The Hero?

The structure of Song of Solomon seemed to me to be a fairly strange one. Though the novel does switch between several perspectives throughout, it is at its core a coming-of-age story of Milkman. While he is clearly the protagonist, though, I felt that for almost the entire book I wasn't rooting for him, and he didn't feel like a hero at all, but a somewhat unlikable and questionable character. Even at the end, the ambiguity of the final scene leaves Milkman's status as a 'good' character fairly up in the air.

Milkman is somewhat unique among the main characters of the novel in that, for almost the entire first book, he's the only one that isn't seen or described from another point of view. We hear Macon and Ruth all talking about each other, and Milkman's descriptions of the other characters he interacts with, but Milkman's character is extremely rarely discussed by anyone else, and we don't get other's internal thoughts about him since the story is generally told from his point of view in every scene that he is in. In fact, the only person that talks about Milkman's character before Lena's rant is Guitar, who says that Milkman isn't "a serious person" and questions how trustworthy he is, but this isn't taken too far. It's also quite difficult to ascertain much about Milkman's character from his own narration, as it's generally somewhat descriptive and reactionary, and he doesn't spend much time in the first book thinking about his own character and actions.

Since the story is largely about Milkman's coming of age, it's somewhat odd that this process doesn't seem to truly start until the second book, very late in the novel. The first book is largely concerned with building Milkman's environment and the people around him, and he doesn't undergo any real personal development during this book. Though it's somewhat hidden by the extremely uneven passage of time in the novel, Milkman ages 31 years in the first book, but it still sort of feels like he hasn't grown up yet.

Lena's speech about how poorly Milkman has treated everyone sort of comes as a surprise, as the things that she talks about were in large part not really discussed earlier or described by Milkman. It's been shown that he doesn't really care about his family all that much, but this is the first time that it's really shown how much he's neglected them and ordered them around, how much like his father he's become to them, and it's the first time Milkman is seemingly made aware of these problems with his character. To his credit, this does seem to have some effect on him, and he has a desire to improve some of these things. It's this moment that's a real turning point for him, and that leads him to get some time alone to think about things by going on his quest for the gold.

While away in Book II, Milkman does some thinking about his character, and does seem to really come of age and become more independent during his search. He comes to realize how much he values some of the people back home, especially Hagar and Pilate, and that he's treated them extremely poorly, showing growth. He also finally solves a problem harder than his previous best of "fourth-grade arithmetic," as Lena claims, as he's very clever and intelligent in piecing together his history from the extremely vague song. Still, though, it seems as if his character isn't very likable.

Most of the attention and popularity he gets in Pennsylvania isn't at all due to anything that he's done, but rather his ancestors' fame in that town, and he's admired there because of who he is, not his character. People in the last town he visits, who have no such connection to him, seem to really dislike him at first, and even try to kill him. Although he is somewhat accepted by the older generation afterwards, showing that he's become better, there fact that nearly every character that knows him  (Macon, Lena, Hagar, Pilate, Guitar) at some point attempts to kill him or injure him doesn't speak very well about his personality. This is especially telling with Guitar. Even though Milkman didn't actually steal the gold, and as such his reasoning his flawed, the fact that he thought that he would and that he wanted to kill him for it is extremely revealing. Guitar is probably the person who knows Milkman best and is his best friend, as he's still very willing, and even eager, to assume bad things about him and attempt to kill him.

The final moments of the book don't really give a good idea of where Milkman stands as a character and as a potential hero of the novel. Though he does improve his relationships with many of his family members when he returns to Michigan, it's unclear where he's going to go from here, or if he even survives; although I think that he will kill Guitar and live. Guitar's actions and motives are really strange at the end, as he kills Pilate while trying to kill Milkman by mistake, but then smiles and puts down the gun as Milkman prepares to attack him. I read this as Guitar witnessing how much Milkman cares about Pilate and how he's willing to avenge her, and feeling somewhat proud of Milkman, that he's finally become a "serious person," and as such not wanting to kill him anymore. If Milkman does end up killing Guitar and avenging Pilate, I think that this action would really show his growth and  make him into a heroic character, but without knowing what truly happens, it's impossible to say if he is a hero at the end of the novel.

