Kevin McGrath's X084 Intro to Lit Sec 002

Having read up through chapter 6 of “The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri, I am relieved at how linear and comprehendible Lahiri’s writing style is. “The Namesake” has so far been much easier and enjoyable to read than McEwan’s “Saturday” (which could stand to be trimmed down by about 70 pages) and Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” (which will never be a book that I would willfully read).
Chapters 4 through 6 (as well as the initial three chapters) brought several questions to my mind when it dealt with Gogol’s feeling of being an outcast because of his ethnic and familial background, questions such as: Are all minorities as constantly absorbed by their race as this? If I were in the minority, would I be as racially concerned as the Ganguli family? Do all people find fault with little things such as having their (admittedly difficult and uncommon) names mispronounced?
Speaking of that name, perhaps I’m just not reading enough into the story or am not grasping the author’s intentions, but I feel like Gogol’s name is becoming too much of an issue. I see the conflict that arises from it (it is an unusual name to both his American community and to his Bengali heritage, making him an outsider on both fronts), but I found his fierce aversion to it to be excessive, particularly the section in which his teacher Mr. Lawson reads the strange, disturbing story of Nikolai Gogol’s life. Such anxiety would have been understandable had Gogol’s classmates been drawing a connection between the twisted author and himself. But the class did not even look towards Gogol throughout the whole ordeal (though that was most likely intentional on the class’ part). If anything, he should have been relieved when Nikolai Gogol’s death linked itself to a supposedly anorexic girl in the class, thus further pulling Gogol out of the class’ attention.
However, with all of these thoughts inhabiting Gogol’s narrative, I found it to be a relief that his life is relatively normal. Despite his lack of dating throughout high school, he seems to live a relatively stable life, with his group of friends, appreciation of music like Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and strong academic performance. Also, I was not surprised by the tremendous drop in the prevalence of the Bengali culture after he moves on into his college years, further establishing his own personal identity.
Also, as the story progresses, I hope that Lahiri will return to the narrative points of view of Ashima and Ashoke as well as Gogol (or Nikhil, as he is now known at this point). I found that their experiences as Bengali immigrants raising children in an unusual, frequently contradictory, and often shocking society held my interest just as strongly as Gogol/Nikhil’s experiences within a Bengali/American culture clash.

Having just finished Book 4 of Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms,” I have completely lost all interest in Catherine Barkley as a character. It almost seems as if Hemingway has just given up on Catherine as a character. Her presence now just seems like a formality. If Catherine wasn’t there, much of Henry’s dialogue and action would revolve around missing and searching for her, and the reader would wonder what is happening with her and her baby; but since Henry manages to make it over to Stresa to reunite with Catherine, Hemingway is no longer burdened with having to detail his longing for her, and instead, she just seems to be there, without doing much else. She no longer as clingy and relentlessly inquisitive (“Are you happy, darling?” “Do you love me, darling?”) as she has been in the previous books. Instead, she is now dependably submissive, with much less to say.
Another thing that I find odd (and I also suspect may have been intentional on Hemingway’s part) is the fact that no matter where Henry finds himself, he always manages to be surrounded by people both willing and eager to go completely out of their way to assist him in his travels. For example, Simmons, his singer friend, and his wife Mrs. Simmons, offer Henry a place to stay and give him Simmons’ own clothes so that he will not be discovered. Also, Emilio, the barman, not only informs Henry of his imminent arrest, but also gives him and Catherine his boat, as well as sandwiches and brandy. He then allows Henry to pay him for the boat later, despite the fact that he and Emilio hardly even know each other. In fact, it seems that the only people who pose any kind of obstacle to Henry are his fellow soldiers, who shoot at him, abandon him, and attempt to arrest him, among other things.
I’m sure that it is no accident that Hemingway makes all of Henry’s antagonists in support of the war and all of his allies in opposition to it. It’s details like these that dispel any confusion whether or not “A Farewell to Arms” is a pro-war or an anti-war book. However, I think that this detail feels false when I consider that Henry isn’t so likable a character that people feel the urge to bend over backwards just to make his life easier. Perhaps it’s the fact that I oversee his interactions from a third-person point of view as opposed to interacting with him like his generous friends, but nothing about his personality or actions makes me see why a person would go to such lengths to help him, especially to the extent that Emilio goes after such a short time being acquaintances. My only guess is that it’s just an Italian thing.

