A Very Lit Blog

Coming of age, we aren't doing it anymore. This is an African American Literature blog now. bye bye

An oddly common motif throughout  Black Swan Green is that of birds: Jason lives in a town with "swan" in it, and he also attends a goose fair, during which he makes a crucial decision regarding his own principles (choosing to return the wallet to notorious asshole Ross Wilcox). Now, that's not a lot, but it's weird that it's happened twice. We can do something with this.      "Black Swan Green hasn't got any swans." This sentence is one of the first things we hear about the town from Jason. It's a quick little quip, something that could be easily passed off as world building. And yet, at the end of the book, when Jason is contemplating the many changes his life has gone through in such a short time, what does he see? A swan.  Swans are very common symbols in literature, and mean many different things, but one I'm choosing to focus on one specific meaning: that of elegance and femininity. Jason is embarrassed about his poetry; the hypermascul...

 Throughout Fun Home, Bechdel uses herself and her father as allegories relating to other literary works many, many times, even to the point of redundancy. While this might just be her love of literature, something she shared with her father, I would argue that it is more to frame her narrative less like an autobiography, but more like a crafted fictional tragedy. Many times in the book, Bechdel mentions how novelesque her life was, even apologizing for some of the dramatic irony present in her story. I will just come out and say that I'm pretty sure a good chunk of her story is embellished for effect, and there's nothing wrong with that in my opinion. But I think her use of her and her family as a tool for storytelling is something she picked up not only from her extremely influential father, but her mother as well. In the first few chapters, Bechdel states that her father seemed to occasionally enjoy having kids, as it helped "add to the illusion", like they were mu...

     Throughout the book, Salinger gives us multiple hints that Caulfield is not a character to look up to. The way he interacts with authority figures he feels do not deserve his respect is ignorant at best. Likewise, Holden displays varying self-destructive tendencies both before and after he leaves the prep school: purposefully goading his hot-tempered roommate into laying him out, attempting to solicitate alcohol from multiple sources, getting himself beat up again, etcetera. From reading between the lines and properly acknowledging that these actions are supposed to reflect badly on both Holden and his mental state, we (this English class, at least) can properly understand that Catcher in the Rye is a study of a deeply flawed man who has serious issues that need to be worked out by a professional.     This character is not particularly unique nowadays, but when some of them bleed into popular culture they can have quite an effect on people. Before I say wha...

My coming of age essay was about the 2011 animated movie Rango. Rango starts the movie with zero identity; he literally lives in a cage making up stories where he is the valiant hero to satisfy his crushing loneliness and crisis of self. When he is thrown unceremoniously into the Mojave desert, he has to face the fact that not only is he not as brave as he thought he was, but that the real world is unforgiving, and there are very few people in the desert willing to help anyone but themselves. When he arrives at the main setting, a town called Dirt, people ask who he is and where he's from. It is then that he realizes that as he has no identity, he can spout whatever lies he wants to impress these people, and he does that exact thing.  However, when he is appointed sheriff, he has to deal with the reality of having people rely on you, as it is now his responsibility to save the entire town from dying of thirst by retrieving their water. When he fails on his mission and has to come b...