The beginning paragraph of this story was kind of hard to follow for me. What was significance of repetitively talking about the smell of meat and cheese? The way he described the setting and Colonel Sartoris Snopes stomach and his view was a very strange way to describe something. He took alot of detail and time into describing his empty stomach and the smells and the cans on the shelf.
Why is Snope so rude and ruthless? He speaks of loyalty to family and blood because that is all you essentially have, but i do not get the sense that he was very nice to his family. The message to me was that when going through a crisis, whether you ( or your family) was at fault, you always stand behind blood. But Abner is a monster, and ends up destroying everything, even the one thing he said you should always have, family. Sartoris faced a conflict between what he thought was right and what his father has always told him. I think that Sartoris made the right decision, because it saved the rest of his family from the crisis they had been in from moving all the time, and knowing the wrongful of the fathers doing.
The only thing i got out of this story was that in 1939, men ruled everything. Because in the story lizzie says that if Sartoris does not warn the de Spains that the barn is going to be burned, then she will. When faulkner desribes the sisters, he only speaks of their physical appearance, never their names or age or anything else. This story kind of gave a subtle side story that women were not important, and what they say did not matter. And as much as the mother tried to give a calm. loving presence, she was always taken down by the stern temper of her husband with the family.
Overall, i thought this piece was kinda of boring.
Great observation, I felt the same way as I began to read the beginning of the story. I didn't understand why he was in depth about the meat and cheese, especially when he was describing Colonel Snopes stomach. The setting and mood of the story seemed a little different and hard to understand. I agree with you when Colonel Snope speaks about loyalty and family, it seems as if he's stating that blood is thicker than water and that you always stand behind blood (family).
ReplyDeleteI guess you're right about men having more control back in the day, at least from faulkner's point of view. Women in the story line were made out to be only house wives and didn't really perform certain duties like men did. As we could see in the story, men weren't really calm and loving to their wives; maybe this was just in faulkner's story.
The story was most certainly unsettling, but not all literature is meant to leave the reader with a warm fuzzy feeling. In fact, most of the books or stories I've read that stand out in my mind are incredibly unsettling.
ReplyDeleteWhile Faulkner's writing style may be a bit outdated for younger readers, he gets into the guts of a little boy who is stuck in a horrible situation through no fault of his own, using language and imagery which helps convey the helplessness of the boy's situation.
The inconsistencies of the father preaching about blood, yet treating his family poorly seems to have been lost on no one, yet no mention has been made of the hollow nature of the father's crimes. He's consistently committing illegal acts that will once again force his family to be uprooted, but none of these crimes ever help the family, such as robbery as a means to help financially support the family. What this tells me is that the father is a complete psychopath.
It's very possible that the father suffered greatly at the hands of his own father, and may consciously doing his best to see that his family is taken care of and raised right, yet his hunger for arson, and what he views as lashing out against those who are in a higher social standing, is having a seriously negative effect on his family.
Overall, the story was well told, and conveyed quite well the hopelessness, and ultimate retribution, of the young boy at the center of the story.
In much of the reading we do I don't really understand the full meaning of what the author was trying to say. It's not until we discuss the readings in class with each other and Professor Booker sheds light on what the authors were actually tying to say. This passage was no different. I knew there had to be some meaning behind why the narrator was being so descriptive about cheese but just couldn't figure it out until class.
ReplyDeleteI think Snope is so rude and ruthless because he was taught that he was superior to African Americans but when the north won the war he was forced to work alongside them. This must have been terribly degrading to him. Even with that said that’s no excuse to put your family through such hardship and destroy so many others prosperity.