Ella's 20th Century Blog

  In Albert Camus’s The Stranger , Meursault is presented as a complex and almost unintelligible character. Seemingly unaffected by the world around him, he lives in the moment and does what comes most naturally to him without regard for the broader impact of his actions. Meursault’s neutrality by itself is no issue, but when he is exposed to certain conditions, he acts in somewhat unthinkable ways, like his seemingly random killing of the Arab man. While some may say that it is Meursault’s inability to perceive the outside world that causes him to act in these irrational and nonsensical ways, I’d argue that it is exactly Meursault’s perception of the outside world that influences his actions. More specifically, while he perceives the outside world perfectly, he lacks serious internal processing that allow for him to react in a sensical manner.       While Meursault is being questioned after killing the man, he makes an interesting comment about his nature: “I e...

          An interesting feature of The Sun Also Rises is the way Hemingway handles the setting shift from Paris to Spain and coinciding shift in writing style. Paris is painted as a chaotic, overstimulating place through Jake’s narrative. This description is apparent the first time he describes a scene in the city: “It was a warm spring night and I sat at a table on the terrace of the Napolitain after Robert had gone, watching it get dark and the electric signs come on, and the red and green stop-and-go-traffic-signal, and the crowd going by, and the horse-cabs clip-ety clopping along at the edge of the solid taxi traffic, and the poules going by, singly and in pairs, looking for the evening meal,” (Hemingway, 19). The writing style of this sentence shows Jake’s mind as scattered, with Jake flitting back and forth from one object to another without any rhyme or reason. From this sentence alone, he seems overstimulated and unfocused, as if living within a...

Intersubjectivity and the Meeting of Minds in Mrs. Dalloway           Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway offers a unique perspective on its many facets of developing character, but perhaps one of the most fascinating is the weaving of multiple consciousness throughout the book, and the even more remarkable picture of when these consciousnesses collide. I think a particularly key use of this technique was in the scene between Peter and Clarissa reuniting after years apart. As Peter Walsh walked into the house he began thinking, “She’s looking at me, he thought, a sudden embarrassment coming over him, though he had kissed her hands. Putting his hand into his pocket, he took out a large pocket knife and half opened the blade…‘How heavenly it is to see you again!’ she exclaimed. He had his knife out. That’s so like him, she thought,” (Woolf 39). On the surface level, this dialogue is already quite enjoyable to read and dissect. From a glance, a reader with no cont...

The goal of many literary works has often been to capture what it means exactly to be a living, breathing human. While most fall short, bound to the unspoken laws of convention and plot, The Mezzanine differs from these works by narrowing the majority of its focus to the pure, unfiltered human experience. The first way Baker does this, and the most crucial, is by having the entirety of his book cover a tiny, seemingly insignificant, interval in a perfectly normal day. By focusing the time frame of the book on such a small instance, the thoughts of Howie are magnified a hundredfold, just as thoughts of actual humans sometimes seem to be. Every thought is immediately given more significance; more time to breathe and expand to its full capacity. An example of this is Howie’s thoughts about shoelaces, in which he expresses his pleasure at having both shoelaces break within two days of each other: “Apparently my shoe-tying routine was so unvarying and robotic that over those hundreds of mo...