Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year

We briefly discussed “Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year” in class today. I agree with some of the things that were said about this poem. I think it’s a son writing to his father but what I’m not sure about is if the father is dead or alive. The son is looking at his father after what appears to be a fishing trip, “I study my father’s embarrassed young man’s face. Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string of spiny yellow perch, in the other a bottle of Carlsbad beer” (line 2-5). The son talks about his father trying to be something he couldn’t become, “All his life my father wanted to be bold” (line 10). At the end of the poem the tone changes into regret towards his father for not teaching him or taking him fishing like his father did when he was younger. “Father, I love you, yet how can I say thank you, I would can’t hold my liquor either, and don’t even know the places to fish” (lines 13-15). In that statement the son admits that he might be an alcoholic himself, and that to me seems like the only thing his father ever really showed him. His father was an alcoholic and that’s what the boy grew up with so instead of following in the father he wanted footsteps he only had one person to follow; his alcoholic father’s footsteps which he seems to regret as much as his father not taking him fishing when he was younger.

My Papa's Waltz

Even after discussing this poem I am still convinced that the son of an alcoholic dad is looking back at his childhood describing the daily occurences. I believe he is an alcoholic because of the phrase, "the wiskey on his breath" (873). I believe the father to be a hard worker because the son describes him with, "palm caked hard by dirt" (874). But after the hard working day I believe the father has a drink to relax. At this time he wrestles around with his son witch doesn't get to see him much. I believe the son loves him much because there are two phrases like, "still clinging to your shirt", (874) as the dad puts him to bed, and "he waltzed me off to bed" (874).

My Papa's Waltz

In "My Papa's Waltz" the author remembers his father and all of the senses associated with dancing with him.
In the first paragraph, the author makes a comment on his father’s drinking and the smell. “The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy.” But as you can tell, he still wanted to dance with his father, even though it was a difficult dance: a waltz.
In the third paragraph he uses the sense of touch to describe his father’s hands. “Was battered on one knuckle;” And you can tell that the author is young in this poem because he talks about scraping against his dad’s belt buckle when dancing with him. I think it brings happy memories to everyone, memories of when we were all kids standing on our parents shoes while dancing with them. It was always fun to do and you would always feel so special while doing it.
In the last paragraph, the author uses the sense of sight by describing his dad’s hands. “With a palm caked hard by dirt.” I think that is a very familiar sight in that a lot of us remember some male in our family as having weathered and dirty hands. They are hands of a hard worker, hands that told the story of working hard labor to earn their money.

Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year

Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year by Raymond Carver is about a son looking at a picture of his father when his father was 22years old. The son talks about how his dad is leaning against his old truck. He describes how his dad is dressed and how he is looking "bold"while holding a beer in one hand and fish in the other. The son is comparing himself to his dad. How they both can't hold their liquor and he doesn't know where to go to find the fish. Also the narrator talks about how he loves his dad but dosent know how to thank him. I think that the narrator talks the way he does in the poem becasue that how a lot of boys feel like, that whole "male thing", how they dont show their feelings very much. Again the narrator does a good job with really showing the father and son in a sense of bonding even though the narrator is looking at a picture. But all boys and girls do the same thing when we look at old pictures of our parents we can kind of see ourselves in them.

"Digging"

In the poem "digging", there is a melancholy tone. The narrator laments about his father who farmed and his Grandfather who dug sod for a living. He is very proud of their work, since he mentions their jobs in such detail and has nothing negative to say about them. He also expresses a fondness of the memories, with "the squelch and slap Of soggy peat"(679-25). At first, I thought that the flowers were a monument for his dead father. Now I think that his father is outside of his window shoveling flowers, and the sound reminds him of "twenty years" before(678-7). His dad was a potato farmer then, and was as good of a digger as his grandfather. His "grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner's bog"(679-17). When we learn about the two men that were great with a spade, and he says "I've no spade to follow men like them", there is a tone of regret. The narrator mentions how his pen is "snug as a gun" in his hand(678-2). This would imply that he takes the pen very seriously. He then says he will "dig with it", which would mean that he will make his living with a pen instead of a shovel.

