lit analysis #i forgot because we do so many

Looking For Alaska AKA THE BEST BOOK IVE EVER READ
1. A not too social boy living in a not too exciting town moves to a boarding school that his father attended as a high schooler as well. Thinking it would be an amazing place with beautiful scenery and exciting people, you could imagine the disappointment when it ends up being a bone dry wasteland of cliques and classes. But he judged too quickly. Culver Creek Boarding School was most likely the best thing that had ever happened to Miles. He met the best people he would ever meet, one of them being Alaska, a witty girl who never seemed to lack an answer. As the days go on, he slowly falls in love with his best friend, and then, it all suddenly changes. Alaska dies, no one knows by suicide or not, or why she did what she did previous to the destructive car accident. But Miles won't stop until he figures out the mystery behind her death. The author pulls you in with every incident and every word written. Each problem in the novel has a distinct purpose to make you feel certain overpowering emotions. 
2. There are so many themes encumbered in this book but I'm going to choose the struggle with finding individuality. Miles comes from a town where he has no friends, just his mom and dad. The people he meets influences everything he does, even though they are fighting to find themselves too. Especially Alaska. He needed to find his great perhaps, as he put it.
3. The author's tone is very witty, humorous, and deep all at once. 
"He's just happy most everyone's gone. He's probably masturbating for the first time in months."
"'Sometimes I don't get you,' I said. 
She just smiled toward the television and said, 'You never get me. That's the whole point.'" 
"You all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die."
4. Parallel structure: "I hated discussion classes. I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way..." pg. 32
Metaphor: "So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane." pg. 88
Lyric: "Night falls fast. Today is in the past." pg. 89
Allusion: "Night falls fast. Today is in the past." (also an allusion of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay) pg. 89
Irony: "COFFEE TABLE", the coffee table that is not a coffee table is labeled coffee table.
Narrator: the narrator is Miles, aka Pudge. "After five minutes, we split up to go to our destinations. I stuck with Takumi. We were the distraction." pg. 103
Onomatopoeia: "bangbangbanged" pg. 105
Alliteration: "drinking and joking" -it sounds like alliteration anyways, the way you say it. pg.121
Simile: "Like an alcoholic preacher on a Sunday morning." pg. 124
Personification: "...her volcanic candle just peeking out from beneath the bed." pg. 154
 


CHARACTERIZATION 
1. Direct: "...the not-yet-setting sun shone against her lazy dark curls..."-"I saw a short, muscular guy with a shock of brown hair."
Indirect: "My thin arms didn't seem to get much bigger..."-"
The author uses both approaches in order to put the reader into the story with the direct characterization, because different characters needed different appearances to go with different personalities. He left some parts of the characters up the reader's imagination though, which is why he used indirect characterization too.
2. The author's diction and syntax rarely changes through the novel. If the diction ever changes, it's when one of the characters is talking. They are high schoolers, so they don't have as elevated a vocabulary as the author.
3. The protagonist is extremely round, and is dynamic. He changes so much throughout the book, being a boring, friendless teenager to a slightly more grown boy dealing with the death of his best friend and a girl he believed changed his entire life.
4. After reading this book, I was an emotional wreck. I didn't understand how the author could just kill off such an important character. But then I realized, his whole reasoning for killing off such an important character was exactly to make me feel like the emotional wreck that I was. 
"He was screaming, 'I'm so sorry.'" This one sentence was stated after the death of Alaska. And it is so simple, that it made me understand the exact emotion that I've gone through, and describes the intensity I was feeling.

Huxley's Brave New World

I don't understand how we will ever be this society. Brave New World was interesting and all, but it's just not humanly possible for any of this to happen. We can't just drop all emotional reasoning and mature at a younger age than we do now. We can't just not feel jealousy, or euphoria, or sadness, or love.

