Self Reflection

When I signed up for this class, I had so many great ideas about what I was going to accomplish and how I was going to expand my writing and reading. I had high hopes that I would use this class as an excuse to actually be able to write down the ideas and stories that had been floating around in my head. To be honest though, I am a little disappointed with how little I have accomplished for this class. I had really hoped to really get the creative writing juices flowing, but I have lost my creative writing spark a bit. I had really hoped to be writing lots of short stories and expanding all of the little ideas I have. Yet I haven’t really done to much of that. 

I have however, completed three books; Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and Into the Wild by Jon Krakeuer. And I am almost done reading Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, with The Virgin Suicides the next stop on my list. This class has given me a real reason to read and explore these books, as well as delve into their film adaptations. I keep a notebook when reading and after every section of reading I reflect on and summarize what I have read and write down quotes I find interesting. I use this notebook as reference when I write the book reviews and when I write about the quotes. 

I have written a few short stories in the course of this class. But they are pretty dark and aren’t really the kind of writing that I would really want to share with many others. But I am happy with the little bit of writing I have done. I have a little notebook that I got for this class and I find myself writing in it  lot. Bits and pieces of stories, little snippets of dialogue I hear, random ideas, the writing prompts, and poems. I have been writing a lot more little poems, or just verse style writing. Not something I did too much of in the past. I am also very pleased with what I have filled this little notebook with. 

With the last month and a half remaining, I really hope to get myself together and just get things done. I really hope to stop using this class as a time to finish work, and more of a time to start work and create work. I want to end the year with a substantial amount of work accomplished. I really want to be able to have a folder full of the work that I have done and to be proud of what I have done. 

Quotes from Into the Wild

“‘[S]eemed like a kid who was looking for something, looking for something, just didn’t know what is was’” (Krakeuer 42). 

“Unlike most of us, he was the sort of person who insisted on living out his beliefs” (Krakeuer 67).

“‘There was always a wanderlust in the family, and it was clear early on that Chris had inherited it” (Krakeuer 108). 

“The whole idea was to lose out bearings, to push ourselves into unknown territory. Then we’d run at a slightly slower pace until we found a road we recognized and race home again at full speed. In a sense that’s how Chris lived his entire life” (Krakeuer 112).

These were my favorite quotes from the book because I felt that they really captured the essence of Chris as others saw him. They are all from different people as well, his family, his friends, and  mere acquaintances. Because Into the Wild is the story of Chris’s life as told by others, we never really here what he has to say about all this, and we never get his own description of himself. However, I thought these were the best descriptions because they really connected with the actions and decisions that Chris made on his journey to Alaska. It is interesting to me the way the author tried to delve so deeply into Chris’s life without ever having the chance to talk to Chris. And interesting the way the people he affected chose to describe him. From reading the book, I saw Chris as a go-getter, and as someone who made a decision and went with it and whatever else got thrown at him along that adventure. These four quotes seemed really accurate to me from what I took away from the book about Chris.  

Words

When I read 

What others have written

I am impressed and amazed 

with the way 

the words they write all flow 

like a beautiful and raging river

and fit perfectly together like the 

pieces of a puzzle to create a 

greater more powerful and meaningful 

work of art. 

And when I write

the words are there, stuck in my 

throat as I try to force them up 

and when they do come, it is 

like vomiting up a jumbled mess of

words that must be carefully 

sorted into sensible and meaningful

sentences which always seem, to be 

missing something, like a flower that 

has dropped one of its petals or

an ant who has had a leg 

ripped off by a schoolboy 

because my writing is fine

it’s just not complete 

not fully there and not perfect 

and symmetrical, it’s only 

decent  

Who are the real Monsters? 

The real monsters

aren’t scary-looking at all 

They don’t have long claws 

or misshapen bodies 

They don’t hide in you closet 

or under your bed

They don’t howl at the moon 

or live in the shadows 

Their eyes don’t glow red 

and their teeth aren’t sharp like knives

They don’t haunt you at night 

and disappear in the daylight 

The real monsters live among us 

inside of us 

We are the real monsters 

The Road: Movie vs. Book

I found I was equally disappointed with the movie version of The Road as I was by the book itself. The movie did however hold pretty true and close to the book. It left parts out and added in more details to make the movie make more sense. As well as adding in more detailed and descriptive flashbacks. A huge difference was that the movie was narrated by the man, where is the book is in third person omniscient. Having the movie narrated by the man actually made the story easier to follow and I actually liked it a lot more. It was a little hard to watch at times, seeing the very disturbing scenes is very different from reading them. Visually the movie was pretty powerful, the whole film had a very grey and foggy tint to it, making it seem like a real post-apocalyptic world. The only things that had color were fires, and the food, which seems symbolic in a way. The things that are keeping the man and the boy alive are the things that radiate color. Overall I did like the movie as a visual element, but I was still disappointed with how it dragged and its predictability (part of that was the fact that I had read the book, but still..). Both the book and the movie had a lot of potential, but I was ultimately let down. 