Rochester

In Wide Sargasso Sea, it's become pretty clear at this point that Rochester is the main villain of the novel, given his actions in the last part of Book 2. While he has now become a pretty bad person and disliked character, I still hold some sympathy for him, as he's faced many hardships since coming to the islands and marrying Antoinette, not all of them his fault.

Even though the reader often seems to be supposed to side with Antoinette (it is her story, after all, only she appears in all three books within the novel), I found myself agreeing with Rochester several times, and I actually sort of liked him during the first few chapters he was there. He seemed to at least try to be nice to Antoinette, and hoped that it would work out between them, even though he didn't really marry her by choice, which makes the fact that he doesn't seem to truly love her more reasonable. Since he wasn't going to get an inheritance meant that he had to find some other way to get money, and this marriage was something that he had to do for that purpose. This is also part of what leads to Rochester's feeling somewhat inferior over the course of the novel, which makes him more relatable, and is even something that he and Antoinette have in common and sort of bond over.

Rochester also has a lot of difficulty in his new surroundings, both with the climate and the people. He sees the island as being very "dream-like," much more alive than the London that he's used to, much more controlled by nature. The natives of the island, even Antoinette to some level, seem to resent the fact that he's sort of an outsider, and many of the blacks also sort of dislike his upper-class, privileged status. This is well-shown with his walk in the forest, where the child screaming at him and Baptiste's coldness to him show how he's still not really a part of life there.

Even when his relationship with Antoinette completely falls apart, turning him against her and turning him into a villain, I still feel like it was, in large part, not his fault. There is a bit of irony in how he ends up being poisoned. Though Antoinette's main problem with Rochester is how ignorant he is, it's her that ends up being somewhat ignorant in the end. She blindly agrees to give Rochester the potion because she trusts Christophine, even ignoring some signs that this was a bad idea, and Rochester is sort of proved right in his distrust of her. Once he is poisoned, Rochester can't be completely held responsible for his actions and for sleeping with Amelie, though it is still somewhat his fault. His anger towards her is also somewhat justified, as she has poisoned him, and this is only enhanced by the doubts he has about her because of the stories that Daniel Cosway has told him. Though he does end up going way too far, even when he's sailing away with her in captivity he still has some regret over what's happened. Although he does some terrible things to Antoinette, he's not a completely evil character, and it's easy to see how and why he has become like this and to sympathize with him.

Christianity in the Stranger

During the second book of The Stranger, Meursault is held captive and is tried for the murder of the Arab, but more for his crimes against society in terms of his personality. During this time, he is interviewed by and speaks to members of the Church, which make for some of the most interesting scenes in the book. People such as the magistrate and the chaplain seem even more unnerved than everyone else by Meursault, mostly because of his relationship with Christianity and his lack of belief in God.

The first conversation between Meursault and the magistrate, where the latter famously asks "Do you wish my life to have no meaning?" is the one that's the most detailed in the book. During their time together, the magistrate is extremely disturbed by the fact that Meursault waited between his first shot and the next four, After Meursault admits this, he goes into a long rant about how he has to repent, before discovering that Meursault doesn't believe in God and beginning to call him Monsieur Antichrist. Meursault speaks to the chaplain in the last chapter in the novel, where they talk about the nature of death and the afterlife, before Meursault explodes into a rant about how life has no meaning and how it always leads to the same place, driving the chaplain away.

I think that the two men that represent Christianity are portrayed in a fairly positive light in this book, although Meursault sees them as ignorant, Both of them refer to Meursault as a friend, are generally kind to him, and seem to really want to help him repent his sins, saying that they'll pray for him. They refuse to believe that Meursault truly has no sort of belief in God, which he doesn't like, but that seems pretty reasonable given some context. Both of the two claim that every single prisoner that they've had before has eventually began praying to God, have "turned to Him in their time of trouble." This is probably a large amount of people, and it's likely that not all of them were religious before they were convicted. The prospect of imminent death probably made some of them desperate, and they turned to religion as a last hope.

