The past coming back to haunt

A common approach for a novelist to try and introduce their characters is to put the reader in a position in which they can hear the characters own thoughts. This generally considered to be the most effective way to develop a character I believe, and certainly the most widespread. It's true there's something very personal about listening in on a persons thoughts as they live--you get to feel like you really know them. It's a skill that Virginia Woolf perfected. She's described as "carving caves out behind her characters", and she does this by sticking us in their heads and listening to the impressions and thoughts they make of their own lives. If you look at this as the epitome of the character study driven modernist movement, which almost completely disregards the notion of plot, then you might look at Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon as the antithesis to this model.

I don't mean to say that  I think that Song of Solomon isn't a character study, quite the opposite. I think though that she incorporates plot into her work in a way that we see lacking from almost every other novel we've read thus far (Wide Sargasso Sea was fairly plot driven I suppose). In addition to that there's much less self contemplation by the characters in  Morrison's work than in Woolf's. I suppose I'm using Mrs. Dalloway as the staple modernist novel, which may or may not be entirely fair, but I do think it's a great example of a character study that disregards plot as a literary device. Morrison's goes an entirely new route here where instead of letting each character explain themselves we get the story told from other characters.

When Mr. Mitchell asked us if we considered this to really be a story about Milkman my answer was, "well yes and no." Most of the dialogue in the novel comes from different characters than Milkman himself. It feels like we spend most of the novel listening to people in Milkman's life tell their own stories. For example the last half of chapter 5 is Pilate recounting her own story to Ruth. This is pretty typical for many of the chapters actually. It's not the case however, that we never get anything from Milkman's point of view, most of the classic plot development that happens is when we're with him. It's the other parts of the novel when we're not with that I find most interesting. Those are the times when we get the extensive and exciting backstories on the other characters. As was pointed out in class Pilate is an infinitely more interesting character in her own right than Milkman, yet supposedly this is a story about him and not her. It's definitely true though, that Milkman's story is made so much more interesting by getting the backdrop on the other people who make up his life. This is what I mean when I say I think Morrison uses plot in a way no one else so far has. She doesn't necessarily make a huge amount happen in terms of time passing (the novel seems to almost not progress at all time wise) but that she draws hugely on the idea of the past coming forward to effect his life now. It repeatedly seems as though these stories he hears might as well have been plot devices because with each knew revelation they thoroughly refocus the way in which we view the cast of characters. I think that through these stories and the history surrounding him, Morrison turns Milkman from a boring character into a fairly interesting and complex one, and she does it without really hearing from him all that much. 

Names

Names, names, names. For those of you who were not in African American Lit last year it seems to me as though Toni Morrison has got a bit of a thing going for out of the ordinary names. I doubt I'll ever meet a woman named Pilate, or anyone with the last name Dead for that matter. Yet here these characters are. The interesting thing is though, it seems as though names almost don't matter in the novel. Now, I know that's not really an accurate statement, but just consider how characters get their names--many of them seem to get them almost accidentally. Take Pilate for instance. She got her name simply from her father flipping to a random page in the Bible and selecting a name. Or there's Macon Dead Sr., he got his name accidentally from a drunken clerk. Both of these people seem to have gotten their names almost entirely arbitrarily, yet these names seem to me too original, and the book too finely crafted, for that to truly be the case.

Another pertinent example, however different, could be Milkman and his dubious name. Due to circumstances entirely out of his control he's been branded with a name that as Macon Dead puts it has some "filthy connection" to Ruth (17). It even thwarts the efforts of Macon Dead Jr. to pass down his own name, which he is quite proud of. Instead of being known by his father's name, a name that to his father suggests pride and hard work, he is instead stuck with a name that is a constant reminder of his families strange past. It's a past which he is described often trying to run, or fly, away from. It's a name that suggests a major theme for Milkman, that he's been coddled by his parents his entire life. Not only was he milked to an usually old age, he's now been living in his parent's house well into his thirties.