My Papa's Waltz

My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Roethke was about a boy an a father in a kitchen. The father was an alcholic and the son seemed proud to have his father around him. Some of the passage that made me think the son was proud were:
"but I hung on like death"(873)
"Still clinging to your shirt."(874)
the poem could go both ways positive and negative
the positive part is the speaker is explaining that his father having a drinking problem and it is okay because the son is able to spend time dancing around with his father. The negative side is that the father is dancing with his son drunk and it is not the graceful kind of waltz it is the abusive kind.

Those Winter Sundays

In the poem Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden, the cold was what I felt the most. In the first stanza, second line, the word blueblack cold stopped me to think. The first image I thought of was a bruise, but then I started to think about what the outside looked like when it was very early in the morning. The reflection of the moon off the snow gives the air a blue look while still being dark. The color black gives it the feeling of how cold it is. It's so cold outside the cold air will have the effects of frost bit resulting in black fingers etc. It made me wonder if these two thoughts had anything to do with the relationship the father had with his family. At first, I didn't know what the father was doing every Sunday morning. Some questions I asked myself were, Why was the father getting up early in the morning? Was he going to work? What did fire have anything to do with it? All I knew was that on lines three and four the way his hands were described showed me how hard of a worker he was. After class, I learned it was a fire stove he was lighting every morning to heat the house on Sunday. After knowing about this, I could get the feeling that how the speaker, which I imagine is a son or daughter of the family is not appreciating all the work the father does. Communication in the house was limited and it also states that the house had chronic angers. So the question remains, What kind of anger is he/she talking about? Physical,emotional,verbal? On line ten, showed that he/she didn't speak nice or at all to his/her father. This might be why the speaker feels this way. In the end, the feeling changes and there is a realization for the speaker.

The Kite Runner II

“Some day, Inshallah, you will be a great writer, he had said once, and people all over the world will read your stories. There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.” Pg. 183“ . . . , and I had this: that perhaps something, someone, somewhere, had decided to deny my fatherhood for the things I had done. Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so, . . . or maybe it was meant not to be.” Pg. 188 “Come. There is a way to be good again.” Pg. 192 I think that Amir feels that his life is still missing something-Hassan. He didn’t get closure when Hassan left and Amir never faced what he did. I think Amir is waiting for something physically or emotionally to happen in his life that will help him be at ease with what he did to Hassan. His marriage with Soraya will never be completely happy unless he tells her about the past. She was able to open up to him and be honest, completely. He hasn’t done that yet and it’s definitely affecting their relationship. I think that Soraya knows that there is something that Amir is not telling her, she understands that everyone has something in their past that they are ashamed of. He shouldn’t be so concerned with telling her, I feel that she would understand and be strong for him. Amir now has the opportunity to go back to his homeland and I think that he feels that if he goes back there will be something there to help him deal with the past. Of course he is going to take this opportunity to go and face his biggest fear-coming to terms with what he did. He is desperate to lead a normal, happy life with his new wife and I think he’s very close to getting that.

The Kite Runner

In "The Kite Runner" a novel by Hosseini, Khaled I was some what lost. I didn't under stand why Amir, and his father were all of a sudden were fleaing their country. I just thought that Baba was going to visit his brother. I don't know how they could just sit there, and listen to rats. I now know that it was so they could live. I guess if I was in that situation I would try to talk my mind into that the rats were something else. The rats were nothing compaired to crawling into a gas tank. Panic. You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creek. You order your lungs to draw air, NOW, you need air, need it NOW.(106) I really do feel bad for any kind of human being having to go through any of that. Sometimes events in life, like war seems so unnessary. People face enough challenges in life, for instance, Baba when he got cancer. There's nothing he could do. I was very glad that Baba was able to see his only child get married, before he died peacefully. I also admired Baba very much for starting a new life in America. In Kabul he was very wealthy, and everybody looked up to him. In America, he worked very hard for what he and Amir had. I think everything started looking up, once they decided to go to garage sales, and to sell what they got in their flea market. That's when Baba's, and Amir's life got better. They could feel more at home with their fellow country men. Amir's secert still seems to haunt him, even though he's in America, and has a beautiful wife, and starting his adulthood.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, I want to focus on the last part of the section that we had to read for today’s class: the guilt that Tess feels about not telling Angel about her past with Alec D’Urberville and Angel’s reaction to this news when she finally does confess. First, I can’t imagine how terrifying it must be for Tess to live in a society were a past relationship could ruin your chance of a happy marriage; especially given the circumstances of the Tess's past relationship. In today’s society, there is still a certain attitude towards people when they have a child at a young age, but this doesn’t make them unworthy of marriage. Tess truly loves Angel and doesn’t want him to leave her. However, she also has such a guilty conscious that she can’t live a happy life with Angel when he doesn’t know the truth. I don’t blame her for being scared of telling Angel about Alec and Sorrow. This creates quiet a dilemma for Tess. To make matters worse for her, when a man who knew what happened between Tess and Alec confronts the soon to be newlyweds, Angel “struck the man on the chin with the full force of his fist” (Hardy 163). The guilt is now almost unbearable for Tess. If Angel punched a complete stranger, what was he going to do to her?