It's the complete absence of hope that disturbs the religious men so much about Meursault. He refuses to try to alter his account of the murder to save himself by saying there wasn't a pause, even though there are hints that the magistrate wants him to. he says that he feels no despair or regret about his situation, and perhaps most importantly, he has absolutely no belief in an afterlife, doesn't even dare to hope it exists, saying that he wishes it did, but that it doesn't matter. This is completely alien to the Christians, this complete lack of belief. Even someone from a different religion would have some sort of values or hope in this situation, and that would be something they could relate to. But Meursault's beliefs that life isn't important at all are things that they can't relate to, and what makes Meursault and what he represents to frightening to them.

Protagonist of The Metamorphosis

As The Metamorphosis is written mainly from Gregor's point of view, it's natural that the reader's sympathies would lie with him. He is, after all, struck with the horrible metamorphosis that transforms him into a bug and slowly strips away his humanity. Though his story is tragic, I think that it's not the main focus of the novel; the changes in Gregor's family caused by his metamorphosis are.

While Gregor narrates almost all of the story, a great deal of his narration in the second and third parts is actually just describing what his family is doing. He talks about their conversations that he listens to during dinner, the new people that come into the house, and how the members of his family are each progressing in their personal lives and work. While his feelings do change over the novel, his general personality remains basically the same. Throughout the book, he clearly wants to be a part of and help his family, and he wants to make things as easy as he can for them. And, though his worsening treatment makes him angry, he still holds these basic desires and has a positive attitude towards his family. His physical change far exceeds his mental change, and change in character is one of the main criteria for a protagonist. 

Gregor's family, on the other hand, have a complete change in character from the start of the novel to the end. When Gregor is first transformed, they seem to be sort of lazy and generally unhelpful with making money and with supporting the family; that's Gregor's responsibility. However, Gregor is taken away from them, and they find themselves without a source of income. In this situation, both of Gregor's parents and his sister are able to step up and get jobs to save the family. As the novel progresses, we see the three of them start to move away from Gregor; he's rather forgotten and his feeding and cleaning are seen as quick, routine chores. 

Seen in this light, The Metamorphosis could be a completely different story. A family has to deal with (what amounts to, for the family) the death of their son. They are able to slowly move on from him, and support each other as they try to start a new life. At the end of the book, it could be said that all three of them are in better positions than when they started the book; all have employment and are doing something with their life, and there's indication that they'll be able to be happy. It's possible that Gregor, with his complete dedication to and pride in being the family's sole source of income, was actually in a way holding the rest of the family back.

Gregor holding the family back is a common theme throughout the book, as the presence of the bug that's the last remains of him disturbs the family and somewhat prevents them from moving forward. This is shown by his sister's speech at the end, where she says that the family has to "get rid of the idea that [the insect] is Gregor," and that the animal "plagues" them. The family dissociating the insect with Gregor's memory coincides with the bug's death the same night, which brings up the possibility that the insect in itself represented the family's reliance on Gregor; it got weaker and weaker as the others got jobs and started supporting themselves, and it finally dies when they leave the apartment that Gregor bought them and go to start a new, independent life somewhere else.

Mike: The Odd Man Out

During the preparations for the trip to Spain, we were introduced to two new main characters, Bill and Mike. While Bill is very entertaining with his irony, I've personally found Mike to be a far more interesting character. The type of relationship he has with Brett and his level of awareness of it, as well as how he fits into the rest of the group with Jake, Bill, and Cohn, make him a great character to read about.

The first thing that I noticed about Mike is that his style of speaking makes him seem rather unintelligent most of the time. He tends to say sort of stupid, extremely obvious things that don't need to be said, and, more prominently, he repeats things a huge amount. He calls Brett "a lovely piece" a total of five or six times in a stretch about a page long the first time we meet him, and keeps doing this kind of thing from then on. This repetition may be in part a result of him being drunk, which he pretty much always is in the book.

