Author Archives: Umar Alam

Truth

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At newcomers’ night at the AA meeting, Lauren is urged to tell her story to everyone. Lauren wants to finally tell everyone the truth that she is not an alcoholic, but she is afraid of the risk of doing so. She don’t want to disappoint them or make the angry. She’s afraid of changing how the group sees her. She gets so scared that she “relapsed, just like an alcoholic” (204). She instead uses her words to tell the truth but bury it in the words with metaphor. She tells her story whole story but instead of epilepsy, she says she’s an alcoholic.She main point during her story was that “it’s a disease of relapse” (206). She is motivating/inspiring everyone in the group and helping them not to relapse, when she is relapsing by lying much more.

When Lauren does finally tell the truth to the group, she gets angry and feels “hate” (214). She feels this way because the group doesn’t believe her and thinks that she is just in denial about being an alcoholic. It infuriates her because they will never get to know the her real self.

Stories

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“I was falling into whiteness. A terrible silence surrounded me. I wanted to mark the page, but I couldn’t think of a thing to say, or who I was, or even how to spell my name, now that my stories were gone” (164).

When Lauren mentions “falling into whiteness” (164), she is saying that she’s becoming nothing. She no longer has any lies to write down in her notebook and in turn no more stories. She knows she’s a writer; a writer with no stories is nothing. By trying to make herself better and trying to stop lying, she loses who she really is. She may have a habit of lying, but her lies are her stories, and her stories are what make her up.

While Lauren is having a sexual relationship with Christopher Marin, she starts to plagiarize. She does this because she feels that she is not good enough for him and she needs to do anything to “keep him impressed” (152). She wants Christopher to focus on her and not have “a life kept separate” from her (152).

While trying to keep an impossible relationship with Christopher, Lauren loses herself. She is “spiritually bankrupt, a liar, a thief, a plagiarist” (157). She was once again “falling into whiteness” when she started to plagiarize and it is because of this that she has a “real seizure” (157).

Justification

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At the end of part two, Lauren includes Dr. Carlos Neu and Patricia Robinson’s paper on “The Biophychological Consequences Of A Corpus Callostomy In The Pediatric Patient” (98). She includes this in order to show that she does have epilepsy. According to the paper, “patients may display histrionic personality traits that include the persistent need for attention” (99).  This fits Lauren’s desires of taking time, attention and touch when she makes herself have a seizure at several ERs (86). Lauren wants the reader to see the connections with her actions and the doctor’s general analysis of patients with epilepsy.

Lauren admits to lying in the end of chapter 3. She doesn’t actually fall into the grave, but by first telling that she did shows that she wants attention. She was willing to fall into someone else’s grave to gain the attention of the people there. She also did it to escape into her memory of when she was falling down in the snow with the nuns (60). By falling down into the grave, Lauren would be able to take herself to a world that she liked better than the one she was in.

Slater’s Mother

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Slater’s description of her mother makes me believe that her mother is spoiled. Slater’s mother sees herself as better than everyone else. She wanted to enjoy lobster but, she “couldn’t lower herself to partake” since “it required bibs and thongs, scraping green gunk from dark places” (16). She brags about things to her friends that never actually happened during their vacation like painting and buying a second home.

Her husband no longer seems to be good enough for her. They argue a lot “about bills and house repairs, vacations and cars” (7). Slater’s mother likes to treat herself; buying herself a Steinway piano without letting anyone know. She disregards that fact that they can afford it but, blames their money issues on her husband. Slater knew that only hope held them up but, they could crash at any time (20).

Humbert’s Hints to Violent Actions

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“I did not plan to marry poor Charlotte in order to eliminate her in some vulgar, gruesome and dangerous manner such as killing her by placing five bichloride-of-mercury tablets in her preprandial sherry or anything like that…”  (70)

Humbert sometimes shows a dark violent side of himself. Like in the above quote he describes how he isn’t going to kill Charlotte Haze in order to be with Lolita. It is alarming that he already has a detailed way of murdering someone. I read it as him saying it ironically; as if he already had Charlotte’s poisoned drink prepared.

Humbert then goes on with the idea of giving both Charlotte and Lolita a strong sleeping aid (71). This would allow him to easily caress Lolita during the night without compromising Lolita’s innocence. At least it doesn’t involve murdering Charlotte, right?