When I found out that Angel had “plunged into eight-and-forty hours’ dissipation with a stranger,” I felt some comfort in knowing that he might understand what Tess went through and be willing to forgive her for her sin (Harding 177). But his first reaction to this news is completely opposite! He says that he doesn’t know the real Tess! What a hypocrite! This just shows the difference between the roles of men and women in this time period. A man can be forgiven, or at least understood, for his sins; but a women is suppose to be punished for the rest of her life. From seeing the movie already, I know that he does finally come to his senses, but I am disappointed in the way he acts immediately hearing the news about Tess. To show how unforgiving he is, Angel “broke into horrible laughter—as unnatural and ghastly as a laugh in hell” (Harding 179). I can only imagine that Tess is feeling scared and ashamed. Anger towards herself, anger towards Alec, anger towards Angel. Disappointment in Angel and herself. Helplessness.

Harding, Thomas. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." Norton & Company, Inc. New York: 1991.

Tess

In Tess of the D'Urberervilles, I feel bad for test, always having to move all the time. When she talks about leaving her home town and about leaving the young children for their good. The author makes this book sound so deep and interesting. I enjoy how everything is worded and how the author really captures you into that time period. I feel like I'm right thier with Tess milking the cows right along side of her.

The Kite Runner

I'm confused at why they're leaving their hometown of Kabul. I know there's a war going on but why did Baba decide he wanted to leave? I can't believe that Baba stood up for that woman in the truck, and was willing to take a bullet for her. I know this book was published in 2003 but I don't want to believe that soldiers would do that to a woman as a "tax" (Khaled 115). How could Karim take those people to Jalalabad and lock them in the basement with the rats? And then have enough guts to tell them that his brother Toor's truck was broke down and had been for a week, and that he was waiting for parts when in actuality his truck was unfixable (Khaled 118). When Karim found his friend that had a gasoline truck that had taken people to Peshawar everyone seemed relieved; deep down I think Baba knew that God was looking out for them. Although, its sad when they get there and Amir's friend is dead and then his father shoots himself in the head (Khaled 124).

When they get to America Baba becomes someone he has not been throughout this whole novel. Before he was a loving nurturing man and now he's become a hard working, grumpy, stubborn, ill-tempered man. When Amir suggests to Baba that he should enroll in ESL classes Baba's not too happy about it (Khaled 126-127). For the first time Amir is embarassed of Baba, when he throws a fit at the grocery store (Khaled 127).

Towards the end of the reading Baba says and does things to Amir that almost bring him to tears. When they get started in the flea market business it seems that Baba and Amir talk about more things then they once did and Baba knows about Amir liking the Generals daughter. But all he says to Amir is, " becareful and don't embarass me" (Khaled 145).

The Kite Runner

I really feel bad for Baba, his son is a horrible person he has lost everthing that he worked his whole life for and now he has cancer that is inoperable. All his son can worry about is himself. He set up Hassan to try to help himself to forget about what happened, and now he wants his dad to take chemo so his dad will be there for him, how selfish can one person be. If I was Baba i would have to ask Amir to grow up and tell him to take a long look in the mirror and find out who he really is. I dont know why a boy and a girl cannot talk to each other if there is no adult present. I really want to learn about Afghan customs. Also I dont understand some words in the book. When Amir and Baba are fleeing Kabul it makes me think about how that was not made up real people had to go through that same kind of situatuion, it makes me thankful for what I have. One subject I am confused about is why Baba wants to hide his cancer from everyone. "And one more thing. No one finds out about this, you hear me? No one" (Hossseini 156). I dont understand why he doesnt want anyone to find out about it, he makes it seem like its his own fault he got cancer. Hosseini really did an excellent job making it seem like you were actually in the story. When they are in the fuel truck he makes it seem like you are right there with them, like you can smell exactly what they are smelling. I'm also starting to wonder when Amir will stop thinking of himself, maybe him getting married will help.