Even among this group of privileged party-goers, Mike stands out from the rest as not having a real purpose in life. He's always drunk, he no longer has a job, and he doesn't seem to have any real ambition or passions; he's just along for the ride with Brett. He also seem to be almost comically bad at everything he does; the first thing that we hear about him is that he got injured while attempting to help an old woman with her bags. This is a man who manages to go broke both gradually and suddenly at the same time. Brett also asks him to tell a bunch of stories about the war that are presumably about his incompetence; he doesn't want to tell them because they "reflect discredit" on him.

Brett's relationship with Michael is very interesting. Brett seems to be at least fond of Mike, and seem him as a good friend, but it's clear that she is at least in part marrying him for his family's money. She's not really emotionally attached to him, and has no discomfort with pursuing other men, even with Romero where Mike is there with her. Mike is aware of these relationships; Brett freely tells him all about them. He generally doesn't seem to have a problem with them; he understands the nature of the relationship and seems satisfied that he's going to be able to marry such "a lovely piece." Brett and Mike "understand each other." Cohn, however, is one man that's had an affair with Brett that he can't stand, because he's still hanging around her afterwards.

Mike is extremely hostile to Cohn, and even tries to fight him a couple times. He might have problems with Cohn because of his annoying personality and superior attitude, but I think that his main anger with Cohn is more because of what he represents. Before, he could sort of ignore the affairs that Brett had, but it's impossible to now that Cohn is physically there with them. He's thinking more about the nature of his relationship with Brett, and he's perhaps getting insecure, which is making him angry. It'll be interesting to see if Mike and Cohn eventually have a real fight over Brett, as I think that the story's leading there.

Mike seems to generally get along with the rest of the group, but there's not any special friendship there like there is between Jake and Bill. They seem to see him as a pretty cool guy, one that's fun normally but can get very annoying when too drunk. Jake, Bill, and Brett also all support his attacks on Cohn to some level. Mike, on the other hand, really wants to be fully part into the group and be one of the guys. From his checking several times to make sure they don't mind him coming on the trip to his pausing to make sure everyone's laughing during his stories, it's clear that he craves acceptance. This most evident when he's on the verge of tears while trying to get Jake to side with him about Cohn. Mike just isn't as "cool" a person as the rest of the group it seems; he's desperate to be liked and to it in but he's sort of left out.

Septimus' Role in Clarissa's Story

While reading through Mrs. Dalloway, a lot of people, myself included, questioned why Septimus was in the novel, as until the very end he sort of seemed like a very separate story. When Clarissa was told about his suicide and the connection became evident, a fairly prominent theory for his role in the story was that his personality was there to represent or reflect a part of Clarissa's. The sections involving Septimus were by far my favorite in the book, as his sort of crazy perspective was very interesting, and I actually felt much more invested in his story than Clarissa's, which I found less important. I don't agree with the theory that he represents a "darker side" of Clarissa, as I don't think they have a ton in common, and I think that Septimus was a completely separate person, and that it's how his story impacts Clarissa that reflects on her personality.

There are some obvious parallels between Septimus' suicide and Clarissa's moment at the window; Clarissa can for some reason perfectly visualize Septimus' fall, both of them at least consider dying as an act of "defiance," and, strangely, both see people across from them in different houses looking at them at the moment they're considering suicide. For me, the connections stop when I consider the character's motivations during these scenes. While they both seem to be sort of tired or fed up with life, this is for completely different reasons.

Septimus pretty clearly explains his reasons for committing suicide to the reader; he both feels that he committed a terrible crime against humanity for which he deserves to die and that he wants to have some control over his fate rather than let the doctors take control of him. We see during the course of the novel that his shell shock has greatly affected him and made him somewhat insane, which is evident in his narration. He seems to be at least partially recovering from this right before his jump out of the window, but the arrival of Doctor Holmes makes him want to escape and sort of rekindles these feelings again, leading him to kill himself.

