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Thursday, July 1, 2010
having a good time reading through online critiques of huck finn. looks like i'll be relying almost solely on huck and paddy to see me through- seriously, siddhartha is just unfascinating and, as a whole, boring. calling siddhartha's englightenment a 'climax' is hardly doing justice to the word. wait, i might actually do siddhartha if they ask us to critique/find fault with our part 3 works. i'd target hesse's horribly failed attempts (imo) at portraying his own journey to 'enlightenment' (do you think hesse himself experienced enlightenment?) and the ambiguity whether kamala and govinda become enlightened. then move on to attack the deus ex machina in huck finn. paddy clarke is perfect and doesn't deserve to be ravaged.
In the end, all those who seek enlightenment find it. It is significant that Govinda and Kamala become enlightened through Siddhartha's help - http://www.novelguide.com/siddhartha/themeanalysis.html
does this happen? not in my opinion. kamala dies an inglorious, bloody and perhaps unnecessarily uninteresting death. bitten by a snake? oh come on hesse surely you could've summoned up some indian tiger instead to make her death more...profoundly interesting? poor kamala anyway, there weren't any antibody injections then, hm. that would've worked better than that dubious 'healing potion' they gave her. her claim that she had been enlightened ('i have found peace' or something like that) was probably so siddhartha wouldn't be too sad when she died.
govinda, on the other hand, is a far more intriguing figure and (imo) is to some extent a caricature of the follower stereotype (oh and ever still present in today's world). the last we see of him is him breaking down after kissing siddartha. yes, these two have a veryyyy intimate relationship. since young. brokeback mountain much? you could argue that the book ends on an anticlimax- we do not see what siddhartha or govinda did after that.
the notion that freudian/jungian dream interpretation/concepts (id, ego, subconscious etc...) can be impressed onto hesse's writings to make more sense out of them is also shaky (imo). as was explained in class- the dream sequences are more or less explicit. from my mini expeditions to wiki's page on dream interpretation last and this year, i recall at best as i can: freud's foundations on dream interpretation mainly focus on the fact that dreams dwell on wish fulfillment. jung was a student of his, found this idea too restrictive and introduced his own understanding that dreams embodied a bigger part of life, more than wish fulfillment. i can't remember much else- the concepts in there are very abstract and i failed a lot in trying to understand them. i may revisit them after the exams for the fun of it, though.
alright i can't say i've read much about the application of the above concepts to siddhartha much but i have not seen any so far. at all. anyway, the association with the book with the eight-fold path and four-fold something blablabla etc seems highly irrelevant too; how do these match up? easy- they don't. i don't see why they teach things in lectures that are not even relevant to the book. i mean, even as cultural context...it's not like we had to have a basic understanding of the groundwork of buddhisim before jumping into sidd. props to english strand 2 lessons for bringing this up anyway, i didn't notice that till it was mentioned.
english strand 2 lessons are fun! i like how things are taught in a way they broaden our views and opens up so much more to us- all hail the lucky dragon for pointing out the archetypal figures in siddhartha and the mediation of paddy in the instance where he focuses on the breathing of Da, Ma and the plant. that was really fun. there is so much of a link to literature to psychology, life and social issues (in my opinion) rather than just literary devices >> themes. so much! it is a pity this isn't pointed out often, or at all.
i still think paddy is the best pick out of the three, with huck finn coming a close second. i do not understand why, of all books, we have to do siddhartha.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildungsroman
look! look! so many to choose from and we had to get possibly the most rotten book ever. dickens's novels would've been so much better and interesting imo. then again, it's setting isn't too unlike that of paddy's- they probably chose siddhartha to give us more breadth of setting/cultural context to discuss.
okay rant time over, i have about 2.5 hours to sort out paddy and huck. paper 2 is amazingly simple if you know your texts thoroughly. that means more than just memorizing quotes and knowing how to extrapolate from them. doing that incurs you the risk of the inability to apply them should unsuitable questions come out...knowing the text, however, will probably get you set in the right direction once you grasp the question.
otherwise, if the very rare occasion where you find that your quotes are completely inapplicable to either question, you'll be left floundering with a boatful of useless quotes and trying to guess the lesser of the two evils to be attempted.
shucks, why is my laptop taking so long to recharge. i hope i'll be able to memo the quotes by tonight, sigh. i think the exam should be open book, you know, for the sake of not having to memorize quotes. maybe that'd give us a better incentive to get to know the text well instead of having to spend half our time drilling those idiotic quotes into our head.
seriously, the dialect in huck finn doesn't help. jim's quotes can be mindbenders while huck's/tom's aren't much better. paddy's lingo doesn't make things any easier, too. this is probably the sole part where siddhartha wins- quotes from the book are, relatively, the easiest to memorize.
oh darn look at the time. sigh better get to huck and paddy- the only two books that will be worth any effort. should i throw in sidd? not doing so is unquestionably risky. ah i guess we'll see how things go.
7:58 AM
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