Analysis of Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Growing Up Hidden by Linnea Due - Assignment Example

Your F. 8 December Final Question The first I chose was Jean-Jacques Rousseau that wrote Confessions. In this writing, he initially identifies that all of his thoughts, desires, truths and feelings are what make up his sense of self and that he is unique. He acknowledges that he is no better than anyone else, just different. He acknowledges that he doesnt recall how he learned to do some things that he now takes for granted such as how he learned to read but he can remember some of the things he did read. It was through his mothers romance books that he began to feel a thirst for reading and knowledge of others and began to realize he was developing interests and emotions he was not familiar with at a young age. Rousseau also acknowledges that some of the things around also helped develop a sense of self, such as the aunts love of music. Rousseau recalled spending a lot of time with the aunt so he too developed an interest for music. Your surroundings help cultivate who you become. Rousseau also acknowledge many other feelings that he went through such as passion, the desire for affection, a modesty, and freedom as well as the things he did not like such as restraint, as well as his sluggishness of thought and confusion. Secondly, the additional reading was by Frederick Douglass and is called How I Learned to Read and Write. In this, Douglass discusses how he lived as a slave and how the masters wife taught him to read or right at first but then was advised by her husband to stop and would not let anyone else teach Douglass how to read or write either. He had no one teacher and he did not know how he ever succeeded in doing so. But she was a kind-hearted woman and treated him as an equal rather than a slave. Since his mistress had taught him the alphabet, he began to take on the rest regardless of whether or not it was dangerous. At times, he felt that learning to read had become a “curse rather than a blessing” because there was a thirst to know something else more beyond the walls of slavery that could not be touched. In my thoughts of how my self developed, I closely relate to Rousseaus way of thinking in that everything that you learn, everything around you and everything that is in the realm of your reach is something you can apply to shape your self. I do not recall either when I learned to read nor write but I do know that as a result of that capability that it opened doors for me that would never have been opened before. Knowing two things that are as simple as reading and writing can give a person the foundation for who they become and help determine their interests. Without that foundation, who would we be if all we were was limited to that which is within our immediate reach? I take in everything around me. Every experience, every song, every laugh, every smile, every sentence all are taken in and influence my thought and character and make me want to know more or to create a concept for which I can adapt to my self and development. Question 2. I evaluated What Is Our Life? By Sir Walter Raleigh, Im nobody! Who are you? By Emily Dickinson and Harlem by Langston Hughes. In What Is Our Life? Raleigh uses the comparison of life to a “play of passion.” He also describes the wombs of our mothers to be houses where we prepare ourselves for “this short comedy” which would be life and our mothers wombs would be that of which we are resting until ready to live. Graves...are like drawn curtains when the play is done, meaning that the graves symbolize our last place of rest underneath the sun and we continue on in our lives, “march we, playing, to our latest rest.” The poet revealed that he is somewhat of a realist and that life is short and sweet and we spend our time just living but when the curtains close, like a play, it is over. It is a short and simple and sweet poem, just like life. Im nobody! Who are you? by Dickinson discusses that being a nobody is like being in a big place with no identity and that if you were a somebody, she thinks it would be dreary. She says that it would be public, like a frog, which is a metaphor for something that is exposed to everything especially when he would croak to an admiring bog. It would be an announcement. Dickinson indicates that she is somewhat of a private person and that she likes to stay hidden as a person behind the scenes rather than be in the public eye for all to see. In Langston Hughes Harlem, he discusses that once a dream has been deferred, he wants to know what happens to it. He asks if these dreams are like dried up raisins, if they are like a sore, if they stink like rotten meet, or are if they are comparable to syrup. He also wonders do those dreams just linger “like a heavy load” or do they explode. He uses a series of metaphors to be symbolic of what a dream is. This poem indicates that Hughes is somewhat curious. He is a deep thinker and questions everything around him, wondering what happens to dreams that have not come true and treating them like tangible objects rather that the abstract concepts that they are. Question 3. In Growing Up Hidden by Linnea Due, indicates that the woman is having issues deciding who they are and that they are living in disguise. This woman was having issues with concealing that she was gay, always knowing she was a bit more boyish and knew that she wanted to marry a woman. When she told others, they told her it was ludicrous. At summer camp, she knew it was Stacy that she wanted to be with and a friend of hers wanted to announce that they were going steady with a boy. So they covered it up to protect each other from taunting that they would have received if they had announced that they were gay. While growing up, she continued to conceal her sexual identity more and more, realizing there were few people yet like her. While she was going through some of her dads books, she would take the sex-oriented ones to school. She felt like she was too different, almost feeling guilty and deviant as the books and literature described her “condition.” She was tossed out of Girl Scouts for being too boyish and not only did she have to hide behind her thoughts and edit who she really was, she discovered that she was going to have to hide behind a feminine persona that looked and acted also unmasculine. She changed her life, dropping out of sports, wearing make up and changing identity to make it appear as though she was all girl. She felt she had to live undercover. Finally, when she was older, she was tired of lying and when asked if she was a lesbian, she confessed that she was and though it made her have to leave her school, she no longer had to lie about her identity nor her sexual preference and from then on, there was no turning back. She was gay and she was ired of hiding it. Question 4. I find that metaphors are really fascinating. I think that sometimes a metaphor as written by a poet is almost similar to that of sitting behind someone at a stop light with a personalized license plate. You try to guess what it means and though you have an idea of what it stands for, you really never know the truth. Which is the same concept of a poet that speaks or writes in metaphors. Sometimes they are hard to decipher and I have found that it has been an interesting journey trying to uncover what topics some of these authors are talking about. Not everything we read is literal though sometimes, since we have nothing else to base it on, it seems we have to make as close of a guess as we possibly can in order to try to make a determination of the point that the author was trying to get across. Metaphors are probably the most fascinating yet also the most challenging, confusing and frustrating aspects of literature, especially in poetry. If you cannot determine the metaphor or the symbolism that the author is trying to describe, the entire work loses its meaning. Read More