition to see who could jump the farthest, or who could make the least amount of splash. The boys had known each other since their childhood so the bond these boys had was unbreakable. The boys were surprised when John said, “Hey guys, I think I am gonna jump first!”. The boys were astonished because they knew how much John despised this place. When Paul finally became composed and jumped he flew, his arms flailing, eyes huge, mouth open; he hit the water like a wall of bricks. The boys watched amazed and tediously waiting to see his reaction when he reached the surface. The problem was he never reached the surface. The wait seemed to be everlasting, John’s friends kept thinking he was just pulling a prank and holding his breath but this joke was almost surreal. As they never saw John reach the surface the boys turned to plan b which was that they needed to jump in after him. The boys took their clothes off and jumped in as fast as they could. They couldn’t find John!

The boys couldn’t find John but he managed to venture into a cave on the near side of the swimming hole. John became lost, he walked and walked and walked but yet he couldn’t find a way out. He yelled for his friends, “JERRY!, LIAM!, TODD!, SKIP!” They couldn’t hear him. As he walked more and more he started to realize that he wasn’t going to find his way out. He sat down and began to cry. Suddenly out of nowhere, he hears a noise, it was almost like someone was talking in the distance like someone was arguing. The noise got closer and closer. It got to the point where this noise sounded like it was right next to John. John was scared, so scared, he wanted to ask who was there but he didn’t want someone to hear him. He thought that they might hurt him. Finally, John had enough and asked, “HELLO! Who’s there”. There was a response. It wasn’t what he expected. Nothing he expected at all. It began with a crunch, then another crunch, then another. Finally, there was a squeal, so loud that John screamed. This was a beast it chased John through narrow passages and caves. John couldn’t run anymore, he had to face the beast head-on. So he stopped in the midst of complete darkness. He said come! Come! I am not scared of you! He heard one crunch, two crunches, three crunches. All of a sudden the beast jumped on him and began trying to bite his arm. But out of nowhere Skip runs with his baseball bat and starts hitting the beast, he swung so many time that the beast was dead. John flew up in excitement, he always knew he could count on his friends in the scariest moments.

John was scared, really scared, but sometimes you have to be faithful and trust that something good will come out of it.

In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, there is a strong representation of ambiguity within characters. The ambiguity is represented in many forms. Nick’s moral ambiguity is revealed, which raises questions about morality as a whole. F. Scott Fitzgerald illustrates a world with many different and strange characters. These characters cannot easily be categorized as good or bad, black or white, rather, they are more grey. Nick Carraway is the novel’s most ambiguous character. His moral ambiguities cause people to question their morals and identify the greys of situations,  how they are sometimes neither good nor bad. Nick’s trustworthiness, in particular, causes him to experience a lot of ambiguity. When he experiences Daisy and Gatsby dance right in front of him, he never tells Tom about an affair which is terrible and immoral. Another way ambiguity is represented by Nick’s inability to speak up for himself. He finds himself in many situations where he takes a step back instead of engaging directly in the situation.

Nick tells readers his greatest attribute is his trustworthiness. However, he will commit his time and energy to keep others secrets that if let out into the real Gatsby world the novel would change entirely. “Don’t bring Tom,” I warned her. (Fitzgerald 83) When Nick says ‘don’t bring Tom’, this is right after he invites Daisy over for tea. Nick is ultimately encouraging the affair, his idea to tell the cousin not to bring her husband sets them up for disaster. Nick’s sly way of contributing to these negative events has caused this to be a neverending theme for him. He is known to be very trustworthy but his stealthy contributions eventually ruin the marriages in this novel. He knows about the affair between Gatsby and Daisy but he knows that anything he says will ruin Tom’s outlook on Daisy but also everyone’s view of him. By not telling anyone, he preserves his relationships with Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom while keeping everything quiet. Affairs in modern times are perceived as a bad and terrible thing. When the Fitzgerald takes this event and shows how Nick feels very impartial to the affair, this changes the idea of an ‘affair’ and makes it something not wrong, not right, but something that is rather left up to interpretation. Another example of Nick’s constant trustworthiness is shown when Nick keeps the secret of Tom’s affair with Myrtle and pushes for it. Nick’s complicitness in this affair causes Tom to feel trust and for Nick to yet again keep a secret. “You see, cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. “It’s really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic, and they don’t believe in divorce.” “Daisy was not a Catholic, I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of that lie”.(Fitzgerald 33) Nick listens and observes but seldomly opposes what Catherine says because he knows that Tom and Daisy are not Catholic. He is shocked because the elaborateness of the lie shows that Tom has sparked this lie and made it sound like an actual excuse. Nick’s attention to the elaborateness of the lie shows that he thinks this is too far. He didn’t expect Tom to continuously lie about Daisy being Catholic. This causes their friends to assume that this is the reason they won’t get a divorce. When Nick and Tom go up to New York they decided to go visit his mistress. This trip is when Nick finds all of Toms lies and fibs.  Again Nick is surrounded by lies and he stays loyal to people by keeping their dirty little secrets.