As I said earlier it does seem as though the manner in which many of characters get their names seems accidental and almost meaningless, but I think they actually serve as reminders, and even in some ways prophecies for who these people are. Macon Jr.'s name relates him strongly to his father and the pride he felt towards his father for having worked so hard for everything he owned. That same hardworking quality is the most defining aspect of his personality even as a 70 year old man. For Milkman it's much less flattering. It was a name given to him not by his parents, but by the general public to reflect on his mothers overly affectionate actions towards him. And now he seems unable to escape from that same strange family history and his own dependence on his parents. For Milkman his name acts not only as a constant indicator of his past, but an indicator of the lifestyle he seems incapable of escaping.

Are they nice?

( So unfortunately I just realized that this piece, which I had meant to publish like four weeks ago when we still discussing the Metamorphosis, remained as a drafted copy until I just now noticed it. I must have just forgotten to publish it. Anyways, I hope you still find what I have to say somewhat interesting. )

More so than other books we've read this semester I've found The Metamorphosis hard to interpret. Perhaps part of the reason for this is that it's quite a short story and as a result it has to pack meaning in much more densely than another longer story might. In the short segments that we read I actually found it hard to get myself engaged fully before I had actually finished the reading. It felt a bit for me like the novel was ending just as I was getting started with it, but hey, I suppose this is what writing is for.

There was one not so subtle aspect of the novel that I did catch up on, and it was that this is not a realist novel and the state we find Gregor is undoubtedly a metaphor for something. What exactly that metaphor is remains unclear perhaps, but it's definitely somewhere to start. For instance the first two readings I did completely void of discussion due to being sick, and immediately I started wondering what the whole thing with Gregor being "a giant vermin" was all about. In the first few pages the first conclusion I came to was that Gregor's condition was a statement from Kafka about the existential limitations of a life used for the pursuit of money. Gregor allows his employers to step all over him, and his work is probably not particularly fulfilling, so he is turned into a bug, something which people often step upon. I figured perhaps that Gregor's metamorphosis was not in fact his turning into this huge vermin, but that this would be merely a pupil stage for him, and his real metamorphosis would be when he evolved into someone who could find more meaningful pursuits in life. Admittedly I now find this theory a little trite, especially for such a famous modernist writer.

I still haven't decided what exactly the metaphor behind Gregor's condition is, but I think I have a general theme that I like more than the existential crisis brought upon by meaningless work. Throughout the novel the idea of humanity is prominent, due to Gregor's loss of any human like features. We discussed in class what it means to have humanity--what do we do that other animals don't--but there isn't any set definition for a way to act or feel that makes us human. There are actions though that we like to think of as being especially human, and compassion is one of them. It's also a very controversial notion in The Metamorphosis, at least I believe it to be. It's certainly an emotion that we know Gregor still feels, he tries it seems very hard to be considerate of his family. It's not clear the same can be said about how his family regards him after his change. Clearly it is very upsetting to them, but I saw very little sense that they grieved his loss simply because they missed him, but more because his absence meant they had to go back to working. By the end of the novel they're downright hostile to him and are majorly responsible for his death, I feel. For the human characters in the novel they seem quite unsympathetic or compassionate. Now perhaps their reaction isn't really that different from how you or I would have responded, you could replace Gregor's change with an illness--cancer perhaps--and you could imagine how their approaches to him might have been similar.

I suppose this is a depressing way to interpret this novel, but for me at least it's the most thought provoking. It would have been easy to make a statement about the pointlessness of a life spent seeking money, but much harder to paint such a picture of the nature of human compassion. For me this novel makes me wonder how and if my response to Gregor would have differed from that of the family's.

Point of View

It seems to me that in 20th Century so far the main characters of the novels we've focused on have been more controversial than I've noticed in any other english class I've taken so far, and even in books I've read outside of school. Perhaps I'm just reading books at a higher level than I used to, but I don't think so. It probably has something more to with the period of books we're reading from, that being from the modernist and post-modernist movements. I think that as a result of the "point" of the novel switching towards character study as Virginia Woolf puts it. As a result I think we get a number of characters who are harder to like than a usual narrator would be I believe. This is something to be celebrated though, since I don't think likable people are the only type of person worth studying. The interesting thing to me though is how my own perception of a character changes depending on how I'm viewing them.