Earlier in the novel, Humbert showed signs of violence when he was with Valeria. He was contemplating on whether he “should kill her or her lover, or both, or neither” (29). What makes him snap is that Valeria’s lover, Maximovich, didn’t flush the toilet and Humbert attacked Maximovich.

Knowing that Humbert is widowed and in jail, this makes me believe that Humbert is in jail because he killed Lolita.

Lolita – Part One: Sections 1-9

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The first thing that I’m curious about in this novel is that the narrator is a guy named Humbert Humbert, but sometimes he talks about himself in the third person. For example, “She looked tremendously pleased with the bonus of fifty I gave her as she trotted out into the April night drizzle with Humbert Humbert lumbering in her narrow wake.” (23)  I feel that the narrator switches to third person whenever he is going to say something that he possibly regrets. I think this because he is writing the story in jail. Inference from, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” (9) and “I am writing under observation.” (10)

The narrator has a strong interest in girls. Even when he was young he fell in love with a girl named Annabel. The tragic thing is that she died because of typhus. From this first love, which was abruptly ended, the narrator probably got an image of the type of girls he would be attracted to based off of Annabel. WHich is why later in his life he likes young girls about twelve years old; though it seems he has never done anything sexual with them. He watches them on a park bench while pretending to read. (20)

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

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I find it interesting that the story is titled “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and yet the narrator only talks about them in the final paragraph. Instead, the narrator interests the reader by describing a city that is like a utopia. Everyone there is happy and enjoying themselves. Even the environment is appealing when the narrator says “In the silence of broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.”  (1)

I suspected things would take a turn for the worse when I read the trumpets sounded all at one and the horses back up and neigh. (4) The fact that the riders had to soothe the horses made me suspect that there is something dark to this “utopia.” Then the following paragraph informs the reader that in the cellar of one of the city’s buildings, there is a small child locked there. The child is kept there because it is believed that in order for the city to prosper, the child must suffer.

Everyone in the city knows about the child and has seen him, since they take the children to him so they can explain it to them. Like anyone would the children would object to this but eventually come to terms with it. It is justified by believing that it is too late to help the child. He would be trapped by fear and “would not get much good of its freedom.” (6)

This brings us back to the title of the story. Sometimes when someone goes to see the child, don’t return home like everyone else. They decide to leave the city and never return. It is unknown where they go but we know that they left the city because the truth was too horrible for them to accept.

“Who’s Irish?”

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This story shows the little differences between cultures. The main focus is on how a woman’s granddaughter is growing up differently than how she raised her daughter. I completely agree with is. The woman raised her daughter in China and now they live in America. This difference in environment causes children to grow up differently. There are things the woman can’t do because it is viewed as wrong in the new environment. For example, the woman wanted to spank the granddaughter in order to teach her not to take off her clothes everywhere, but the woman’s daughter doesn’t want to do that because people in America don’t do that.

Another difference that is told is that the woman’s daughter is living a new way of live. She goes to work and has a babysitter watch her daughter. Now, the woman watches her granddaughter. The difference told is that in China, a woman’s daughter would help take care of her when she gets old, but in America “Mother help daughter, mother ask, Anything else I can do?”

“Two Kinds”

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A girl whom ,as a child, was told she could be the best at anything she wanted. The only issue was that she thought that she would become a prodigy without any work. She just wanted to instantly become great at something. Her mother was her motivator, and she made do tests everyday to see if she was good at anything. The girl soon decided to do be herself and not work to be the best. This was a poor decision.

Once the girl decided to no longer be something she wasn’t, she lost motivation. She didn’t take things seriously and never tried. Her mother got her piano lessons, but the girl took advantage of the fact that her teacher was deaf. She didn’t practice and constantly made mistakes. All she needed to do is to try to do well. She kept putting herself down, saying that she won’t ever be a prodigy. She wanted an easy way when there wasn’t one.

“The Story of an Hour”

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This story was interesting because it was about how a woman felt when she finds out that her husband was killed in a train accident. She seems devastated that her husband is dead, and we know that she will cry when she sees him in his coffin. At the end of the story we find out that her husband is still alive and was nowhere near the accident and had not known that there was one. So, he just walks into the house as normal and when his wife sees him, she dies. Most likely from the shock of finding out that he was still alive.