Quotes from The Road

“He’d carried his billfold about till it wore a corner-shaped hole in his trousers. Then one day he sat by the roadside and took it out and went through its contents. Some money, credit cards. His driver’s license. A picture of his wife. He spread everything out on the blacktop. Like gaming cards. He pitched the sweat-blackened piece of leather into the woods and sat holding the photograph. Then he laid it down in the road also and then he stood and they went on” (McCarthy 43-44). 

This scene almost brought tears to my eyes. This billfold was a metaphor for the world before the apocalypse and for the man’s life before the apocalypse. He was throwing away everything that was his old life and that was the old world. By throwing out his billfold and leaving the picture of his wife behind, the man had let go of his old life, of his dead wife, of everything that the world used to be. It was really a turning point in the story for the man. 

“This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up” (McCarthy 116). 

All throughout the book the boy and his father called themselves the ‘good guys’. The man said is was because they carried the fire. They were the good guys setting out against the world and the ‘bad guys’. I think it is one of their reasons for carrying on. And a way for the man to remind the boy that they need to carry on. 

“The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell” (McCarthy 152). 

I really liked this description of the new world. I thought this was a pretty good summary of what this world looked like, of the way things had twisted and changed, the way the people had twisted and changed. 

“They ate slowly out of china bowls, sitting at opposite sides of the table with a single candle burning between them. The pistol lying to hand like another dinning implement” (McCarthy 176). 

I loved the imagery in this scene. The boy and his father sharing a meal together, a candle between them, eating out of china bowls. It seems like a nice image, and then there is the gun, a reminder of what the world is really like, of what the man and his son really face. 

“Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it. Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of. Out on the tidal flats lay a tanker half careened. Beyond that the ocean vast and cold shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the gray squall line of ash. He looked at the boy. He could see the disappointment in his face. I’m sorry it’s not blue, he said. Thats okay, said the boy” (McCarthy 181). 

They finally make it to the coast, and it did not look like it once had. The man had always described it to the boy as this beautiful place with blue waves and a clean sandy beach. What they found was grey muddied water and a trash covered beach. It was just as destroyed as the rest of the world. 

“Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery” (McCarthy 241). 

This was the ending quote of the book. I thought it was an interesting way to end the book. From a broader point of view, rather than from the boy’s. Not exactly an hopeful ending, but not a depressing one either. The world would never be as it once had been. 

Review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Trapped in a post-apocalyptic world, a boy and his father travel through the barren wasteland that was once the world we know today. They travel down ‘the road’ knowing it will eventually bring them to the coast, and hoping it will bring them to a better place. The clothes on their back, a shopping cart filled with blankets and food, and a pistol for protection are the only things they carry. They live in a perpetual fear of running out of food, freezing to death, and being found by the cannibalistic people that now roam the ruined world. Struggling to beat the oncoming winter and stay alive, they pillage through the half burned homes of the dead. On their journey, they encounter other survivors, some good, and some bad. Fighting to keep alive they do “what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up” (McCarthy 116). Will the coast hold a brighter future for them? 

I have to say I was disappointed with this book. I had only heard good things about this book, and I found it to be not as enticing as I had hoped it would be. There were so many questions I had about the book. I was really curious about what had happened to bring the world to the wasteland it was. Very little is revealed about what brought the world to this current state, there were some allusions to disease and vast fires, but no blatant explanation. The way the book was written also lead to some confusion; no quotation marks were used and the dialogue was not followed by who said it. Overall I found the story very slow-moving, repetitive, and confusing. 

I would give this book a 6 out of 10. Like I mentioned, I had high hopes for the book when I started and I was left with disappointment and a lot of questions. I would recommend this book for those who enjoy reading about post-apocalyptic worlds and journey stories. However, this book is not for the faint of heart, there are many highly disturbing scenes throughout the novel. I did like this book though because it of its simple themes. More than anything this is a story about survival and human nature.