Monthly Archives: May 2018

Regalia

noun:Regalia

The emblems, symbols, or paraphernalia indicative of royalty

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/regalia

I encountered this word in What you pawn i will redeem on page one upper third paragraph on the right of the page.

“I didn’t know for sure,because I hadn’t seen the regalia in person ever.Id only seen a photograph of my grandmother dancing in it.

I knew that regalia had something to do with royalty so it seemed sort of out of place in this story.However it makes sense that people other than royalty have adopted regalia,royal bloodlines have all but dried out.

Christelle. Contemporary Fiction. The Shawl by Louise Edrich

The story demonstrates two ways in which people cope with the death of a loved one. These two ways are of that of incrimination and or reflection. The coping with incrimination is seen through the father of the deceased girl. As evidenced in the passage “For a time, the boy had no understanding of what happened. His father kept what he knew to himself, at least that first year, and when his son asked about his sister’s torn plaid shawl and why it was kept in the house, his father said nothing” in this part of the passage that the father is unwilling to accept that his daughter is gone and continues to hold to this grief. “But he wept when the boy asked if his sister is cold. It was only after his father had been weakened by the disease that he began to tell the story, far too often and always the same way: he told how when the wolves closed on Anakwad had thrown her daughter to them” the father sees the death of his daughter was unjust and offers his son as well as himself an explanation as to why such an injustice could happen. In the father’s eyes, his daughter did not deserve to die and he could accept that is was perhaps by her own fault or the workings of the world. The coping with reflection is seen through the grandson. As evidenced in the story “She saw that the wolves were only hungry. She knew that their need only needed. She knew that you were back there, alone in the snow. She understood that the baby she loved would not live without a mother and that the uncle knew the way. She saw clearly that one person on the wagon had to be offered up, or they all would die” this refutes of that grandfather when he refuses to accept that his daughter’s die may come about naturally. Naturally in the sense that all things must die at one point and none of those things have to power to determine when, where and how. It also refutes the thinking that her death could not come about on her own doing. Sometimes situations arise that force us to make difficult decisions that make us comfortable, in the case of the daughter she had made the ultimate decision.  We should view these two coping mechanisms as right or wrong. Instead, we should view them as allegories to the all-consuming philosophical  question “What is life and why do we have to die?”

The Shawl By Louise Erdrich

  1. “Suddenly, he was my father again. And when I knelt down next to him, I was his son. I reached for the closest rag, and picked up this piece of blanket that my father always kept with him for some reason. And as I picked it up and wiped the blood off his face, I said to him, Your nose is crooked again. He looked at me, steady and quizzical, as though he had never had a drink in his life, and I wiped his face again with that frayed piece of blanket. Well, it was a shawl, really, a kind of old-fashioned woman’s blanket-shawl. Once, maybe, it had been plaid. You could still see lines, some red, the background a faded brown. He watched intently as my hand brought the rag to his face. I was pretty sure, then, that I’d clocked him too hard, that he’d really lost it now. Gently, though, he clasped one hand around my wrist. With the other hand he took the shawl. He crumpled it and held it to the middle of his forehead. It was as if he were praying, as if he were having thoughts he wanted to collect in that piece of cloth. For a while he lay like that, and I, crouched over, let him be, hardly breathing. Something told me to sit there, still. And then at last he said to me, in the sober new voice I would hear from then on, Did you know I had a sister once?”
  2. If you were like me, once you got to this passage you realize that the author didn’t start a new story in the middle of the passage. In this part of the story you see that the son that was left behind grew up and had children of his own. After his wife died he became a drunk that beat his children. His son decided he was big enough to fight his father. After the father suddenly became sober. When he told his son that he once had a sister is where you see that he was the son that was left behind. I feel as though  the author experiencing his mother leaving and being told his sister was eaten by wolfs along with his wife dying cause him to have PTSD. Which led to him drinking and beating his children.
  3.  I think the story is trying to show the importance of letting go. If the father had let his hatred of his wife leaving him for another man go, he wouldn’t have told his son that his mother thrown his sister to be eaten by wolves. If his son wasn’t told that story, he may not have kept that piece of blanket with his all those years along with the painful memory’s. If he had let go of the pain he held all those years, when his wife died it would be less likely of his becoming a drunk that beat his children.

The Shawl By Louise Erdrich

the narrator was the son, who claim to seen shadows.

The narrator relationship with these characters:

Aanakwad- was she is his mother, she was in love with another man who wasn’t her husband, she has a bad temper, she left him behind with his father.

Father- he was his father, He was the one retelling the stories of what happens to his sister being thrown out the wagon and eaten by wolves. He also abuses his children after his daughter death.

daughter- this is his sister ,she was left dead, eaten by the wolves, and the raven.

her lover- his mother Aanakwad was in love with a man who wasn’t his father, and had a baby with him.

lover’s uncle- the man who went and picked Aanakwad and her daughter up in a wagon.

Blogging about Contemporary Fiction

For the rest of the semester, we will think about and respond to our readings with a focus on identifying important passages. This will prepare us for the final exam.

When it’s your turn to post,

  1. identify a passage you think is important and add it to your post (either type it or copy and paste it from the website where the story was posted)
  2. Then, in one paragraph, interpret and analyze the passage, calling attention to specific details and words in the passage.
  3. in another paragraph, apply your analysis of the passage to the argument you think the story as a whole is making.
  4. in another paragraph, compare how a moment/scene/event/image/symbol/motif in another text includes a similar issue or theme you identified in the argument or in some way resonates with the passage you chose. Be as specific as possible, including details and from that moment.

For Wednesday’s class, volunteers should post by Tuesday at 8pm; everyone else can respond by 10am on Wednesday. Feel free to post about “The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl” by Louise Erdrich, or “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie.

UPDATE: For Monday’s class, volunteers should post by Friday night; everyone else can respond by 10am on Wednesday. Posts can cover “You in America” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, or “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie, or “The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl” by Louise Erdrich.

Whichever story you use for your post, please be sure to follow the structure listed above.