The Coming of Age Novel

Sag Harbor

This is going to be one of my more informal blog posts as I prepare to graduate and reflect on my time at Uni. I want to connect a lesson I've learned to Benji's ideology of "the other boy," based off the prompt we received earlier this quarter. I think that Benji tries to separate himself so much from the younger version of himself because he's reminded of the time that him and his brother were neglected. I also think that some part of him might feel like a failure because he was trying so hard at the time to protect him and his brother from going shooting in the first place. But then his brother found a way around it and that'a how the whole mess started. All resulting in Benji getting hurt. This is an interesting aspect to explore but I really want to focus on why he tries so hard and yet fails to separate himself. I think the reason why Benji can't truly separate himself from the younger version of him is because he quite literally still has a part of...

Invisible Man: Invisible Women

Ellison's Invisible Man, women are portrayed as either crazy, helpless, motherly figures, or sexual objects. They are all represented in a surface level 2D way, much like they in Wrights Native Son . We never really get to learn each women's story or see them have any character development. In fact, the women are always used as plot twisters, or extra add ons, or even just to set back the narrator, rather than becoming major parts of the story. For now I'll touch on the Dancer and True Bloods daughter and wife which are the most minor female characters in the novel. The Dancer at the very beginning of the novel was placed into the situation just for entertainment and to throw off the narrator. There was only that brief moment of eye-contact between the two of them where the narrator somehow thinks he can relate to her situation because she looked terrified at what was going on. After that, we hear or see nothing of her again. Next in the story comes True Blood's daught...

Invisible Man: Narrators Search for Identity

The narrator in Invisible Man undergoes a lot of dream like sequences of events throughout the novel. in the opening scene of the book, the narrator seems to know who he is and what he wants, that is, before he tells the story of how he got there. The character we've seen up till where we are in the book is clueless to who he is. he's constantly trying to people please and base his identity off of other people. Slowly he learns to start questioning the people and the world around him, but still bases his identify off of other people but in this case instead of people pleasing he's trying to prove people wrong. For example, up until the narrator is sent away to New York, all he does is try to people please. Specifically Dr Bledsoe, the narrator want's to be his assistant and tries to be the best model student he can be. He doesn't really have a personality of his own and he blindly follows the rules that even the reader questions. B...

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