To Overcome Authority

This is a pretty naked overview of my aspirations for my paper. However, during the past couple of weeks, I have fallen in love with FEEDBACK! So, if anyone is willing, take the time to read the following mini-paper, I'd love to have a conversation about the ideas I'm presenting!

Question: What is the effect of ignorant parenting on children and can they overcome it?

Depriving Childhood Through Authority

In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the Bundren children are dwindling in poverty, selfishness, and animosity. However, in each child’s narration of the story, there can be found deep insight into human nature, which contains more prudence and virtue than that of their parents. Still, they are at the mercy of their father and recently deceased mother. Similarly, Lewis Carroll’s character, Alice, journeys into Wonderland and finds herself succumbing to the whims of various adults. Just as Alice is ridiculously scorned, mislead, and reprimanded by the authority figures in her journey through Wonderland, the offspring of Addie Bundren represent the precarious condition of children that do not have reliable authority figures in their lives in the novel As I Lay Dying. Lewis Carroll and William Faulkner's works identify the damage caused to children by dysfunctional family environments and autocratic adults.

Complete Chaos

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All of my thoughts about this paper are swirling around in my head with no sense of order. It's complete chaos in there. So, in an attempt to create order here are some questions and a mini-draft of my paper to circulate to others in order to get some more feedback.

Questions: Can I compare Death from The Book Thief and the death themes in Alice and Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by using past representations of death? Would it work? Would it make sense? Is this even a good idea? Are there better ways to do this? Any advice or feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Perks Of A Possible Paper

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I'm still hoping this paper will come along as I keep writing it but for now, it needs more work. There's also something in the back of my head telling me that I might have trouble writing a long, well-supported paper about this topic but I guess time will tell. Some of my ideas are still growing so they aren't as well developed. I'm really glad we are doing many small drafts as builds for our full paper. I feel like this really allows me to flesh out my ideas and work on my editing, which I need. Without any further adieu, here's my rough (but improving) build for my final paper. Suggestions are always welcome!

A Miniature Paper About Morrie and Alice

Here's Alice having a nice relaxing afternoon in the fields,
unlike the rest of us, locked inside cramming for
finals and writing papers.

My main problem is that I'm feeling scatterbrained in terms of my ideas. I have lots of good things that I want to include, but I'm not sure how to tie them together. I'm also worried that my idea isn't advanced enough to make an 8 page paper out of it. I don't know if I've come up with anything someone could argue with, I guess. So if anyone has a minute to look it over and give me some
feedback, that would be really really nice.

Here's my miniature paper.

The Chicken or the Egg...

The writers of the Lost Generation suffered from the consequences of the Great War. They were troubled at the apparent lack of inherent human goodness and felt disappointed with social structures like religion and family. They often searched for meaning and identity in artificial things like sex, liquor, and adventure. These experiences most always led to a loss of innocence.

Hemingway and Friends (Wikipedia)

Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises beautifully captures the every day struggle of a few of these people from the Lost Generation. The main character, Jake Barnes, slowly comes to terms with his loss of identity while kneeling in a Spanish church:


[…] as all the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was a little ashamed, and I regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time […].


My question is this: Did the Lost Generation suffer at the hands of the changing world to which they belonged, or did their own selfish desires produce their feelings of disenfranchisement from society? Basically, are they being acted upon or are they suffering from their actions? Does their situation motivate their actions, or do their actions determine their situation?

I plan on circulating this to a classmate from a different English class and to a few of my acquaintances who are English majors in Colorado.

Pamplona, Spain (Wikipedia)

To the Core

The Victorian Era and the 80's don't seem to have much in common...

Experiences, focus', and expectations for life and society may have changed, but what drives people to pick up a book seems to be timeless.  

Coming of age, feminism, breaking social norms, fantasy, unknown worlds full of new rules -- 

these are things that bridge the centennial gap between 

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Winter of Fire.

Though surfaces tell us that these books are different and independent; 

their core reveals the a single entity 

People will pick up these novels for what they are, but they will return to these novels for the journey. 

The journey of the characters, the emotions, the moral and their own growth. 

Why Tell Stories?

In A Little Princess, Sara Crewe is always imagining something and often tells stories about what she imagines. She even sometimes seems to see the things she imagines as being real in a way. Although many of the other students are fascinated by her stories, many people also say that this tendency is strange. My question is what exactly is the good of fictional stories? Clearly there is a good to them. They help Sara survive her hardest times, and they help real people too. There are people who would say that a belief in impossible things can even be unhealthy. So, are stories, especially the truly unrealistic ones such as Sara’s fancy of rats being people or Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole, unhealthy or do they do a lot of good? Why?

I plan to circulate this mostly through Goodreads, but I may also give Facebook a try. I also have a couple of past English teachers that it might be good to contact.

Point of View

In The Phantom Tollbooth, after taking the scenic route to Point of View, the boy Milo and his companions stop and take in the sight of the green valley stretched before them.

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Credit to Dcrjsr

"'Isn't it beautiful?' gasped Milo.

'Oh, I don't know,' answered a strange voice. 'It's all in how you look at things'" (102).

The voice belonged to a boy named Alec Bings, who was standing three feet above the ground in midair. Alec explains that in his family, every person is born with his head exactly where it will be when he is an adult, and he grows toward the ground. 

"'You certainly must be very old to have reached the ground already,' [said Alec].

'Oh no,' said Milo seriously. 'In my family we all start on the ground and grow up, and we never know how far until we actually get there.'

'What a silly system.' The boy laughed. 'Then your head keeps changing its height and you always see things in a different way? Why, when you're fifteen things won't look at all the way they did when you were ten, and at twenty everything will change again.'

'I suppose so,' replied Milo, for he had never really thought about the matter" (105).