Top Dawg Blawg

    There is a quote that says, "inspiration lies in the pages". Well for me it didn't. I actually found inspiration for this blog post on the back cover. There, I noticed a review by Kirkus Reviews calling David Mitchell's Black Swan Green , "Great Britain's Catcher in the Rye-". Conveniently having just read J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye earlier this year, I was inspired to trace the parallels between the two stories and the coming of age of their individual protagonists, Holden Caulfield and Jason Taylor. While the stories take place literally an ocean apart, these two young protagonists share coming of age stories that feels parallel and environments that remind of each other.      Jason and Holden are both in a similar type of social environment, a hierarchical order of teenage school boys whose goals are to gain power among themselves. Both boys are in the lesser powered group of people, but for different reasons. Holden is a lot more jud...

       I have heard the saying "kids are perfect mirrors of their parents" many times before. As young children, we imitate our parents, absorb information from them, and develop a perception of the world through them. The connection between a child and a parent goes much deeper than learning lessons from them. As products of our parents, we are able to understand them on a sort of below the surface level. By this I mean that some things can be communicated between children and parents without the use of words, and some of these things we don't even realize we are absorbing. In the final chapter of Fun Home , Alison spends time talking about and reflecting on her last interactions with her father (Bruce). While acknowledging that Alison's father has done some things wrong in his life, Alison focuses more on his positive aspects and how her father made profound impacts on her throughout the time she spent with him. The impacts her father made on her played a pivotal r...

      The metaphorical use of a "bell jar" as a force that descends upon Esther, severely deteriorating her mental state and bringing her close to death on multiple occasions, was an idea that I found particularly interesting. It reminded me of the scene in the movie Coco (a movie that is essentially all about death), where the famous singer and guitar player Ernesto de la Cruz is killed by a bell that falls on him. The title of the final song he played and his actual last words "remember me" allude to denouement, which also reminded me of Esther's frequent references to her own death. The use of bell-shaped objects in the two stories (the latter mentioned story uses an actual bell) as a force that brings death was an unusual connection that for some reason stuck out to me. Throughout Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar , the metaphorical use of a descending and rising bell jar to describe Esther's recurring bouts with severe depression arise multiple times thro...

    Holden Caulfield sure is one hell of a guy, and I don't mean that in the positive metaphorical way. The average person's coming of age is often a long, slow process that takes years or even decades. Holden Caulfield's coming of age, however, is a far cry from what most people experience. His adventure of a coming of age takes the span of just a few days, and while massive shifts in his person do occur, judging by how he leaves us at the end of the story, we are left with evidence that his condition is still far from ideal. Rather than an accumulation of good, useful things, I see Holden's coming of age as more of a decumulation of bad things. As the story builds, Holden's ego is deflated and his connections with other people deepen.     Throughout the first few chapters of J.D. Salinger's the Catcher in the Rye , Holden is portrayed as a fiercely independent, self reliant teenager who does not conform to social norms: "The game with Saxon Hall was suppo...