Flashback Grendel Style

AP Literature Open Question: 

Select a line or so of poetry, or a moment or scene in a novel, epic poem, or play that you find especially memorable. Write an essay in which you identify the line or the passage, explain its relationship to the work in which it is found, and analyze the reasons for its effectiveness.

One, if I actually saw this on the exam I might cry. Which is why it's a good idea to blog on it. Blogging on difficult things before the exam make me less nervous for the exam and prepare me for everything that could come. However, I will still cry if the prompt is similar. 

If I did get this prompt I would write on Grendel by John Gardner. Can you guess which line I would use?? Yes! You're right!! "Tedium is the worst pain" is the main line that sticks in my head. Maybe because it's the easiest one to really say and I couldn't exactly talk about how he cries for his mom all the time. Alright here we go. So, tedium refers to something that takes a long time and can be enervating. For Grendel those tasks that are long and enervating are frustrating and "the worst pain". But don't the acts that are tiresome to certain people different than those that tire another person? Why yes of course! That's why this line is effective. We all have something that drives us bonkers. For instance my dad HATES standing in line waiting to check out at the grocery store and it's probably bad that I laugh at his frustration but this is where he relates to Grendel. This stupid boring task is what drives them both crazy. Gardner is trying to relate Grendel to us because there aren't a lot of things that we share in common with Grendel. We aren't furry and scary looking, we don't eat people (hopefully) we don't yell at chasms, and we aren't angsty teenagers. Ehh well ok, maybe I take back that one but still, we don't share a lot of things in common with him. By Gardner's reaching out, we are able to identify more with Grendel and understand what he's going through. But that's exactly what the point is. We aren't supposed to be similar to Grendel. We are supposed to see the differences between humans and animals just like Grendel does. He sees that humans are awful creatures that pillage through other villages and kill dogs and cows and start wars and burn things down for no good reason. But when Gardner is talking about tedium, he wants us to connect with Grendel to show one of the small similarities that humans and animals share. 

Snow Falling on Cedars Part II

In the end, I really enjoyed Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson and I plan on reading it again in a few years. My favorite part is how Guterson made it a frame narrative. We didn't get all the background information at once so we couldn't jump to conclusions, and we didn't go through the entire trial before we learned the background information. The way Guterson slowly reveals the background information changes your opinion on who did what and how it happened. For instance Guterson is talking about Kabuo's past and how when he was in training he easily took down a man with just a stick. The jury then thinks this is a good point at which they use against Kabuo and claim correlates perfectly with Carl's head injury. We also see that Kabuo's flat emotion and brisk stature are really from how he was raised and trained as a soldier to be. In the end, we learn that Kabuo  is just like the rest of the fishermen of San Piedro. The fishermen have an unspoken law--one does not board another's boat unless there is an emergency and you always help another fisherman. If you aren't doing that you let them be and carry on your fishy ways. After Ishamael finds the boat papers, he learns that Carl most likely went overboard after a big ship went by leaving behind a huge wake which could've caused him to slip or fall or what have you. After we learn this we learn that Kabuo had helped Carl earlier that night by replacing his battery. Many saw this before as a cover up of the murder.
On a different note, Kabuo and the other Japanese people believe that Kabuo is the first to blame because he is Japanese due to the still-residing tension between the two cultures. Before World War II, they got along because of the common hobby of farming strawberries. The strawberries brought them together. Strawberries are a weird fruit and symbol don't you think? The seeds are on the outside, and it's red with a little green on the top, and the inside is white. Strange, right? So how I see it is that the seeds on the outside resemble the start of the growth of a new relationship. The Japanese and American's have the seeds handed to them; in other words they have the chance to change their relationships with each other. The red symbolizes all the trouble they've gone through and the green shows how on top of all the hate comes peace. Then once you break the barrier and get inside the strawberry there is white aka innocence. Kind of a backwards journey--you don't usually end with innocence. In San Piedro's case they have to earn their innocence by building back their naivety. Both cultures have to plant the strawberries in order to try and find their old sense of innocence. They have to start going backwards to what things used to be. Which is what you do after a war or tragedy--get things back to normal. Kind of a weird way of looking at it, but hey it works.