The most relevant instance of this I think is the character who's point of view we're reading from right now--Rochester. By all counts I think if we were viewing him from any of the other characters in the novel would we see him as a straight up villain. As it stands I really don't like him for the most part, but that being said I have a hard time writing off everything he does. Obviously there's stuff that he does to Antoinette that we don't really get filled in by him, and as a result it's clear you lack a complete picture of who he is when he's the one describing events. That being said I still for some reason find ways that I can sympathize with him. For instance, I can see how he might feel really threatened by such an alien environment compared to his home of England. Not just the terrain, but the very type of people are very different to what he's accustomed to, and most aren't friendly. There even seems to be some merit to the claim that he was sort of forced into this marriage. All I'm saying here is that there is definitely material he talks about that gives him a more sympathetic air, which you wouldn't be privy to if you were being told his story from a different character's point of view. I think just as importantly however, there's definitely critical aspects of his personality that he chooses to leave out of the story.

Rochester isn't the only character who's been hard to sympathize with this semester though. In fact I believe that the very last character we observed was at times a hard character to sympathize with, let alone understand. Really, I think it's kind of hard to sympathize with someone who shoots and kills another person for no obvious reason. The jury at his hearing decidedly were not such people. Yet, there were still several people in my class at least who at times felt very sympathetic towards Meursault. He let's us in on feelings and insights about his situation that we could never have been experienced to otherwise, and the result is that we start to even care about him.

I don't mean to overplay the extent to which I think we do, or should, sympathize with the character whose point of view we are reading from. There's obviously loads of reasons to dislike a character like Rochester even when we're getting his side of the story. I suppose if I had to summarize my thoughts on the subject in a thesis statement though, it would be this: I see point of view as a very valuable tool for authors to demonstrate the complexities and dynamics of human character and how variable it can be, and this is especially pertinent to a movement whose goal is to study the character in depth.

My problem with The Hours

So admittedly this is coming pretty late, but the reason being is at least somewhat related to this post. In a nutshell I suppose this is about why I didn't like the movie The Hours. Really though, this is an oversimplification of how I feel. In all honesty I found the movie extremely depressing, which to its credit is something I think the movie was going for. It seemed to me at least that it did an exceedingly accurate job of painting all the ways in which one could become frustrated with life and how you might just find the whole ordeal pointless. This may not be an entirely fair review, I've only watched the movie once and as a result haven't given it intensive critical review, but the fact still stands I found the movie extremely difficult to watch.

Perhaps part of my problem was that when we started the movie I was expecting something more akin to a pastiche of Mrs. Dalloway set in a more modern style. This wasn't entirely inaccurate, the movie was obviously hugely impacted by the book, but they weren't simply different copies of the same story. This is poignant because I feel as though there were major themes in Mrs. Dalloway that were not touched upon in The Hours, but the movie was not necessarily trying to mimic the book and as a result I don't think my complaint can be one about the quality of the movie. Really I think I could summarize my feelings towards the movie by saying that I was disappointed at the lack of life affirming material in the The Hours, where there is certainly such material in Woolf's book.

If you look at Mrs. Dalloway it may come off on the surface as being a similarly depressing story, Clarissa the main character has deep existential doubts, and Septimus ends up committing suicide. Both of these aspects of the novel were pretty deeply unsettling for anyone who could immerse themselves in the novel, but despite this I somehow managed to thoroughly enjoy Mrs. Dalloway, and it stands as a very influential novel for me. When it came time to write a paper about it I was actually somewhat confused by the fact that I had enjoyed it so much, since I for a while held the belief that Woolf was a bit of a nihilist. Further contemplation has changed my view on that though. My thoughts are thus: while there is definitely material in the novel that could prove shaking for many readers, there are also some extremely affirming words stored within. Even on the eve of his suicide Septimus himself concedes that life is good, and this is a view held by Clarissa Dalloway as well I believe. While she may have a lot of doubts about her life she still seems to find a great deal that she loves. Honestly I'm extremely glad that Woolf decided in the end that Clarissa would not commit suicide, but instead would go on living.

