Questions
1. What lessons does the reader learn as he travels with Marlow down the Congo River? In Joseph Conrad’s he reader learns the lessons that the line separating “civilization” from “savagery” is much thinner than Marlow suspects in the beginning. The further he goes down the river, the further he moves away from civilization. But while the physical moving away form civilization is obvious, it is the mental, internal moving away which is most interesting to the theme of the novel.
Marlow learns that it takes little for a person to lose touch with the civilization that they were socialized under. People go “mad” in the Amazon, and by that they return to a primitive, animalistic way of living. Conrad write, “As we sat over our vermouths he glorified the Company's business, and by-and-by I expressed casually my surprise at him not going out there. He became very cool and collected all at once. "I am not such a fool as I look, quote Plato to his disciples," he said sententiously, emptied his glass with great resolution, and we rose” (1040). This is an interesting and important quotation to this theme because Plato represents civilization; yet just quoting Plato does not make a person civilized. Rather than people in primitive tribes who grew up under what Marlow would call a “savage” way of living, these men can to this way of living from civilization which has been lost as they go deeper into the jungle, or the “heart of darkness.”
2.Explain the concept of time as it relates to The Garden of the Forking paths?
The protagonist of this story is a professor of English from China named Doctor Yu Tsun. He is living in England during the time of WWI, but he works as a spy for the Germans. The concept of time within the short story is very different from most traditional understandings of time. Dr. Tsun is working on building a labyrinth in which all possible outcomes occur simultaneous.
There are overlaps into Eastern religions in this understanding of time. This concept of time is in conflict with the idea of destiny, since all possible destinies play out at the same time. The author, Luis Borges writes, "The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes!” What this means is that just as the plot of an entire book can be explained on the back cover, so to can one possible outcome be explained without having to read 500 pages (1340).
3. Explain these lines as they relate to themes presented in the story by Tolstoy: “Ivan llyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
In Tolstoy’s short story, “The Death of Ivan Illyich,” the protagonist Ivan leads a very ordinary life. There is nothing exceptional or outstanding about it and all of his viewpoints have come from conforming to other people’s viewpoint. The theme of this story, is that Ivan never fully was able to become himself, because he was stuck listening to other people’s viewpoints and conforming to them instead of developing a fuller picture of who he was. In essence, he spent his whole life living other people’s lives instead of figuring out who he was. 4. What is Daru’s dilemma and how does this relate to existential or absurd view of reality?
The dilemma that Daru faces in Albert’s Camus’s “The Guest” is an existential crisis. The fundamental crisis is between acting out of his beliefs, or adhering to the social conventions of the society. In many ways, Daru is a foil to Tolstoy’s Ivan Illyich. Daru treats an Arab prisoner not as a prisoner but as a guest because this is how he is most comfortable treating. He does not want to dehumanize him by treating him as a guest. He also must deliver him to jail, and this is a conflict for him. In society, it is easy to attach a label like “Prisoner” to someone, which conveys an archetypical idea about someone. But every prisoner in the world is more than just a parishioner. A person being a prisoner is an accidental property of who they are and has nothing to do with their intrinsic nature. Words like “prisoner” or “criminal” are just labels that people use as a short hand for describing someone instead of attempting to understand their fullness of person. This relates to the existential or absurd view of reality, because Daru realizes that the title “prisoner” is an arbitrary title that has been applied to the Arab for his murder. But it could have just as soon been applied to anyone else.
5. Write an analysis of the following poem. Use the poetry worksheet form and make sure you cover all the bases in you analysis.
In William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming” he uses allusion and imagery to relate his point. The central image is the image of a falcon and a falconer who are separated from being able to communicate with them. He writes that the “Falcon cannot hear the falconer” this causes there to be chaos since this line of communication is necessary for the falcon and the falconer to hunt.
The allusions used have to do with Jesus and the second coming. The poem is about waiting for the second coming, but like the falconer and the falcon, every since Jesus died there has been “twenty centuries of stony sleep” where there is no longer any direct communication between humankind and God as there was when he was in the world.