Nick seems to find these ambiguous situations through his inability to speak up for himself many times. Nick’s role as a man who sits back also makes him just as responsible as the people around him. This shows his laziness but also shows that he is trying to protect Daisy. This comes with a sense of loyalty also with Nick being loyal to his friends. Nick knows that Daisy killed Myrtle and he never tells anyone. This shows respect towards staying out of it. The idea of never sharing things come with a sense of either trustworthiness or laziness. Although Nick is contradictory in his feelings for Gatsby when he stands back and says, “I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog horn was groaning incessantly on the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams. Toward dawn, I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive, and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress—I felt that I had something to tell him, something to warn him about, and morning would be too late.” (Fitzgerald 147) Nicks inability to not only help him by warning him, but not even choosing to anything about it. He could condem him and turn him over to the police but that presents a negative outlook on Nick and he can’t deal with that. This idea that Nick does not do either of these things makes him ambiguous. Representing our repetative theme of Nick refraining from engaging in the chaos and instead being lazy.

The overall theme in Nick that encaps ambiguity is his ability to not engage in actions that could hurt him, not physically but socially. Nick is the most educated character in that he knows almost all the gossip. If any other character was placed in the same situations, they would not be able to refrain from telling people about these secrets. Nick finds that letting things work themselves out on their own is more beneficial for himself. The laziness Nick shows is another reason that he is ambiguous. He has the ability to be trustworthy to others and yet play a factor in the destruction of characters and their marriage. His ambiguous self causes Nick to not only be the most interesting character but the most overlooked character in the novel.

It may seem counterintuitive that people- when people similar to them, with similar backgrounds, surround them- people free to interact and forge bonds with whomever they’d like to- tend to gravitate towards people with differences in interest and life stories, though rarely those who vary in ethics- and that they get along so well- seemingly much better than people who are very similar to them in personality. But there is a draw, an almost imperceptible tug of attraction, a magnetic yet undeniable pull towards those who differ in idea, in presentation, in origin from yourself, that can’t be ignored. These differences don’t separate us from each other, just pull us closer out of pure intrigue, a force that can’t be explained. It is as if inherently, humans crave diversity, so much so that two people too similar can’t seem to get along. All other senses tell us to gravitate to those similar to us, but those relationships so rarely work out in the grand scheme of life. The magnet that attracts opposites to each other is also one that repels those too similar.

It might be, too –that those who are similar find competition in their everyday actions, that every moment of interaction, even in passing, feels like the sickly shudder of nails running down a chalkboard– that causes an exhausting relationship. This phenomena, against all intuition, so almost imperceptible yet unable to be ignored, is that those too close to other in personality will clash with such a force that often one cannot stand to be around the other. Over and over again, the tempter of souls draws us to certain individuals, for reasons often unknowable at first, that don’t get much clearer with time, that pull us to our opposites and away from people to like ourselves. Though the idea of befriending those like you is pleasant in theory, like magnets two beings too similar will repel each other. What we compel ourselves to believe, that we need people like us, is not what we find ourselves to know, from examining your closest relationships, that finally, we understand why this phenomenon occurs. Human beings crave enlightenment; and perchance the reason that we seek others so varied is the intrinsic desire to broaden our horizons in a consistent manner.

By Sam Gumprecht

Home, the place I unwind, relax, and feel comfortable. It is a constant place in most people’s life.

There is a famous quote that goes “home is where the heart is.” As cheesy and cliche as that may sound, it is a perfect representation of what home is to me. All throughout my childhood, my little family hopscotched our way up and down New England, living in many different houses. The key word in that last sentence being house, because that’s just what they were, a building in which I lived. The import things about the house were what was inside, the home, the contents.

My home is my mom and my brother. With everything that I’ve been trialed with in my life the one thing that never left or changed was not the houses I lived in but the people who lived within them. Home as a constant comfortable place is my family.

The first half of my home is a warm, bright, powerful figure. She has shining eyes, a soft smile and a loud personality. She stands tall and voices her opinion, no matter the circumstance. She is strong and resilient and has been through alot. She is worn. But she soothes my greatest worries with a single touch as she wraps her arms around me and calms me. This half of my home knows me better than I know myself. She is the strong weight bearing walls and supportive of my  a home gives its inhabitants.

My home’s other half consists of a hilarious, smiley, and kind hearted soul. He has sunny blonde hair, a very contagious giggle, and a sassy attitude. This half never fails to make my stomach hurt with laughter and will always give me his best advice though I’m the older one. He is always the one I tell my problems to because I know he’ll always listen. We huddle up spilling stories and the daily drama on our beds and little does he know how much I value his tidbits of advice.

My family has been the comfort of my life and given me the best they could in our mixed up circumstances. I don’t think a simple house could give the security that my home gives me. If home is where the heart is my heart is in my people.