Huxley's interview made me realize how much thought he actually put into his novel. How carefully he placed each symbol delicately through each chapter. I think he found people to be a lot more emotionless than we really would be in that world's structure. It's impossible to feel nothing, and if it was, nothing would be an emotion. Free thinking is something we can't help but do, and he can tamper with the idea that we can't all he wants, but really, there will always be one Henry in a sea of Directors that halts the process.

the dreaded essay

PROMPT
1979 Choose a complex and important character in a novel or a play of
recognized literary merit who might, on the basis of the character’s actions alone,
be considered evil or immoral. In a well-organized essay, explain both how and
why the full presentation of the character in the work makes us react more
sympathetically than we otherwise might. Avoid plot summary.

A novel wouldn't be a novel without its traditional good and evil characters. The immoral "mind-bogglers" and kind-hearted heroes make the entire plot. Through the eyes of a serious reader of stories, the obvious antagonist of Brave New World is The Director. But, through the eyes of the analytical thinker, it's relevant to say that John the Savage is the immoral character of the story. But why? He is the protagonist, the tragic hero, the misunderstood outsider- so why would he be the evil one? The immorality of a character is based on his or her actions and behavior when placed in a different environment, in this case, in the "brave new world".

The confusion between common morality and the morality of a certain society is proven through John the Savage. By placing him in the opposing land of the reservation, we as readers felt for him and made that connection known as sympathy for his new found world. By venturing out of his comfort zone and making the transition into an emotionless world, we are shown many reasons why he is considered immoral.

In the new world that John lives in, he is not amused by the lifestyle of Lenina and everyone else alike. The way that the Alphas and Betas and Deltas, and so on, live is non driven and unoriginal, and the fact that John doesn't live that way automatically outcasts him as an immoral beast from a different universe. When in our eyes, he did nothing wrong but think for himself. In the "brave new world's" society, self-provoking thought processes are uncalled for, even unknown in a way. Not surrendering to the temptations of approaching erotic activities is seen as wrong. The morals of John and the morals of the reader are so compatible that we experience a symphony of sympathy for his situation. His dually noted self-preservation comes off to the people as strange, and that is what makes him immoral.

John the Savage contradicts most immoral characters in traditional novels, but when read into, he is an obvious suspect for the immoral character choice.

this essay sucked.   

benchmark remix

"I hate small talk. Tell me about your infinities."
"But the capability to breed sadness is a blessing.""I'm on diet romance, and I hate the taste of watered-down love."

If you understood that at all you are officially my favorite.

resource of the day

my resource of the day is my mother because she helped me with literally everything today and I can't thank her enough. (And because I can't think of a resource rn)

resource of the day

Sooooo I was messing around on Twitter the other day, and found an account dedicated to Charles Bukowski. Lately I've been coming across bits and pieces of his work and quotes by him on Tumblr and just on websites and the internet in general, and a lot of them make sense to me. I really like his writing. So I followed this account on Twitter to get a different part of his mind every day, and you should too!: https://twitter.com/bukquotes

resource of the day

Being the nice person I am, I brought my friend Starbucks to school today. And I don't have any amazing resources that can help academically so I'm gonna post one that I used today randomly. Click on it to see what it was hahahahaha
surprise!

resource of the day

My resource of the day is somewhat cliche, in my eyes, because the book it is about is considered a "teenage girl love story that feeds the emotional fire of nostalgia and things that are never gonna happen in my love life". So The Fault in our Stars is one of my favorite books, but it's also written by one of favorite authors, John Green. He just KNOWS the correct variation of words to make me happy, I can't even begin to explain it. And this book is one of the three books I'll be including in my Masterpiece.
So anyway, I found a link for frequently asked questions about the book, and I figured it could help me with understanding some things I didn't catch while reading. And in case there's any more teenage girls out there like me who like crying and smiling at words at the same time: here it is

acceptance is sweet

Finally got into all four schools I ultimately wanted to get into, and I'm surprised I did it.
College is officially happening.