[WH] - The narrator who never talks

"I have now heard all my neighbor's history, at different settings, as the housekeeper could spare time from more important occupations" (page 134).

There were plenty of places that in the novel where we see Lockwood directly address the reader and then return to Nelly to tell the story, but this was the quickest for me to find.  There are many reasons why this book confuses me, but I have established it in my first blog post (the last that you'll read if you go from top to bottom) that Bronte is a meany who intentionally made her story confusing to parallel the relation problems.

So why would Bronte decide to make a narrator to emcee the novel and just introduce the new narrator every chapter?  Well, there could be a variety of reasons for this and I believe a combination of the bunch is probably the best reason, but like every rude AP test makers, there has to be a "best" reason for everything so I will make myself five choices and why one is the best.

• Since Lockwood is an new member of the society (poor guy...) it would make sense in a story sense that he would ask an older member of the community about the history of the families.
• It allows the Bronte to remind us a few times a chapter that everything in the story, up to this point at least, is a flashback and that no memory is one hundred percent error free so certain parts will be understated or exaggerated.
• As a participant in the action, Nelly will underplay parts that would hurt her credibility and exaggerate where she was a major player in the game.  I noticed this in chapter 15 when she passively watched Heathcliff crush Catherine as if she was not there.
• We'll just say that D was a really stupid choice that I immediately threw out because I can't think of another reason why Bronte would change narrators.
• Aliens came and...

A) is a very good choice, but no author ever writes a book so that it makes sense so clearly this is wrong.   Both choices B) and C) are very similar and have equal merit, but I have to go with answer B) since it seems like the "best" choice based on it's two literary terms and best encompasses all the chapters and not just the more recent ones that are more clear in my mind at the moment.

This is why I am a Chicago comma type of guy

"Ever since that fatal night, the end of my labours, and the beginning of my misfortunes, I had conceived a violent antipathy even to the name of natural philosophy" (pg 43).

 
Quick note: 100 posts, success.
Quick note #2:  My title rhymed.

As you can see in my above post, Victor describes his creation as "fatal," but in the sense that it killed his happiness, career and sanity.  It's ironic because in about seven pages, Victor believes a new form of fatal within the creation.

This year I have gotten so much better at noticing strange diction that authors use to set a tone.  When I read through it, I thought that it foreshadowed that the creation would kill someone, but now that I reread it, I realize Victor was using it in reference to his labours.  This brought up another question for me to answer though - why would Mary Shelley be so redundant with her writing.  See, this quote could either be a list of three or two depending on how you read the list.  Is "the end of my labours" a clarification of the night, or is Victor describing three ways to interpret the same night, because it would be clear given later hypotheses of Victor that the night could be interpreted as "fatal."  This is why I hate grammar.  The ambiguity of this parallelism is driving me insane.

Okay, I wouldn't say that I hate grammar because it does save lives.

Oh, and let's not forget Andy Grammer.

Never Let Me Go - Twelve

"'We all know it.  We're modelled from trash.  Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps.  Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren't psychos.  That's what we come from.  We all know it, so why don't we say it?  A woman like that?'" (pg 166).

This excerpt from Ruth has such a nice array of strategies that I just had to use it.

First, it is a fine example of British vernacular with the word "modelled."  I realized it early on that this book has other words like "realise" where Ishiguro is using that sort of talk.  This is probably just because the author is British, but I did not really notice this much vernacular in Brave New World.  It does give this novel more of a sense that it takes place outside of the United States though (seeing that it is in the United Kingdom, it makes sense).

Also, the term "winos" is a very informal, colloquial term to use.  Using a colloquial term in parallelism with more common terms made me stop to figure out what exactly a wino was.  I feel like it probably is more of a British term, but all the dictionaries say that it is informal.

The italicization of "trash" made it emphasized before Ruth expounded beyond the already insulting nature.  This really hammered in that the tone associated with possibles is one of disgust.  While everyone secretly wants to know who they were cloned was (so it seems), no one actually wants to know who they were cloned from out of fear that they are magically going to turn into the prostitute which they were made from.  Here is one of those moments where I start to wonder about nature versus nurture.

The phrase "just as long as they aren't psychos" kind of appears to be a litotes.  She definitely negated a negative form for a certain attitude that would not have been felt had she said "just as long as they are normal."  For some reason, psychos made me feel more strongly about the situation than had she just stated a positive.

In the words of Mrs. Sander, "a dark chocolate paragraph."

Brave New World - One

"One egg, one embryo, one adult - normality.  But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide... Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before.  Progress" (pg 6).

The parallelism and understatement early in Brave New World really express the importance of this distorted realities ethics.  Not only are they manufacturing humans, but they are even predestining every embryo to what its future occupation should be.  The "progress" has been unfolding for the past years, but through scientific break throughs, this process seems to be yielding greater results.  A perfect reality of "community, identity, and stability" and unravelling as the world found ways to make one person develop nearly one hundred copies of themselves.  The parallelism emphasizes the progress which the researchers are uncovering.  It also focuses in on the unity of separation.  While Bokanovsky's Process seems to be working in the present, it will be interesting to see the further implications of the current actions and seeming lack of precautions.  The unity of parallelisms and understatement seem to contrast the feelings that the characters in the book have of control over the situation with the shock in my mind that they actually think this scheme will be successful.

Remember when cloning sheep was all the rage?