Hamlets Journey: A Response to "Hamlet"

Hamlet, thou soul is darkness
Shadowed by the Bloated King
Incestuous mothers and the loss of a God,
are such a fiendish happening.

Hamlet, thou soul is brightened,
by the words of a kingly apparition
Given the purpose of avenging your father
or is this a fools ambition?

Hamlet, is thou insane?
Madness caused by what you’ve seen?
Maybe the loss of a lover,
or the acts of two Kings and a Queen.

Hamlet, thou soul is clear
Insanity gone in the blink of an eye
One small prick of your killers blade,
all it takes for a plague to die.

Eternally sleep, dear Hamlet
Your maniacal façade is undone,
but the Godly King is avenged
This you know with your last glimpse of Sun.

Individual Response #3: Spectrum of Ideologies

Individual Response 2

Critical Response

In the novel “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck, the main characters are almost all driven by self-interest. This will to only help ourselves is the cause of deaths and disappearances throughout the novel. The idea which Steinbeck is trying to portray is that the best way to preserve oneself is by first helping the group. Of all the characters in “The Grapes of Wrath,” Tom Joad is the first to realise that he cannot continue to be driven by self-centered desires. His realization is influenced greatly by Jim Casey who has always been attempting to help the group but did not know the right way of doing it. Eventually a circumstance arises where Jim is able to help the Joad family.

When the family first arrives in California, Tom gets in trouble with the Californian police. The Police are harassing the campsite that the Joads have stopped at for the night. Tom ends up getting in a fight with one of the police officers and knocks him unconscious. The family knows that Tom will be in a lot of trouble not only for attacking the policeman but also for breaking his parole. So Jim Casey, always thinking about the family, takes the blame for the crime and gets sent to jail in Tom’s stead. Jims act of selflessness eventually helps the family when, for a time, Tom is the only man to find work. Although Tom does not initially learn from Jims actions, he begins to see the benefits of working for one main goal rather than many individual goals.

The next time Tom encounters Jim is when Tom finally realizes the mistake of only working for one’s own goals. When they next meet, Jim is organizing groups of farmers to protest the lack of work and low wages. While in jail, Jim decided that the best way for him to help people is by bringing them together. Tom talks to Jim Casey for a while until they again get in a fight with the police. The fight ends with Jim being killed by a police officer. His death is an act of martyrdom and changes Tom’s views on self-preservation. Through this sequence of events, Steinbeck is able to show that it is better to die for the group then to live for oneself. Tom realizes this and goes off on his own rather than hiding with his family and getting them in trouble as well.

Each character in “The Grapes of Wrath” is interested only in themselves during at least one part of the novel. The characters that are continuously self-centered either die or end up in a bad situation. John Steinbeck tries to show us that the only way to have a good life is to work with other people and help them when possible and selfishness leads to a despicable life and bad situations.

Personal Response

A person’s capacity to strive for their goals is very much dependent on the conflicts in one’s life. These conflicts affect the choices that are available to an individual and the choices which present themselves generally conflict. No matter which choice is made, there can be some negative repercussions. In order to make a decision, one must first overcome the conflicts presented by ourselves and the people around us.

In the short story “On the Rainy River,” Tim O’Brien is forced to deal with his conflicting choices. He has to choose between running to Canada and going to the Vietnam War. If O’Brien does what he wants, his fear is that his family and the community he comes from will despise him. If he does what will make them proud, then he will hate himself and he may actually die in the War. I can relate myself with O’Brien in the fact that I have been faced with choices that have similar consequences to his, although mine have never been life threatening. My decisions had to do with my future career and lifestyle. What I want is to become a part of the music industry through either recording or broadcasting. My conflict, like O’Brien’s, had to do with my parents. Either I do what I want or I make my parents proud and go to University to get a prestigious job. In the short story, O’Brien runs away from his hometown and the decision he must make until he is forced to decide at the Canadian border. I can again relate myself to him in this instance. The difference is that he physically ran away while I just hid my ideas. My parents would ask what I wanted to do with my life and I would elude their questions. I did this because I was afraid that my parents would not like my choice of career. Once I started grade twelve, however, I was forced to choose. My conflict was resolved with much less drama then I thought. My parents were more than welcoming towards my ideas of doing what I want to do. The only issue they actually had is that I had not told them sooner so they could get acquainted with what it takes to get into the recording industry. I believe that in O’Brien’s situation, his parents would have also accepted his plans for the future and his imaginings of their disappointment towards him were fictional.

What I think this suggests is that our ability to pursue our goals is mostly affected by our internal conflicts. Although what other people think can be a factor, most of the time what we believe these people are feeling is just imagined by us. If these thoughts are not just imagined, then the affect they have on our decision making is huge unless we can cause ourselves to not care what others think. Therefore, to overcome the conflicts which affect our goals we must overcome our own fears and thoughts of personal failure.

