Hello, everyone! Long time no see! While deliberating who I should focus on for this installment of my long-winded, poorly-titled blog, I found myself rereading the short stories of Faulkner, namely “Barn Burning” and “The Bear.” While I could have written about those (which I might in the future), I found myself more excited in my return to The Sound and The Fury, in which I found a deep inclination of sympathy. William Faulkner’s pieces are often regarded as symbolic and representative of more significant issues. Faulkner displays this pattern in The Sound and the Fury by chronicling the fall of the Compson family. Faulkner allows for interpretation and representation by giving each brother of the Compson family their own section of the novel. This method also allows deep insight into the psychology of each narrative character. Through sentimentality, psychology, and representation of the South, William Faulkner lays bare the trauma of the Southern United States and forces readers to sympathize with an otherwise tragically flawed region.
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McFerron’s Authors of Revolution: Not Another Hemingway Analysis: Manipulation via Voice in The Sun Also Rises
Hello, everyone! Welcome back to the blog. When it comes to writing about Ernest Hemingway, trying to bring up new ideas regarding century-old texts can seem troubling at best. While I was researching his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, I was taken aback with the amount of criticism I outright disagreed with. The Sun Also Rises is widely acclaimed for Hemingway’s style and voice in depicting the mindsets and pace of life of the Lost Generation. Each character involved in the story is irreversibly traumatized and affected by the events of World War I. Many critics have attacked the misogynistic, racist, and antisemitic commentary of the novel’s narrator as reflections of Hemingway’s personal mindset, but more recent criticism has displayed the crucial aspect of the novel as the separation of author and speaker. While seemingly a “Creative Nonfiction” account of Hemingway’s own expatriate life, ignoring the role that fiction plays in characterization and voice is to misinterpret the novel entirely. Jake Barnes is certainly an unreliable narrator, but through his minimalist approach to detailing the events of the novel, he should also be understood as an unwilling participant in the telling of this story. Furthermore, Jake’s voiced depictions of Lady Brett Ashley draw the conclusion that she, like Jake, is also an unwilling participant in his manipulation of her character. Through this complex, Hemingway proposes both the ideas of the unwilling protagonist and the unwilling deuteragonist.
Continue readingMcFerron’s Authors of Revolution: The Lost Generation in Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” and Wallace’s “Forever Overhead.”
Hello and welcome back, everyone! This past month, I’ve had the privilege of revisiting two of my favorite authors, William Faulkner and David Foster Wallace. In doing so, I stumbled across an old paper of mine comparing two of their short stories. I’ve made some heavy revisions and thrown out some of my old ideas for new ones, but the central theme of both author addressing a type of lost generation is still intact. The lost generation is commonly known as the generation of Americans post-World War I and pre-World War II. Many writers including T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner responded to the anxieties of America at the time through their short stories, poems, and novels. Faulkner’s short story, “Barn Burning,” directly addresses this generation through his characterization of Sarty, and the reader’s relatability to him. Decades later, however, David Foster Wallace also responded to the lost generation and argued that the American mindset still coincides with the same mindset Faulkner and his contemporaries displayed. In “Forever Overhead,” Wallace displays this argument in an improved-upon aspect of relatability by using the second person, forcing the reader to become the lost main character. Both stories attempt to answer the question; when does one decide to be their own person?
Continue readingMcFerron’s Authors of Revolution: Mikhail Bulgakov
Hello and welcome back, everyone! I’m excited to be continuing my blog this semester and I wanted to start by visiting The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. This novel has quickly become a favorite of mine, and I only regret that I didn’t read it sooner. At its core, this text is a masterclass of satire, irony, and fantasy, the likes of which I can only compare to the works of Vonnegut, O’Connor, and Wallace. If you’re a fan of the actively surreal, you will no doubt love this novel. Before we jump into the text, I’d like to focus on the author, as the life of Mikhail Bulgakov is central to understanding his Magnum Opus.
Continue readingMcFerron’s Authors of Revolution: Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
Hello and welcome back, everyone! These past few weeks, since my blog about Milan Kundera, I’ve had difficulty finding the time to sit down and read a full-length novel that I wasn’t already reading for one of my classes. With stressors in mind, I started to scramble through my bookshelf for a lesser-known book that had an impact on my life and the lives of others. While doing so, I came across a book that I had completely disregarded from my mind halfway through my reading of it: No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. If you’ve read it, you can probably guess why I chose to forget this book, a lot of the themes found in this novel are heavy to accept, and it didn’t help that I was visiting themes of suicide, depression, and alienation after my re-read of A Little Life. So, I put the book down some months ago and tucked it away until just yesterday when I decided to re-read and finish the novel. Luckily, I was able to finish it, but at some cost to my mental well-being. Before I delve into this, I’d like to offer a similar warning I gave with Hanya Yanagihara’s novel. If you aren’t in a good headspace, don’t be afraid to put the book down. Many who suffer have found Dazai’s work to be a comfort to them and even inspirational, but I’d argue it’s easier to read this and be put into a more negative headspace. All that being said, I’d like to introduce you to No Longer Human.