This is perhaps what I mean when I say I didn't enjoy The Hours. It wasn't that I think it was a poorly done movie, quite the opposite, but I did feel that it lacked some of the more positive spin on life that Mrs. Dalloway had. Perhaps this was intentional, but for me it had the effect of presenting all the existential problems we as humans face, and lacked the more more encouraging material that was at least present in Woolf's novel.

Jake the stoic

Now a straightforward writing style is what made Ernest Hemingway so well known, but even amongst the various characters in The Sun Also Rises Jake seems especially simply spoken. He really doesn't say very much, and when he does it seems to be very straight to the point. I don't just point this out to emphasize that he's not long winded though. In comparison to the other characters in the novel Jake seems to almost take things more seriously. This isn't exactly correct, but I see his attitude as being in comparison to Bill or Brett who take remarkably ironic tones towards life.

It had been pointed out in class I believe that irony seemed to be a way for the characters to shield themselves from true emotion. It really does give off this vibe of being so far removed from any kind of emotional attachment that you're able to crack jokes about anything. In this way people are able to cast off the illusion of ever being hurt by anything, whether this is actually true or not. I think more generally than Jake, this is an important statement of how Hemingway feels people are changing going into the 1920's. It's not longer suitable to act in a more open manner, such as the way Robert Cohn does. Cohn served in many ways I think as an example of an "old-fashioned" person, such as the way he treated Brett and wasn't able to accept her sexual promiscuity like the other guys supposedly do. All this ties into a more universal theme that people now need to start to cover up their emotions, and Bill claims irony is becoming the norm.

As pointed out also by Bill, Jake doesn't fall under the category of an ironic person. He's decidedly not ironic for the most part, and as a result you might read his emotions an actions as being more sincere than the other characters. I'm not sure this is exactly accurate though. Despite his straightforward manner I still see Jake as a somewhat shielded individual. He's entangled in an ordeal with the woman he loves, which surely must be gut wrenchingly painful for him on some level. It can't be at all easy to see someone you love in that way going of with other people. We get some indication that Jake is torn up about it, but really not as much as we could. For the most part he seems to just report on what he says, as a true newspaper writer would. But really, I don't think Jake could be as removed from this as he seems to be. This is why I don't see Jake as being a less shielded (or more sincere) character than the others. Honestly I read Jakes pointedly stoic manner as his own way of guising his emotions. If he only just tells us about the direct actions of those around him then emotions don't ever even factor into the equation. I believe that Jake uses his own stoicism as a means by which he can hide his own damaged emotional state.

The hated Ms. Kilman

The Panel Presentation my group gave this week focused around a paper titled Equating Performance with Identity: The Failure of Clarissa Dalloway’s Victorian “Self” in Virginia Wool’s Mrs. Dalloway. Kind of a long title, but it was an interesting and thought provoking paper. Most of it focused around Clarissa Dalloway herself and her role as the perfect hostess, but a section of the paper also focuses on her daughter Elizabeth. More specifically it talks about Elizabeth’s life choices and how they compare to Clarissa, but it does by comparing her choices of role model between her mother, Mrs. Dalloway, and Ms. Kilman.

Ms. Kilman was a very interesting character to me, and one I wish we had looked at a little more in class discussions. The general sense I seemed to be getting from people was that they didn’t like Ms. Kilman very much, but I actually found myself empathizing with her quite a lot. What she represented in the paper however was Elizabeth’s desire to find a profession herself, as opposed to resigning herself to the same role her mother represents. Eventually Elizabeth seems to side with her mother as far as that she decides to attend her mother’s party as opposed to staying with Ms. Kilman and as a result chooses the perfect hostess roll over that of a profession.

If one were to assume that this is how Woolf meant it to be interpreted this presents an interesting view on Woolf’s own view of how a woman might define her sense of identity. Feminism was an important idea to Woolf and she wrote and extremely influential essay on the matter titled A Room of One’s Own. In it she states, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”, and more broadly she talks about the idea that women need similar support to that which a husband traditionally acquired from his wife if they are to have a fruitful career. What I find so striking here though is that there’s really no clear bias as to which root Woolf seems to feel is the better one.  Despite being an outspoken feminist and someone who had a lot to say about what women needed for their careers her novel doesn’t present a particularly pleasant idea of what the professional woman is like. Ms. Kilman certainly isn’t the happiest character in the book.

