Dear all,
Please post a paragraph or two on either of these essays, paying attention especially to how you believe style is part of and influencing content. I look forward to reading your thoughts on these difficult, dense, and lovely essays.
Best and see you tomorrow,
Laura
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"He always feels hot, I always feel cold." (Page 423). From the very beginning of this beautiful personal essay, the author already starts it off with comparisons of herself to her husband. Throughout the entire essay this is what she seems to mainly do. She compares herself to him, always putting him on a high pedastool while putting herself down. "He speaks several languages well; i do not speak any well." There is another example of her showing us how he seems to be so superior to her little old self. As the essay continues, we see so many more of these little "he can do this, but i can not" sort of statements. Our writer seems to feel inferior to her significant other mainly becuase she makes herself feel this way. It looks as if she is quite insecure and therefore he seems like a god in her eyes. It is true that he makes her feel bad at times as well, and maybe that is what made her so self-concious in the first place.
"If i loved music I would love it passionately." (Page 427) This statement makes me believe that she is sad and torn apart by the mere fact that she can not understand or love music. She knows how much music means to him but to her it means nothing, but at the same time that statement in itself comes across as if she could like and love it she would with a great amount of passion and devotion. That makes me think that she has an incredibly big heart full of love and compassion.
The style of this essay is on a very high personal level and it gets quite intimate. She speaks and tells us all about him and all that he is and all that he means to her. She seems to really admire and adore him, given how all she does is put himself before her in almost every sentence. It is a touching essay because i seem to see myself in this essay. Although i do not have a husband not even a boyfriend at this point in my life, i do have someone that means a lot to me and i seem to feel like her in the same way that i think that maybe the boy i like is too good for me and that maybe if i better myself in the way i hope to and are working towards, that maybe then i will be good enough for him. So this essay really hits home for me, and although i did not cry while reading it, it sure hit home for me.
"He and I" by Natalia Ginzburg
Ginzburg begins and ends her piece with "HE and I" and never "WE". From the first line "He always feels hot, I always feel cold" (423) sets the tone of her personal essay as two separate and very different individuals in a relationship/marriage. The major tone is CHANGE. Time changes things. She cleverly conceals this through out the essay by using comparison between her husband and herself.
She constantly compares herself to him, by belittling her self and bringing forth most of his good traits. She also points out how very different they are yet they've been together for so long. (430) She reveals a lot of of intimate details of her husband but sarcastically describes herself, "I smoke a brand of king-size, filterless cigarettes called STOP, and he smokes his tuscan cigars." You get this strong impression that her pessimistic view of her self is highly impacted by her husband, "He often says I don't understand anything about food, that i am like a great strong fat friar_one of those who devour soup..."(424), "makes fun of me"(426), "If I suggest that i should get a license too he disagrees. He says I would never manage it." (426).
Towards the middle,she does feel like she capable of great things but she isn't that sure of her self. This is a turning point. The tone changes the focus from him to her, not sure where exactly, because she makes it flow smoothly. She starts to point out her good traits. The paragraph which begins with "I am very untidy" changes into a picture of her rearranging and changing, like her essay, then ends off with "His untidiness is triumphant."(428). The obvious part where she points out his change was when she talks about his mother talking about how he was a "model of order and precision," to "There is no trace in him of that former immaculate little boy."(428)
You don't really get this sense of change until the last two paragraphs when she talks about when she first knew him he was very different from what he s today. She continues with its not the topic of importance but the person. "..and I sometimes ask myself if it was us, these two people, almost twenty years ago..."(430)
I loved this essay. I read it a couple times to try to understand why was she writing like this. I'm not sure if I'm correct, but this was surely my impression. I saw myself and my significant other in many parts, and wondered are we going to change in 20 years like Ginzberg and her husband?
Zach Kalatsky
Meatless Days
Sara Suleri
The essay begins letting the reader into Suleri's way of viewing food. She would rather not know exactly what she is eating and prefers to call is something appetizing. The association with the name the food given can make a dish unappetizing.
Eating all types of carnivorous foods, it gives the palate an imagination of its own. "How very sour those ants must be."
Suleri add a happy tone to the sadness of the events at the end of her essay. When Nuz goes completely bald, her mother makes a miraculous recovery.
From reading Natalia Ginzburg’s first line in “He and I,” I felt drawn to the sense of dualism. Dualism, in the sense of this work, establishes that in the speaker’s universe, everything is broken down to two pieces: her husband and herself. She begins her essay, “He always feels hot, I always feel cold” (423). At first it seemed like the speaker and her husband would always be at ends with each other, failing to find a middle ground. After all, hot and cold are two extremes, so how could they ever understand each other? The speaker perpetuates this difference through other examples, like shyness and affability, and their love and hatred of different things. I actually found it surprising that that husband and wife both enjoyed the cinema, but in true dualist fashion, they enjoyed it in different ways (424). However, their passion for cinema struck me as one of the common threads in their lives, and I began to look for more. The next piece that stood out to me was when she spoke about driving and said, “I think he likes me to be dependent on him for some things” (426). Both the love and cinema and dependence started to give the essay a sense of cohesion as the speaker and her husband did not only exist as two separate, unrelated parts, but as pieces of an interrelated whole.
By forming the essay to follow this dualistic style element, the speaker is manipulating the content to reflect her own identity as well as her husband’s influence. These two halves are able to meet and do not remain separate elements, although that is how they appear as seen in the first line about the two extremes of hot and cold.
the author of "why do i fast?" Wole Soyinka introduces the essay by telling the reason of why the main character has decided to fast, because is his own choice. the introduction is effective because he doesnt want to fall in "self-indulgence" but rather he wants to prove the power of his mind.there are two thesis in the essay, the power of veto, and the denied of choice. throughout the essay the author goes on details on how the character decides to fast, at first he feels different sensations and tries to smell the food to feel the taste of it, then he tries to imagine how would it be if he could take vitamins pills instead of food, but find it like cheating. later on he feels hallucination, his cell walls and ceiling bacome a different environment letting the prisoner have absolut control on his mind and body. the prisoner wants to prove that eventhough he has been denied of choice he can still control who he is. by not eating he wants to emphasizes in the power of veto meaning the option to say no to food and still be able to survive.
Maria Molina
"why do i fast?"
Right from the beginning, she starts off with comparisons of her and her lover, and not long after that she makes it clear that she thinks he is better than her, and that he thinks so, too. Throughout the essay, she describes how they are as individuals, and adds that he often gets angry with her, and that she gets angry with herself. To her, he is perfect and she wants to be more like he is. I think pretty much everyone in a relationship can relate to this, even if they do not feel the way she does. Almost everyone who has cared very deeply for someone else has felt at least a little bit like she does, or maybe even very strongly that sometimes they are not good enough or that they don't deserve the person they're with.
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