Experiences with Huck Finn

1. No

2. I was aware of its relation to Tom Sawyer and the frequent use of the vernacular term for slave.

6. Huck Finn is considered a controversial novel because a cursory read of this piece could easily influence one to believe this novel is the culmination of Mark Twain's negative opinion of slavery. However, I believe that this novel is more of an editorialization concerning Twain's disgust with society's inability to think as individuals.

7. I had a difficult time connecting with this novel, and I would agree with the idea that it is losing relevancy to college students. I think it is significant in a historical context, but the original impact of the novel is marred by the incongruence created by the inherent differences in time periods.

8. I think this novel is considered flawed because it lacks a resolute ending to the story. There are many different opinions on why this is, many of which I think are too insightful. However, I am under the impression that Twain was either confused about the direction his novel was taking, or was too much of a coward to finish what he started.

2/13 - 1930s article

     Initially I found this assignment somewhat abstract. I thought it would be difficult to find an article with a theme that could be related to the concept of a 'coming of age' piece of literature. As I was flipping through the 1936 issue of Life magazine, I came across a collection of photographs depicting the everyday lives of the students of West Point and felt an immediate connection to this article. This article was written to educate the American people about the lives of the people of West Point. One of the reasons I found this intriguing is that as I sat down to write this post, I could not decide whether or not to call the males in the pictures men or boys. I spent a while thinking about this point and decided it would be a great catalyst for a 'coming of age' post and started writing.
     These pictures captured what seemed to me as the prime of our nation at the time. West Point was, and still is, a premiere university in this country and a place where the best and brightest were to be educated and prepared for the future. I think there is an interesting parallel between the lives of these men and the state of our nation at the time this article was written. There are many points in history where it could be said that the United States had cemented its place in world politics as a major player. However, I believe that this time period embodies that idea in a more symbolic form by this article. In a way, the argument could be made that United States was in the midst of its own coming of age during the late 1930's. My recollection of history is mediocre at best, but I remember this being a time period when we had just come out of the worst economic depression in our nation's history and, prior to that, pretty much won World War I for the Allied Powers with our intervention in the late 1910's. As a result, the perception of the United States was changing from just another country across the Atlantic to a major economic and military superpower. With the maturation of our country, I believe that a similar metamorphosis was occurring in the lives of the students of West Point.
   One of the concepts of the article that struck me was the rigor and strict discipline with which the cadets of the military academy lived within. I understand that this comes with the territory of a military academy, but I was surprised by the regimented lifestyle. Despite this, the cadets always seemed to be smiling and enjoying what they were taking part in. I know that emotion was probably scripted by the photographer and not a permanent sentiment, but I found it intriguing.  What I took away from this juxtaposition of enjoying a strict life was that these men knew what they wanted to do with their lives. It baffles me that seventy-six years can go by and so much can change. With the societal freedom that most of us enjoy in today's culture, I find that that same liberation often has the potential to lead to apathy and a lack of progress.  With the freedom that most of the men in those photographs fought and quite possibly died for in World War II, I feel that the last thing these men would look upon with favor would be mulling over possibilities. I found this train of thought very motivating - coupling the contrast of the negative aspects of wasting time against creating a reality. If pictures could talk, I feel like these cadets would be upset with the concept of paying so much money to figure out what one wants to do with his or her life. Coming of age is all about maturation in multiple aspects of life. It's about deciding what your life is for and making that mental image a reality.

Candide - Reflection

To be honest, I found this novella quite frustrating and even somewhat depressing at times. The satirical nature of this piece of literature creates an exceedingly sarcastic, and at times, humorous tone that adds to the condescending intentions of the author to create a work which points out what Voltaire sees as flaws in the society of that time period. At first, I truly enjoyed the exaggerations and not-so-subtle editorializations concerning the socioeconomic misplacement of values. However, after a while I felt as if I was reading the diary of an extraordinarily well-read teenage girl. It seemed like every footnote’s sole purpose was to explain the historical context of an insult I would otherwise be ignorant of.

After realizing that I was comparing a renowned historical philosopher to a pubescent woman, I started to think about why Voltaire could be so frustrated with so many different people. That was when I connected the Enlightenment to the theme of this course. It seems to me that if one was to anthropomorphize the time period of the Enlightenment to a young adult, a lot of the reasons I disliked this novel start to make sense.

Voltaire buried his agenda and issues with certain philosophical fallacies of his contemporaries underneath several layers of sharply worded satire. The Enlightenment was a time period in which new philosophies and paradigms of thought were growing into fruition faster than most people knew what to do with them. This ‘age of reason’ led mankind to ask and attempt to reason through certain fundamental questions of life, such as wondering if the universe can ever be understood.  With the development of solutions to these questions, there were bound to be disagreements and animosity between contrasting philosophical views. Voltaire obviously had a bone to pick with the idea of optimism being a legitimate explanation. The character of Pangloss embodied this train of thought and always seemed to have a completely rational, irrational justification for whatever obstacle is thrown in his path. The absurdity of these ‘solutions’ tend to act as catalysts for Voltaire to point out inherent flaws in the use of rationalization to answer questions that had been considered intrinsically irrational for hundreds of years. 

One of the most intriguing aspects of this novella is the character of Candide. While it is obvious that Voltaire uses this character’s innocence and pureness to contrast his critiques of the overuse of reason, I view the character in a more symbolic light. In an elegant use of incongruity, I believe that Candide represents an ironically placed solution to the errors of pure rationalism. Candide is the human element that Voltaire seems to consider absent from the ‘age of reason’. 

Despite my initial dissatisfaction with this piece, I admire how much Voltaire was able to convey without explicitly saying what he believed. After wading through his mountain of satire, I found the underlying thematic elements quite interesting and was able to connect with the coming-of-age theme despite its context being more of an intellectual movement.