There wasn’t a great deal of discussion in my class about the extent to which Woolf’s own life is reflected in her novel, but I’ve always enjoyed trying to get to know the author a little better. After every good novel I’ve read I’ve always wanted to sit down with the author and just talk with them and get to know them a little better. Anyways, maybe this could provide a certain insight for the curious author into who Virginia Woolf was.

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

As one reads Mrs. Dalloway it becomes very clear to the reader that one of the main focuses of the novel is to explore the various ways in which we as human beings are related to one another. One of the biggest questions that her characters cause you to wonder is to what extent do we really understand one another? Well I haven't got a clear answer to this one, but it does seem that there's an awful lot in the novel to suggest Virginia Woolf feels that we don't really understand one another very well. I may or may not agree with her here, I haven't made up my mind, but I think it's a failed reading of the novel to assume that this is all Woolf has to say regarding our connectedness to one another. Understanding is a big motivator behind human action and it's understandable she would want to explore it's role in our lives, but I feel that another aspect of human interaction that Woolf plays with--and one which in my own opinion wasn't very well represented in class discussion--was that of how we influence one another and the connections formed as a result. 

Clarissa Dalloway as a character seems to spend a very large portion of her time contemplating the idea of death. I suppose it could be said that she also contemplates the idea of life a lot, since the two go hand in hand, but it does seem to be something that ways very heavily on her, as it probably did on Virginia Woolf. In fact for a self-proclaimed atheist she has a remarkably religious view on the role interconnectivity amongst humans plays in life and death. It says,

"Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? But that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in eachother, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself” (9)

Clarissa really seems to feel as though her essence as a being is what she refers to as the mist that spreads out over all the people and places she knows, and that that connectedness is what she considers to be her life.

            Such contemplation of the nature of life and death continues throughout the novel for Clarissa, but perhaps the most striking example of this is what the mention of Septimus Smith’s suicide evokes in her. Merely at the mention of it from Lady Bradshaw Clarissa wanders solitarily into a room separate from her party in order to contemplate the nature of suicide. In fact as Mr. Mitchell has pointed out a number of times it seems almost mystical the manner in which she pictures the very way that Septimus takes his own life. For a novel whose main goal is present an accurate representation of life there must be something that Woolf is trying to say with this scene. At least one of the messages I take away from it is that she’s trying to demonstrate the nature in which all our lives can be connected and influence one another, even in regards to the way Septimus who isn’t even living any more can cause such a strong response from Clarissa. In fact this was really the only time in the novel when someone seems to really understand some of the troubles that Septimus faced.

            Maybe this is my own feeble attempt to try and draw some hope for the idea that we aren’t all just floating in our bubbles, unable to see clearly into anyone else’s. That being said I do hold that there is a lot in Mrs. Dalloway that supports the view that we’re all ultimately very connected to one another. I remember that during one class discussion I proposed as a response to the idea that there’s not a real connection between Septimus and Clarissa the relationship that we as readers hold with Virginia Woolf herself.  Certainly she couldn’t have predicted the influences her book might have on future readers, and indeed it’s not hard to imagine a book like this being extremely influential in some reader’s lives. It’s definitely been quite a journey for me to read through its pages and think through the ideas contained within. In some way you might even be able to say readers had an impact on her life, in that she undoubtedly worried about the ways in which readers would interpret what was to become one of her masterpieces. Maybe I’m just deluding myself with a fantasy though.

What really makes up Character?

So here begins my dive into the stuff of the modernist writers, along with the rest of the 20th Century Literature Class.