Doulton Skripal and Logan Rudolfsen's Team Assignment

Individualism and Collectivism

Rainy River and Honia River: Compare and Contrast

“On the Rainy River” and “The Return” are similar in the fact that they are stories about life and yet both short stories are quite different from each other. Both have very unique settings, characters, and story lines. While “On the Rainy River” is about Tim O’Brien running away from his life, “The Return” is about a man named Kamau coming back to his life. There is one thing, however, that both stories have in common. Each story is based largely around rivers. “On the Rainy River” is set in Minnesota while “The Return” is about the Honia River in Kenya.
Both rivers represent important concepts relative to their stories. Many of these concepts are quite similar between both stories. One of these similarities is what each river represents to the main characters. In “On the Rainy River,” Tim sees the river and is reminded of his simple past as a child. He proclaims that he sees “Chunks of his own history flashing by” (Page 82). These flashbacks cause O’Brien to realize that his life would slip away if he ran to Canada. In “The Return,” Kamau also sees his past in the Honia River. The River is where he grew up and is the last part of his life left unchanged before he went to a prison camp. “Perhaps the river would not recognize in his hardened features that same boy to whom the riverside world had meant everything.” said Kamau in a moment of reflection (page 45). The difference is that while Tim is forced to make a quick decision on whether to give up his old life and start anew or go back and join the military, Kamau does not have a choice and is forced to give up his old life. Tim eventually decides that it would be better to keep his old life and go to war than restart in Canada. His choice is swayed greatly by the fact that he is afraid of the embarrassment of not doing what everyone else thinks is right: “I would go to war-I would kill and maybe die-because I was embarrassed not to” (page 83). In Contrast, Kamau loses the last of his personal affects in the river and moves on to try and forge his new life. Again, Kamau and O’Briens emotions are in contrast. Where Kamau “felt relieved” and ready to start his new life, Tim breaks down at the thought of losing everything he has worked so hard for (page 49). Tim’s fear is represented through the image of “a big crow looking at him from a boulder along the river” (page 81). The crow, being a symbol for death, signifies that Tim feels his life end if he moved to Canada. Kamaus loss of personal belongings also represents his life ending. Kamau is relieved, however, because he no longer has to carry his past with him like he had for five years when he lived in the prison camp. One of the most important symbols that the river lends to each of these stories is its swift current. The current of the Rainy River shows the urgency with which Tim must make his decision. Although this is not the case for the Honia River, the currents of both rivers still share one meaning. They both show how life keeps going. If we spend time making a decision or are stuck in the past, life around us will continue to press forward like the flow of a river.
While both rivers do not necessarily depict the same meanings, they are similar in many ways. The rivers remind each character of their own history and allow them to see what they are, or might be, giving up. Both rivers are also the setting for the main characters when they make their final realizations about their past and future lives. Both the Honia and Rainy River make the perfect setting because of their symbolic value. They represent the urgency of choices and unerring continuation of life.While acknowledging many differences between “On the Rainy River” and “The Return”, it can be suggested that there are more similarities between the two then contrasting factors.

Cowardice

Tim O’Brien’s dominant characteristic in the short story “On the Rainy River” is cowardice. Many people might think that because he went to the Vietnamese war and fought in one of the most brutal and destructive wars that he must be courageous but this is not true. O’Brien did not have the courage to stand up for his ideas and values. Rather than do what he thought was right by dodging the draft, Tim proceeded to do what he thought everyone else wanted him to do and he joined the military to fight in Vietnam. “I was a coward. I went to the war.” Tim admits at the end of his short story. Tim O’Brien is a coward because he is more worried about what other people think of him than his own opinion.
Some might argue that a more dominant trait than the cowardice of Tim O’Brien would be his feelings of self-loathing. Tim’s self-loathing was brought on by the fact that he was incapable of doing what he wanted. Although his self-loathing is a relatively big part of his character, it can easily be linked to Tim being a coward. An instance of his cowardice through self-hatred is when Tim is in the boat with Elroy on the Rainy River. He starts to hallucinate and sees thousands of people from his past, present, and future. He judges himself through their eyes and bases his decision of whether or not he will run to Canada on what he believes all these people will think of him. Tim acts like it is these people who hate him but it is all in his head and so his thoughts of hatred are coming from himself. Tim hates himself because he does not do what he wants but he does not do what he thinks is right because he is a coward.

Musicians Are Cowards!

“Musicians are cowards!” is a quotation I took from a song called “The Triumph of Our Tired Eyes” by the band Thee Silver Mt. Zion. The song is about how people, and in this case musicians, have the tendency to express themselves through words, but are too cowardly to act on their thoughts. I chose this excerpt from the song for two reasons. Firstly the song represents how I act, because I am opinionated and outspoken when it comes to my values, but I am not always one to take action. Secondly, the song is a piece of music and music is something I feel passionate about. It is for these reasons that this quote resonates with me as opposed to just taking a quote from a historical figure or politician.