Am I Blue by Beth Henley
Works Cited Not Included
The author of Am I Blue, Beth Henley, begins the play with the seventeen-year-old protagonist John Polk sitting alone in a bar. John contemplates on the red and black card in his hand. From the street, a sixteen-year-old girl whose name is Ashbe sits next to him. She hides under his raincoat because she stole two ashtrays from a local inn. Ashbe is a social person and soon begins a conversation with John. Through persistent questioning, Ashbe discovers John is in a fraternity. John admits the fraternity is not solving his problems like his brother told him it would. Ashbe, noticing the red appointment card, asks John why he has an appointment with a prostitute. John responds ?Yeah, I like to give myself a treat?(line 50). Ashbe knows the girl John has an appointment with and explains what the girl looks like. John makes a comment that he needs to go to a cheap bar so he can stay drunk. Ashbe says she has a bottle of rum and invites John to her apartment. While at Ashbe?s apartment, she entertains John with a blue rum drink, her voodoo doll, and making him a paper hat. Ashbe asks John about his aspirations in life. John is unsure what he wants to do with his life, but his father is pushing him to help manage the soybean farm. As the conversation continues, Ashbe accuses John of being normal. She says he only acts the way he does because it?s expected and makes everyone happy. She wants him to be himself and not try to fit i...
The story, “Good Country People,” by Flannery O’Connor, is a third person limited narration which means the reader can only look into the mind of only a few of the characters. Those characters are Mrs. Hopewell and Hulga, or Joy. Schmoop discusses a deeper understanding about the narrator of the story.
A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...
In Bebe Moore Campbell’s, You’re Blues Ain’t Like Mine, I was able to view the novel from the three main sociological perspectives: the structural-functionalist approach, the social-conflict approach, and the symbolic-interaction approach. From the structural-functionalist point of view, I analyzed the Honorable Men of Hopewell as the power elite. I viewed Mamie Cox’s understanding of social class from the social-conflict perspective, and Doreen and Lily Cox differences were easily seen through the symbolic-interaction approach. By examining the characters and situations from these three important perspectives, I was able to have a better understanding of the novel and the life of the people in which the novel was based.
Jonathan Kozol's book, Amazing Grace, analyzes the lives of the people living in the dilapidated district of South Bronx, New York. Kozol spends time touring the streets with children, talking to parents, and discussing the appalling living conditions and safety concerns that plague the residents in the inner cities of New York. In great detail, he describes the harsh lifestyles that the poverty stricken families are forced into; day in and day out. Disease, hunger, crime, and drugs are of the few everyday problems that the people in Kozol's book face; however, many of these people continue to maintain a very religious and positive outlook on life. Jonathan Kozol's investigation on the lifestyle of these people, shows the side to poverty that most of the privileged class in America does not get to see. Kozol wishes to persuade the readers to sympathize with his book and consider the condition in which these people live. The inequality issues mentioned are major factors in affecting the main concerns of Kozol: educational problems, healthcare obstacles, and the everyday struggles of a South Bronx child.
Conflict is opposition between two forces, and it may be external or internal,” (Barker). There are two styles of external conflict that can be examined within the plot of “Sonny’s Blues”. The first of these is character versus society. This is the outer layer of the external conflict observed between Sonny and the society, which his life is out casted from. The meat and potatoes of the external conflict however, is character versus character. Sonny lives a lifestyle that his brother seems to be incapable of understanding. The internal conflict lies within the narrator. It is his struggle to understand his brother that drives the plot. The climax occurs when Sonny and the narrator argue in the apartment. The argument stems from the narrators complete inability to understand Sonny’s drug usage and life as a musician, and Sonny’s feeling of abandonment and inability to make his brother understand him. This conflict appears to come to a resolve at the resolution as the narrator orders Sonny a drink following hearing Sonny perform for the first time. It appears as though this is the moment when the narrator begins to understand, perhaps for the first time, his brother the
In the setting of “Sonny’s Blues” the element of illusion is used to create above all a world of beauty, illness and horror. Baldwin uses the sense of sight in his work. Using colors of vast difference to express to his readers their definition of what good vs bad, and light vs dark is. However it is so much more than that, he gives his readers the opportunity to consider truth. He introduces Sonny a character who fall’s victim to subjectivity and bias. With the tremendous use if illusion and color, Baldwin paints a picture and Sonny’s character is reviled in an almost angelic way. This theme is prevalent throughout the story, and Baldwin’s use of illusion really captures the truth in the story. He uses such colors as yellow to signify the illness of the streets and the drugs that consume them in the character of Sonny’s friend. The color of blue is one that is used often in the story but in different contrasts; blue signifies the beauty of Sonny’s conquering to his addiction...