Continue readingMcFerron’s Authors of Revolution: Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera is both widely praised and somehow overlooked in talks of influential postmodern authors and poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. Kundera was born in 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and came of age during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia that started with the Munich agreement. From his early teenage years, Kundera was a devotee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In 1950, he and his close friend Jan Trefulka were blacklisted from the party for “Anti-Communist activities,” since the party’s take-over in 1948. Kundera and Trefulka both criticized the movement’s deviation from Marxist principles and leniency toward totalitarianism. In response to his expulsion, Kundera wrote The Joke, a novel in which he pointed out the hypocrisy of the party, which was banned as soon as it reached bookshelves. This novel was published in 1968 and was Kundera’s foothold for his involvement with the Prague Spring. To understand Kundera, you first have to understand this history. The Prague Spring was a reformist movement led by groups of philosophers, writers, and artists who introduced enlightenment ideals like freedom of speech and religion, as well as a decentralized economy and democracy to what was then Czechoslovakia. You can probably see where this is going if you know your history. The Soviet Union didn’t take kindly to these “Western” ideals being implemented so close to home and used other nations of the Warsaw Pact to invade and take control of the country in a rapid display of violence that lasted only 2 days. Kundera, though certainly on a hit list for his influence in the reformist movement, remained hopeful throughout the occupation, but was eventually pressured to flee from Prague to France in 1975, where he now, at the age of 93, lives a quiet, isolated life.
Continue readingMcFerron’s Authors of Revolution: Hanya Yanagihara
Welcome back, everyone! I hope you all had a great summer and are enjoying the weather as we transition into autumn. This summer I spent a lot of time, though not as much as I wish I could have, reading and re-reading some of my favorite texts. Some off-the-bat recommendations I have from my new reading list this summer include The Sun Also Rises by Hemmingway, The Stranger by Camus, Immortality by Milan Kundera, and Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky. Again, I hope you all had a wonderful summer, thank you for joining me again as I delve back into this blog. Without further ado, I’d like to talk about one of the novels I re-read this summer, why I chose to re-read it, and why I think everyone ought to read it.
Continue readingMcFerron’s Authors of Revolution: David Foster Wallace’s response to Postmodernism.
David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He’s best known for his novel Infinite Jest, which totals at 1,079 pages. He’s widely regarded as one of the best American writers of all time, and Time Magazine awarded Infinite Jest a spot among the top 100 English novels since 1923. Some of his other better-known works include his collection of short stories Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, his essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and his final, unfinished novel, The Pale King. His writing is perhaps the closest we’ve gotten to responding to the postmodernists, and I’m sure with time, Wallace will be officially considered to be in a category of his own, but for now, he’s often called a post-postmodernist.
Continue readingMcFerron’s Authors of Revolution: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky is widely regarded as one of the best novelists to ever write, and the best Russian novelist of all time. All in all, Dostoevsky wrote 15 novels before his death in 1881. His first novel: Poor Folk immediately found critical acclaim in Russia and was deemed Russia’s first “social” novel as well as a major socialist work. Poor Folk was written in an entirely epistolary form, told through the letters of an impoverished clerk who wrote to a woman he was wildly in love with, but knew he could never be with. The story attacked classist systems in Russia and the rest of the world and urgently spurred Russia’s socialist movements which at the time sought the eradication of the feudal system. Unfortunately, Dostoevsky’s later works wouldn’t find critical acclaim for nearly 15 years after the release of his first novel. Finding such striking success pretty much right off the bat and immediately returning to obscurity surely tormented Dostoevsky, but this is only one instance of suffering that made him one of the greatest psychological and philosophical novelists of all time.
Continue readingMcFerron’s Authors of Revolution: Henry Rollins
Welcome back, everyone. These past few weeks since my last blog, I’ve found myself incapable of focusing on anything other than the history of punk music and culture. For this rendition, I’d like to focus on one of the leading DIY punk bands in America, Black Flag, but more specifically on the life and times of Henry Rollins, their frontman from 1981 through 1986. Black Flag was formed in 1976 during what I would call the punk revival. This revival of punk in America saw multiple other leaders such as The Minutemen, Minor Threat, and Descendants, just to name a few. This era of punk can best be described as a response to leading sellout punk bands who were being warped by industry and ultimately losing the very essence of punk, turning it into more of a fashion than a movement of resistance.
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