Kite Runner

I was kind of dissappointed in the "Kite Runner" in the begining because I was lost at first. He all of a sudden jumped to Amir and Baba running away from their home. I am sure I would of understood it more if I remeber learning about it in history class. The author could have told a little more about it so you wouldnt get lost in it. I was happy that they came to America so you could hear from their perspective on how they saw America. Its weird seeing how they left Kabul pretty much being like the rich and famous, and coming to America poor. I would never would have guessed that Baba would develope cancer. Its something that hits you in the face. At the flea market when Baba was having a seizure and I thought that was when he was going to die from the cancer, I started tearing up! I really want to find out what happened to Hassan and Ali. I know they have to come back to the picture sometime!! I cant wait to read the next portion of the book to see what the author does with Amir getting married and Baba's cancer!

The Kite Runner

In "The Kite Runner", by Khaled Hosseini, the imagery that is inscribed within the readers mind is something that keeps you wanting to read more because Hosseini does an excellent job making the reader feel as if they were present. I am surprised how Amir is acting towards Hassan. He is not giving him the time of day and Hassan still sticks by Amir and would do anything for him. I am shocked at Amir's actions when he framed Hassan by planting the money and the watch under the matress. Then Hassan admitted to taking the gifts even though they both knew that he did not do it. I think Amir realized at that point that Hassan was a better person then he could ever be. I do not feel that Amir needed to set Hassan up in order to " set him free". Amir made the decision that either Hassan or himself had to leave but he knew that he was not able to do so. Also, when Amir uses all of his senses to describe what it was like being in the fuel tank of the truck provides excellent imagery to the reader.

"Kite Runner"

I can not believe the deception of one friend to another in this story. How could Amir set up his best friend, Hassan? To put his Birthday money and his watch under his mattress and then let Hassan take the fall for it, is so surreal. I don’t know if it’s because Amir is that jealous of Hassan and Baba’s relationship, or if the secret is eating him alive, so every time he looks at Hassan, he is reminded of the betrayal of a friendship.
And then to sit back and let Baba’s best friend Ali leave, is so shameful. Baba was clearly upset when Hassan, and Ali were leaving, I thought the writer did an awesome job with the imagery in that. You could feel Baba’s emotion. For Baba to forgive Hassan in the greatest sin in their culture, surely proves his feeling towards Hassan, and Ali. But Amir sat back and watched it happen. I can now understand how Baba is disappointed in Amir most of the time.
When Amir proposed to Soraya, and she told Amir the truth of her past, that Amir should have been honest with her, and told the truth at that time. Once again, it show’s Amir’s cowardness, and willing to go into a brand new marriage with a lie. Soraya did not want to go into the marriage with secrets, and she told Amir regardless of the outcome.
If Amir would just tell the truth he could get the monkey off his back!

The Kite Runner

In The Kite Runner, I couldn't even imagain what Baba and Amir went through. To make that transition in there lives had to be hard. Amir belives that his relationship with Baba is stronger than ever. Amir and Hassan's friendship is going down hill. Not knowing his life was about to change dramaticly, Amir keeps treating Hassan unfriendly. He still hasn't admitted to seeing Hassan geting rapped. Ali asked Amir why Hassan is sleeping so much lately. Ali asks Amir,"'Did something happen to him, Amir agha? Something he's not telling me?'" (Hosseine 81) and Amir replies back "'How should I know'" (Hosseine 81). You know Amir is bothered by this because when everyone was asleep Amir wispered "'I watched Hassan get raped'"(Hosseine 86). Hearing this outloud made Amir think about the lie he was living. Amir also took a watch from one of his birtday presents and hid it under Hassan's bed so it looked like he stole it from Amir. When that conflict occured the big news of Ali and Hassan moving shifted the story a little. After fourty years of knowing eachother they packed and moved away. When the time came, Amir and Baba had to move too. The Russians were invading and the journey from Kabul to Pakistan was a rough one. Finding themselves in a fairly large truck with others, Amir had a hard time with his car sickness.I couldn't imagine the smell. Vomit and feces...ugh! It's very hard for me to imagin all of this! I have never moved away before and not only are they moving but the reason they are moving is scary. When they arrived to America, their lives changed but their culture stayed with them.