In Terrance Hayes Book of poetry Wind in a Box, one can see that the poems are devoted to personal history, blues variation, prose poems, and attempts at getting to the core of defining one’s lineage. The blue poems in particular consider 20th century representations of race, culling wisdom, and impressions from many famous people. Hayes uses the word blue in many different titles of poems in order to show various themes throughout them that tie them together using popular cultural icons. It is obvious to see the significance the word blue plays throughout the Wind in a Box poetry collection. Hayes poems “The Blue Suess” and Booker’s Tomb” from the collection Upright Blues emphasize the times of tradition, rare and freedom in the most interesting ways.
The contrast was written by Royal Tyler. Royall Tyler (1757–1826) “was born in Boston, studied law at Harvard, and then served in the army before writing The Contrast” ( n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2013). He was American jurist and playwright who wrote The Contrast in 1787. The setting of the play is in “New York and its upper-class society”. It is an American play inspired by Richard Sheridan’s “The School for Scandal”, he was so inspired by this show that he wrote his own play “The contrast in three weeks”. Both of these stories use differences as its main tool to satirize. These two stories are completed in five acts. What the play does for modern readers is that it keeps entreating us, and gives us an idea about the life in seventeenth century when this play was written. The Contrast is the first comedy written by an American citizen that was performed in public by a company of professional actors. This frolic is truly a difference of the variety which exists from people to people, from the players to the lovers, and the imitators to the genuine. The play has a lot of contrasts representing a bigger concern on the past and traditional background of Europe and America. There is also another contrast in this play which is the contrast between the characterization of male and female characters in the story. The female casts of the story, in contrast to the male casts, are described as subjects of oppression. The gender-based difference shows alignment to the male casts suggesting alignment to the masculine discourse of socio-cultural economy.
“Black Power”, the word alone raises an abundance of controversial issues. Black power was a civil rights movement led by the black panthers which addressed several issues including segregation and racism. Black power had a different meaning to every member of the Mc Bride family, Ruth and James both looked at black power from a different angle. In “The Color of Water”, The author James Mc Bride admired the black panthers at first, but slowly he grew afraid of them after fearing the consequences his mother might face for being a white woman in a black community influenced by black power. James’ worries were baseless, black power’s motive was to educate and improve African American communities not to create havoc or to harm members of the white community.
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia.12th ed. New York: Pearson, 2013.58-78.Print.
Ruta Sepetys is the author for Between the Shades of Gray, a novel that captures the truth of Siberian camps and the annexation of the Balkans by Stalin. Ruta Sepetys got the idea to write this fictional story when she visited her family in Lithuania and got the chance to discover more about her heritage. She got very fascinated about her family’s struggle to keep memories of her grandparents because of the annexation of Lithuania to the USSR. This conflict urged her to find out more about the feelings and people’s memoirs during this period in World War II so, she started interviewing the survivors from the Siberian gulags and gathered information to write her novel. The book was also inspired by her father, Jonas Sepetys, who escape the Stalin furry with his family when he was a little boy. This fictional account is part of a historical event filled with several true stories intertwined to create this wonderful story filled with love, hope, pain and tears. Ruta said, “I took two research trips to Lithuania while writing the novel. I interviewed family members, survivors of the deportations, survivors of the gulags, psychologists, historians and government officials. The experience was life-altering. I spent time in one of the train cars that was used for the deportations. I also agreed to take part in an extreme simulation experiment and was locked in a former Soviet prison. Let’s just say the experience left me certain that I never would have survived the deportations.” In an interview with conducted by rutasepetys.com. She started writing Between the Shades of Gray in 2005 after several visits to Lithuania. Sepetys said in a blog that she wrote titled “My Family’s Story” that her main goal while writing this book was “On...