Clarissa, on the other hand, just seems sort of bored and like she doesn't have a purpose, and she also is feeling some regret about the way her life has gone. She doesn't exhibit any signs of insanity even close to those Septimus does because of his shell shock. When she's thinking about Septimus' death alone in the room at the party, some of her potential motivations for suicide become clear. She mentions her moment at Bourton where she would have been happy dying, and I think that this news of Septimus sort of brings back that feeling, leading her to consider jumping. She thinks about the years of her life she's spent with Richard and how none of it compared to how good her time at Bourton was, and that seems to lead her into a lot of regret and sadness (one other potential motivation, which I thought of as she was describing death as a means of communication, is to prove to Sally and Peter (who seems especially disappointed with how she's turned out), who are both present, that she is more than she appears, that she's not satisfied with her somewhat boring life with Richard).

Clarissa, in the end, does not kill herself, though she doesn't seem to see it as a very bad idea, as she understands the potential reasons that Septimus has done it and says that she's happy for him. It's perhaps the presence of Peter and Sally, her friends from her Bourton days, that give her hope to reclaim the feeling of happiness that she had there; to give life another chance. It's this vast difference in the character's final decisions, as well as the completely separate initial motivations, that show that Septimus is a completely independent character whose story helps Clarissa reflect on her own life and not just a physical representation of a darker part of Clarissa's personality.

Howie

On the whole, I really enjoyed The Mezzanine. It was a very unique and fun-to-read book, and it provided a lot of interesting little insights into what was everyday life at that point. Its footnotes were also very enjoyable and a highlight of the book. One of the parts of the book that I loved, though, was one that wasn't clearly prominent: Howie's personality. 

Howie was actually one of the more interesting characters I've read about recently, and that's in large part due to the way that he's presented to the reader. In most books, characters will be more clearly defined; we learn about their names (it's pretty easy to miss the fact that the narrator's name is Howie, as it's mentioned in passing twice over the course of the entire book), interests, and histories either from the author or from other characters, and we can see their personalities from decisions that they make in important moments in the plot. Without any real character-defining decisions in the shoe-lace buying plot of The Mezzanine, and with the strange writing and formatting style of the book, we can't really learn about Howie in a "traditional" way, and thus sort of have to pick up what we can about his personality from random thoughts and and memories that pop up in response to whatever he's doing at the time. We aren't told specific details about his life because Baker is trying to write to represent what Howie would really be thinking, not just for the ease of the reader, and that's what we get; we never learn what he does for a living because he isn't thinking about it, he's just thinking about the actual physical work he has to do there, which seems just like generic office work.

What we can learn from this about Howie is that he's actually kind of a strange person. Observing the things in everyday in detail is actually something that pretty much everyone does without talking about, but Howie does it to a pretty extreme level. He's just constantly thinking about what's around him, wondering how things work, thinking of stories about his past experiences with something, and going into a lot of detail about it. People when they're going about their day are generally at least a little bit tuned out, and just take some things for granted instead of investigating everything as Howie does. I thought the disparity between Howie's outward appearance and his inner life was great; on the surface he's just a normal part of society who's gone through life like he's supposed to and gotten a normal job, but from his thoughts we can see that he's actually oddly disassociative when thinking about society; it's like he's taken a step back from the things that seem routine to most people and sort of looks on them in wonder, thinking about how amazing it is that these things exist and that people take them for granted and always wondering how things work. Things don't seem to come easily to Howie in a way, and he seems to really value having an understanding of how things work and how to work them (this is shown very clearly by how he in large part measures his life through little "advances" like applying deodorant under his shirt). And, of course, he could normally take more things for granted and it just happens that this is a day where he looks really closely at the world, but it seems, from his character and from the chart of thoughts at the end (which was an amazing tool to characterize someone), that this is sort of what Howie is like every day; constantly dissecting things and thinking about life, that each event in his life is its own Mezzanine.