As I initially started reading Book One of "A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway, I immediately assumed that this would not be an easy book to read. The first chapter, despite being only two pages long, and the earlier parts of the second chapter instantly left me confused and removed from the story. Right away the reader is injected into the narrator’s account of his surroundings, without giving any information about the narrator or the context of the situation. All I could gather was that our nameless narrator seemed to be involved in a war, and that, judging by the presence of a king, he was not in the United States. However, by about the fourth chapter, I was caught up on the basics of the story: our narrator is Lieutenant Henry, an American driving an ambulance for the Italians in World War I.
While reading the story, I was struck by how much the lives of Henry and the other men reminded me of a fraternity. The men all live in a villa and eat together, socialize, and seem to come and go as they please. Henry has a roommate, named Rinaldi, with whom he forms a friendship. Up until Henry’s injury from an enemy mortar shell, the book doesn’t even seem like it’s taking place in the midst of a war. When Henry and the others speak of it, they never use specifics or arguments in their oppositions to the war; instead, they just use such general blanket statements as "I say it’s rotten. Jesus Christ, I say it’s rotten," (pg. 35) or "There is no finish to a war." (pg. 50)
It was this separation from the war that made the First Book more appealing to me as I read on. I have never found much interest in the usual, in-the-trenches style war stories, so it ended up being a relief for me to find Henry doing such mundane things as admiring the landscape, drinking, going on leave, and starting a relationship with a V.A.D. from a nearby British hospital. In fact, the book became so disconnected from the war early on that I found the injury and view of the carnage of battle to be somewhat obligatory, as if Hemingway felt that he had to put something war-like into Book One. However, I expect that as the books progress, the focus of the book will soon shift out of Henry’s comfortable villa and trips to Catherine Barkley, and become more like the war stories that I am used to (and never really cared about).

While reading "Saturday" by Ian McEwan, I noticed how authentically and realistically McEwan shows the thought process of typical people. The narrator, Henry Perowne, goes in and out of ideas and thoughts rapidly, in a very nonlinear and uncoordinated fashion. For example, Perowne begins by looking out his window, and his thoughts digress to his week, identifying each of the surgeries that he had performed this week, including those which were passed on to him after the flu outbreak. And from his list he once again digresses into the back story of fourteen-year-old Andrea Chapman, the Nigerian girl who had a tumor removed from the back of her head.
I found this to be an accurate and believable way of detailing the casual thoughts of our narrator. Like Perowne, most people, including myself, do not go through thoughts in a coherent and orderly manner. Our thoughts move about much more quickly. We, like Perowne, are prone to tangents, often upon tangents, in non-cohesive patterns. Perowne’s thoughts are not presented as if he was narrating a book. Rather, they are presented as if he is narrating his own life. In this way Henry Perowne is more plausible as a narrator, though this does not make him more reliable.
Unfortunately, the very fact that makes this book feel more natural and realistic is also what makes it both less appealing and harder to read. As I stated earlier, feel less as if he is narrating a book and more as if he is narrating his life. Since his mind moves quickly from topic to topic, he provides the reader with more inner monologue to read. This amounts to exhaustingly long passages of seemingly mundane details of his thoughts. The book spends so much time in Perowne’s head as he delves through an extensive list of surgeries performed, his first meeting with his wife, interactions with fellow doctors, etc., that it becomes easy to lose track of where we are in the present day narrative. Take, for instance, the moments after Perowne’s car is in an accident on the closed-off road during the protests. He states on page 83 that he has only taken a "half-minute’s pause," yet that half of a minute takes nearly two pages to summarize. In this time, he goes through the number of everyday accidents during which he has had to spontaneously serve as doctor, the noises of the car post-accident, his unseen prediction of the damage inflicted to his car, and his anger at the other driver involved, among many other things. Granted, all of this is completely a understandable and relatable reaction to a car accident. However, this does not make the two pages any shorter or easier to read through. Until I found out this all took place in about 30 seconds, I found myself wondering just how long Perowne had planned on sitting in his car before finally getting out. In scenes like this, the more Perowne gets sidetracked, the harder he is to follow, despite McEwan’s intelligent use of said sidetracks.

Section 002
M/W/F 10:40 - 11:30
Anderson 004
Instructor: Jennifer Schnabel