Essentially this play can be regarded as the mid-life crisis of Walter Lee Younger, passionate for his family, ambitious, and bursting with energy and dreams. Walter cares about his family, and he hopes that buying the liquor store will being a brighter future to Travis, ?And-and I?ll say, all right son-it?s your seventeenth birthday, what is it you?ve decided?...Just tell me where you want to go to school and you?ll go. Just tell me, what it is you want to be ? and you?ll be it.?(Hansberry 109). Walter Lee, shackled by poverty and prejudice, and obsessed with his own sense of success, which he felt, would be the end of all of his social and economic problems. The dreams he had gave him a great sense of pride and self-satisfaction. Unfortunately Walter had to learn a hard lesson in life; pride and greed will eventually lead to unhappiness.
“Sonny’s Blues” revolves around the narrator as he learns who his drug-hooked, piano-playing baby brother, Sonny, really is. The author, James Baldwin, paints views on racism, misery and art and suffering in this story. His written canvas portrays a dark and continual scene pertaining to each topic. As the story unfolds, similarities in each generation can be observed. The two African American brothers share a life similar to that of their father and his brother. The father’s brother had a thirst for music, and they both travelled the treacherous road of night clubs, drinking and partying before his brother was hit and killed by a car full of white boys. Plagued, the father carried this pain of the loss of his brother and bitterness towards the whites to his grave. “Till the day he died he weren’t sure but that every white man he saw was the man that killed his brother.”(346) Watching the same problems transcend onto the narrator’s baby brother, Sonny, the reader feels his despair when he tries to relate the same scenarios his father had, to his brother. “All that hatred down there”, he said “all that hatred and misery and love. It’s a wonder it doesn’t blow the avenue apart.”(355) He’s trying to relate to his brother that even though some try to cover their misery with doing what others deem as “right,” others just cover it with a different mask. “But nobody just takes it.” Sonny cried, “That’s what I’m telling you! Everybody tries not to. You’re just hung up on the way some people try—it’s not your way!”(355) The narrator had dealt with his own miseries of knowing his father’s plight, his Brother Sonny’s imprisonment and the loss of his own child. Sonny tried to give an understanding of what music was for him throughout thei...
Civil Rights are freedom from arbitrary or discriminatory acts by the government, or private individuals. During the time “Florence” by Alice Childress was written, the female characters were set in the time period of when the series of Civil Rights were fighting and taking place as means of affirmative action. The story centers on a Black mother that is mainly defending about Florence, a young woman in hopes of pursuing her theater career, but never appears on stage. In “Florence” by Alice Childress, the racism stereotypes women from understanding each other physically and mentally, coupled with the limitations that these stereotypes creates a border among them and especially for the main protagonist named Mama.
The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda is far different from any other novel that we were assigned to read for apartheid in South Africa class. I had quite a love/hate relationship for the book, for it intrigued me, but I had to read it far too fast and don’t think that I got the true value of the book as I speed-read it. The first thing I noticed about the novel was of course the colorful cover, but when I thought about the title long enough I noticed that it sounded vaguely familiar. I had to read the Heart of Darkness while in high school, and not until I researched the book a little on the internet, was I able to actually correlate the title between the two. Apparently, the title Heart of Redness is actually an allusion to the Heart of Darkness by presenting an opposite presentation of the themes.