amelie's 20 cent thoughts

 "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday" (Camus, 3).  The Stranger by Albert Camus plunges the reader into a disorienting story with these opening lines. Meursault, the main character, narrates the story of how he got involved in a crime, and sentenced the death penalty from his strange first-person perspective. From these very first opening lines, we get a glimpse of just how foreign this narration seems. In such a meaningful sentence the reader is shocked by where Meursault dedicates his attention. Not to his mother's death, but to the question of when it happened. The events surrounding Maman's death are significant in the novel for many reasons. They are the starting events of the book, as we become accustomed to Meursault's way of thinking, of acting, and of processing emotion in what should be...

The Sun Also Rises  is a novel about the complexities of love, relationships, and identity in a post-WWI world. Most of the characters are expatriates, and the book describes their lives and stories as they take place in different settings. The first part of the book takes place in Paris as we are introduced to Jake Barnes, the main character, and the tangled relationship he has with Brett Ashley. Hemingway brings us into 1920s Parisian society as his characters pass through bars, cafés, and clubs in quick succession. Later in the book Jake and Brett's friends decide to take a trip to Spain. Jake and Bill have the chance to go fishing on their own, away from Brett, Mike, and Cohn. During this small period in the book we notice a significant change in Jake's attitude and narration style. Compared with the intense, bustling, emotionally-charged scene of Paris, Jake is calm, relaxed, and satisfied.  Two contrasting scenes stick out as examples of this effect. In the beginning of ...

Mrs. Dalloway is a book about a single day in the lives of people in 1923 London, but the simplicity of the setting is misleading. The book is both subtle and complex. Virginia Woolf crafts her novel by giving readers tools to understand multiple layers of meanings in interactions between characters, such as intersubjectivity and two-track narrations, and the continuous use of a stream-of-consciousness writing style. Two parallel scenes stick out as examples of this technique; the interactions Peter and Richard have individually with Clarissa, where they each surprise her by meeting her in her home. In these scenes, the reader is understanding between the lines, piecing together what they understand of the scene with context from outside of it. We jump from the perspectives of one character to another smoothly, seeing the disparities between what they say and what they feel. This leads to a deeper understanding of the interactions and relationships between characters.  Peter Walsh ...

" I love the constancy of shine on the edges of moving objects. Even propellors or desk fans will glint  steadily in certain places in the grayness of their rotation; the curve of each fan blade picks up the light  for an instant on its circuit and then hands it off to its successor."  (3) Few books have left me with such a strong aftertaste as The Mezzanine has. In the book, Nicholson manages to create a character with a unique permanence, both for his relatability and for his surprises. He lingers in your head and in the small things of life, when you sweep your floor or put your straw in your drink, tie your shoelaces or ride up an escalator. This dual aspect of Howie's character, his intense relatability and foreignness at the same time, is established since the first page in passages like this one. We have all seen fans move, and seen the sunlight shine on fan blades. We can trace their rotation, admire the light flickering, and convince ourselves we are like Howie i...