Madelyn Diaz

(“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is also in my used textbook — now I can say that the title is “The Literary Experience” by Beiderwell/Wheeler. I recommend it even for those works within it that aren’t part of this course, they’re great! But this isn’t part of my word count, heh) When I read this short story on my own, it never so much as crossed my mind that there might be a False Prophet reflected in The Misfit; it’s especially baffling considering that my source has both a biographical paragraph stating that “[Flannery O’Connor’s] works are essentially religious, in that they express her Catholic vision of the world as a fallen place in need of redemption”, and this quote by St. Cyril of Jerusalem: “The dragon is by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” Honestly, the religious overtones to characters and not just dialogue could’ve decked me in the face, and I still would have just shaken my head at some *nebulous evil that inspires senseless violence* and gone about my day, so Baudelaire was right. Something else I only noticed after reading the preceding article was the structure of the confrontation that demonstrates some of O’Connor’s vision: the many attempts and failures of the grandmother to get The Misfit to see the light of Christ. All of her platitudes glance past him because she doesn’t know him at all — and even when he dumps his tragic history she still can’t synthesize any of it effectively until everyone else she traveled with (except Pitty Sing, a cute immortalization of her now that I think of it) has been murdered. “You’re one of […]

For one, praising Joyce’s ability to captivate readers isn’t needed. For another, the particular intricacies of the narrator’s character and where the complexity of “Araby” lies can be detailed without a leading sentence like the above one. I get the impression of trying to couch oneself in what this writer presumes to be widely-held opinions when they’re faced with their lack of a decently-stringed thesis. Offering specific information easily cuts fat like that sentence. After all, a lack of confidence is remedied by finding something, anything, that’s enveloped within itself enough to fit in one sentence. Then one can do that again, a second time, a third, and ideally pierce a common thread through them all. e.g. If I find and pull together many co-occurrences relating to “blindness” peppered through the text everywhere from actions to settings, I might allude to that in what seems to be the first sentence of an essay. James Joyce’s short story “Araby” follows a nameless young boy who, blinded by the light of a “love” that he can’t place in reality, stumbles into the darker corners of his world.” If not super rooted in facts for an introductory sentence, I think that the concrete details therein can evoke the question “What does that mean?” in a way that trusts in the following paragraphs will hold (subjective) answers.

Instead of going for a lofty, vague sense of a meaningful topic like ChatGPT would, I’d actually be more disposed towards analyzing the “side characters” of this short story as a collective. It’d be fun to think about why they react how they do to the plot’s events, or glean info about what their lives might be like from what we see of them. Tentatively, I’d call this theoretical paper “The Young and Foolish of ‘The Lesson'”, in a reference to that very first line of the text. Through Sylvia’s viewpoint, observant as she is, readers get a great deal of insight into these children already. From Little Q.T. who is often targeted for ribbing because his smallness keeps him from fighting back, but is “liable to come up behind you years later and get his licks in when you half expect it”; to “Fat Butt,” usually called “Big Butt” everywhere but here, as if to further emphasize the disparagement that he’s probably confronted with all the time, “already wasting his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich like the pig he is”; to Flyboy who’ll take pity over bullying and is even deemed effeminate by our narrator for reasons that may be related; we have a whole crew’s worth of young boys, all facing mildly less principled forms of social pressure. A whole day could be made out of cataloging individual descriptions and interactions between those characters!

Going through young life in a daze, consumed by a love that doesn’t make sense and making unsound decisions that are regretted later… it sounds a great deal like my years in high school! For that reason — and because I’ve been a rather insular person for as long as I can remember, unlike little Langston in “Salvation”‘s scenario — I personally relate to the speaker of “Araby”. Besides the obvious justification that is “lack of a name making projection easier”, I remember having an obsession with a particular piece of fiction (too particular to elaborate on, my Internet history is semi-public and fully embarrassing) that rewrote my pubescent brain in precisely the wrong place at the wrong time. It led me to choose a Media Arts major at *Brooklyn Technical H.S.*, a choice that I only refrain from mentally hitting myself for today because I was book-smart, but street-dumb. Truly, every course that I took and didn’t do well in, as “I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days” that stood between me and maladaptive daydreaming that bordered on idolatry, “converged in a single sensation of life for me”. My own chalice brimmed with misguided, derivative creative expression in a world of starving artists. Not to say that it was wrong of me to talk that talk, it’s an admirable hill to try to conquer — I just couldn’t walk the walk of the actual “work put into art besides the ideas” and died on it, unfortunately. This all links back strongly to what I wrote about myself in Week 1, really; I suppose without very much time alive, this can happen. I can’t say that I don’t enjoy recalling my life as a well-pared short story, though.

I’m currently poring over some rudimentary annotation (mostly just underlining) that I did with a browser extension while we were reading “Overview of ‘The Handsomest Drowned Man'” in Wednesday’s class, and the sheer size of “POWER OF STORIES/IMAGINATIOI [sic]” scrawled in the margin of the final paragraph makes me laugh. It’s a potential that I strongly connect with as a former “professional escapist” through media. I just hesitated to use the term “escape artist” in a word-playing sort of fashion, but I was that too! Interpretation is an art form, 100% !! My screenshot of the notes I took is slightly cut off, but it looks as though when I wrote the above, it was beside a box I made around Raymond Williams’ quote re: ‘suspending disbelief when interfacing with literature because rationality is limited when it comes to the human experience’, which I obviously agree with. It’s about immersion, about self-inserting and empathizing even when it doesn’t make sense to Make It Make Sense — enjoying reading and writing about reading, that is! “Expect the magical, take advantage of the miraculous when it arrives at your doorstep”… “The Handsomest Drowned Man” and indulging the fullest extents of creative, if esoteric thought both embody that in spades. That’s why I think this short story was chosen for the course’s first — it’s a good Introduction to Literature- my god I can’t make that the last sentence without acknowledging how corny it is-! A partly-related to this current subject, personal experience that’s not part of the word count under read more, and hopefully it works! EDIT: it does not seem to work! mayhaps because “read mores” are opened by default when looking at “full posts”. I’ll make a Pastebin link next time, probably.