As the the english language and the literature that accompanies and animates it advance into the 20th century we start to see significant change take place, which we now label as those characteristic of the Modern era. Chief among these is the daunting issue of how to best portray character, which is a very sweeping term, but for Virginia Woolf it means nothing less than to embody human life and existence itself. This is an extremely difficult and elusive objective, one that she admits herself she has no firm grasp of how it should be done, and one that I often wonder if it is possible at all. Nonetheless this is the goal she sets out not only for herself, but what she defines to be the overarching goal that all young novelists of her day should have been reaching for. Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, would have been well into the swing of the modernist era, and represents Woolf’s own rebuttal to her essays Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown and Modern Fiction, which detail her thoughts and beliefs as to where English literature needed to proceed.

This being the second book of the semester it would be only natural for us to compare the small taste of  20th century fiction we’ve enjoyed so far, but oh, how different the two novels at a glance would seem! Jumping from the early to 20’s to the 60’s not only do see the extreme changes in culture and everyday life that occurred in that quickly evolving setting, but we’re faced with completely different approaches to the idea of what character means. On one hand you have Woolf’s approach with her variety of characters each one of whom are spinning, seething balls of emotion, and the other you have Howie and his drinking straws. That’s not to take away from the importance of Howie as a character and a thought experiment, but certainly the contrast is striking.

While both books still work on addressing the idea of the character, you find entirely different takes on what the defining points should be in both Mrs. Dalloway and The Mezzanine. Looking at a Woolf character you really sympathize and feel for their struggles.For me, all the major characters in Mrs. Dalloway do a great job of prompting very introspective and interesting thought into my own human relations and actions towards those in my life. Definitely this is an extremely important part of my own character, and the very fact that I have this kind of a response I think signals a certain degree of success on Woolf’s part. When reading the Mezzanine, however, I had extremely different, but perhaps not any less meaningful or introspective thoughts. In a book that spends whole pages talking about the development of the drinking straw, Baker does a good job as well of causing me to consider my own character, but in a completely different manner. Instead of having the focus of his novel be on exploring the dynamics of human interaction he instead sends us on a voyage through his careful observation and reflection on the material things that make up his everyday life. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that other humans are important to Howie, (he claims he thinks of L. 580 time a year, and his family 400) but certainly his focus is much more on the little ways in which we react to our outside environment, as opposed to the mini storms of emotion that go on within.

Now I would never presume to make any statement about which of these two books is more important or influential, they both touch excellently on two entirely seperate aspects of what makes up our overall identity. Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that there is no one correct in which one might go about exploring the topic of character. Both novels do good jobs at what they set out to accomplish, but both fail to capture in enough the full extent to human life. I suppose this might support my own belief that the quest for the perfect novel is an endless one, but this does lend a certain heroism to the novelist who would spend their whole life attempting doesn’t it?

Nearing the end

For our first discussion of Sag Harbor we started off by simply discussing the ways in which Benji presents the opening of his summer. This was one of the most open-ended discussions we’ve had in class yet to date, and soon enough it had drifted entirely away from the book and simply into the realm of all things summer. It didn’t take long for my mind to wander (sorry Mr. Mitchell), and pretty soon I was thinking of all the wonderful things that I might get up to once school was out for the year. Tuning back in, however, I picked up on the theme of the conversation going towards the very things I had been daydreaming about. We all agreed that part of what makes the excitement of the start of summer what it is, is the promise of a new phase in which we can hope to improve ourselves. Whether it’s reading that book you’ve been meaning to, getting those extra runs in, or finding a job for yourself, Summer brings with it the poetential of an entirely new set opportunities.

On that day I was certainly feeling it, and was quite ready for summer to begin, but as the book progressed I was struck by an entirely opposite feeling. I’m of course talking about a feeling of nostalgia. I get it from many books, simply because I wish so badly I could live in the world they help me immerse myself in, but this was entirely different. The sense of longing that I got from Benji’s visit to his childhood house made me think back to my own childhood, and what it was like. Lots of it consisted of thoughts of what my elementary and junior high days were like, but even before that I thought back to what my life was like before I moved to Urbana. It still seems like a simpler and happier time, when I spent most of my time playing with friends, and running amuck in parks. Maybe everyone has similar memories of their pre-adolescent childhood, but for me Benji’s account of his childhood memories really struck a nerve.

Perhaps more pertinent to my current situation though, is how Benji reacts to the end of his summer. Maybe this is a little bit backwards, since my summer is just about to begin and his was just about to end, but I think there is a certain basic similarity to the phases, by which both summer and a school year progress.  Both start out with you setting your sights high and being ready for some serious self remodeling, and as they come to an end you wonder where all that has gone. Such is the progression of each, and this school year has proven no different for me.

Unlike years past however, I feel much less as though my summer is one of so many more that will come with as much time as I could want. Honestly, much like Benji I’m starting to feel as though this stage of my life is coming to an end. Obviously this feeling isn’t so dramatic as it would be were I a graduating senior, but it’s starting to feel less and less like the next stage of my high school career is up next, and more and more like I’m nearing the end of some stage of my life. Of course I’m starting to look ahead to what’s to come after high school, but at the same time it makes me think back to what I was like even two years ago. I can’t help but compare what I was like as a freshman or subbie to those I see roaming the halls. Similarly to Benji I’m realizing it’s a strange feeling to realize you’re no longer the upcoming generation, but instead a member of the fabled upperclassmen who are preparing to leave. Still I have one more year, in which I’m sure I’ll have even more thorough reflections back on who I was, even this year.

Can you feel it?

Throughout Sag Harbor the main character, Benji, usually doesn’t portray his teenagehood as being a particularly happy time in his life. Older Benji—or Ben, maybe—certainly describes himself on the whole as having been an extremely awkward person. While I actually like Benji quite a lot, and don’t think him an especially awkward person in reality, I still understand that dynamic between older and younger self pretty well. This being said, there is one scene in which we see dynamic absent from the narrative.

In Breathing Tips of Great American Beat Boxers a main theme throughout the chapter is Benji’s efforts to win himself admittance into a local nightclub, where a famous musical group, U.T.F.O, would be playing. Benji’s friends are also trying to get in, and have their own plan for how to do so, but aren’t letting Benjie in on it. As a result Benji has to try and fight his own way in, but in the end it proves not to be a problem at all. The bouncer lets them in without any trouble, and suddenly Benji finds himself amidst the very diverse crowd, which makes up the occupants of the Bayside Night Club.

At first, he and NP are both pretty nervous about their surroundings. They’re quite aware of how young they look and that they shouldn’t even be allowed there. Fairly quickly though, they start to realize that they haven’t really got anything to worry about.

No one looked at me. I was one of them on the dance floor and they were one of me. I jostled, was jostled in turn, collision as communication: I am here, we’re here together. The bass bounced my shirt on my chest. My elbow mashed the rib cage of this forty-something white lady in a green metallic jumpsuit and when I turned to apologize, she simply smiled and continued swaying to the music. (218)

For once we see Benji somewhere that he really doesn’t feel self conscious about himself at all. Throughout the entire novel we inhabit the mind of this kid who experiences a fair bit of social anxiety, and seems to always be quite aware of where he fits in to the social hierarchy. He feels he’s always been at the bottom, but in this instance we don’t see any of that. Instead he feels the collective identity of being part of a dancing crowd that really allows him to loosen up and just have fun without being afraid of what anybody else thinks.

I think almost everyone is familiar with what this dynamic to some degree, and for me it was a really nice section to read, where I can recognize just what the happiness that Benji is feeling is like. He really does seem to be quite happy and at peace with himself, and Whitehead sets up anticipation for what’s going to come next very well. This is where he leaves it, however. We never actually find out what the show is like, all we get is Ben (the older narrator) asking us “Can you feel it? “ right before the chapter ends.

Personally I’m kind of glad that this is how the chapter ends. The fact that in this one instance we’re addressed in the present tense gives us a sense that this is one of few feelings and experiences from his adolescence that Ben still loves, even as a grown man. Even more importantly though, is what his leaving us hanging does to enhance the feeling. The great thing about literature as an art form is the way in which it allows our imaginations to fill in all the scenarios. A descriptive writer helps us better craft a story in our heads, but ultimately it comes down to you to decide what the story is like. His cliffhanger of “can you feel it?” leaves us only with a sweet sense of anticipation of what’s to come that allows us to let our imaginations roam, which for me is a much more enjoyable result than if he had tried to use words to describe what it was like.