Scott Pero
AP English 11
August 24, 2009
How is Huck’s journey a journey to great human understanding? How does Huck live outside of society?
Row, Row, Row your Life
“What I love most about rivers is:/ You can’t step in the same river twice/ The water’s always changing always flowing” As the Disney character Pocahontas relates in the song “Just Around the Riverbend”, no two rivers are alike. Not only do the waters and currents change, thus changing the contents of the river, but you have changed as well. You are, in some way, a different person from the last time you stepped in Even if the difference was a moment or a decade: life changes you as you endure it. Your past experiences add to your knowledge, and when you step into the river, it is a completely new ride. A river can be a metaphor for life: As you travel down the river, you learn more and ultimately understand more about yourself and the world. Such is the case in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which the Mississippi River is a metaphor for the title character’s journey through life. As Huck travels down the river, he ascends to greater human understanding, just like in life. Huck’s journey and life itself are alike because of their unpredictability, their constant fluctuations, the choices made, and how you change through it.
Very few things are certain in life; anything can happen. Nothing is set in stone or guaranteed to happen, they just do. You can never truly predict life’s changes, just as you can never really predict a river. You may be able to determine an outcome based on various facts gathered, and sometimes that outcome is correct, but a river is never the same. It almost has a mind of its own; it changes so much. When Huck is traveling down the river and his companion, Jim, a runaway slave, is captured, he needs to get him back. Huck walks to the farm to which Jim was taken, and poses as a relative whose identity is unknown to him. One member of the family plays a joke on the owner, in which she reveals Huck’s adopted identity: “‘It’s Tom Sawyer!’ By jings, I most slumped through the floor… Being Tom Sawyer was easy and comfortable” (Twain, 237). Huck would never have guessed in a million years that the farm where Jim was held was the same farm that belonged to the family of his old friend, Tom Sawyer. Now he feels better about posing as Tom, because he knows enough about him to successfully act like him. This was a great load lifted from Huck’s shoulders, as before he had no clue how to act. Though this instance proved the river’s benevolence in taking Jim to this particular farm, it can also deliver bad luck at any time.
The river throws its fair share of difficulties Huck and Jim’s way as they journey down it. One of those difficulties is a pair of men running away from local authorities that Huck happens across at one point. He agrees to let them on the raft and give them a ride, but the whole agreement soon turns sour. One man reveals himself as the descendant of a duke, making him one as well. The other then reveals himself to be a long lost king, and the two make Jim and Huck wait on them hand and foot. Soon, they take over the raft and lead Huck to a sudden realization: “It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes, at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds…If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way” (137). This is the way Huck deals with the king and the duke for the duration of their reign over him. They are a blight cast upon Huck and Jim’s journey on the Mississippi, sent to them by the river herself as an unforeseen impediment. Sometimes, the manner of these instances coincides with the speed of life itself.
Much like a river, life has its ebbs and flows. At times, it is slow and dull, but at other times, it is fast and riveting. It is in life’s nature to constantly stay in flux, forever caught between boring and exciting. Sometimes, it may even be both, as Huck experiences: “I was floating along, of course, four or five mile an hour; but you don’t think of that. No, you feel like you are laying dead still on the water; and if a little glimpse of a snag slips by, you don’t think to yourself how fast you’re going, but you catch your breath and think, my! how that snag’s tearing along” (95). Here, when Huck is caught in the fog, he is separated from Jim, and does not really know where he is. He tries in vain to find Jim, but he only enters further into a state of disorientation. In the quote, he explains how he felt like he was barely moving. He believed that he was perfectly still in the water, and when the snag flies by the boat, he still believes himself to be stuck and that the snag itself is careening along the river. This demonstrates life’s constant change and bipolarity, forever caught between two speeds. Even at that singular moment, life has ebbed for Huck but is flowing all around him. We cannot choose when life ebbs or flows, but our other choices do affect our journey.
A crucial part of life is the choices you make along the way. These choices make up who you are and who you choose to be. It is not your origins or how you start things that define you as a person, but how to decide to end those things. Huck must make a crucial decision when he finds that Jim is captured. He knows that, in that time period, it would be the right thing to let a slave be captured, but Huck begins to wonder about whether he should or not: “I took [the letter] up, and held it in my hand. I was trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said” (228). Huck realizes that going after Jim to save him and set him free is against the law and against society in general during that era, but he goes along anyway. He chooses to help a friend, and not to rescue a slave. Huck chooses what he wants, rather than what society wants, and then follows through. Choices are everywhere in life, at every junction and around every corner, and the way you deal with them affects your course from then on. They may be right, and they may be wrong, but either way, they lead to a noticeable change in both you and your character.
From the beginning of his expedition to the end, Huck changes and is a different person because of it all. Throughout the trip, he is always different, somehow, from the people he meets, and that leads him to a better understanding of what he feels is right and wrong. When Huck talks about the slave given to him during his time with the Grangerford family, “My nigger had a monstrous easy time, because I warn’t used to having anybody do anything for me” (118) he shows how he feels about slavery. He has never had a slave of his own, so he never really treats slaves like others of his time. He understands the way others treat them, and what is accepted by society. He lives outside of society in this way, because he understands the world around him, but is not in any way like it. In an even smaller sense, Huck is not even like the common type of people he associates with.
Huck’s father was a con man of sorts, and when Huck encounters the king and the duke, he realizes they are embezzlers as well. For a while, Huck goes along with everything they do, but when they try and steal a fortune left to three innocent girls by their deceased father, Huck begins to change: “I says to myself, this is a girl that I’m letting that old reptle rob her out of her money!...I felt so ornery and low down and mean, that I says to myself, My mind’s made up; I’ll hive that money for them or bust” (188). Unlike the king and the duke, one singular emotion stops him in his tracks and makes him think about his actions: remorse. Huck feels guilty and bad about helping to steal from the three girls because they are some of the nicest people he has ever met. Huck knows that stealing from them would be wrong, and so he understands that he should not. In the process, he swears to bring down the king and the duke in the process. Because he lived differently from society, Huck rose to truly understand the way he himself worked, and accepted it.
Greater human understanding is common to all, but is different to everyone. It is not a universal abstract; everyone has their own understanding of the world and of themselves. We find this epiphany through life and how we go through it. Life tests us with its metaphorical curve balls and its constant flux. The choices we make about them determine our end. Even though we may be different from those around us, we live for ourselves and our ideals. Huck understands this through his travels along the Mississippi with Jim. Much like steering down a river, we choose the path we wish to follow. Life, as well as the river, is simply our vessel that delivers us to the trail’s end. We experience life and rise to a greater human understanding of ourselves and how we view the world through our experiences and choices in it, and we must never hold ourselves back to the security and safety of its shores. Why? Because we never know what is waiting just around the river bend.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
The Great Gatsby Essay
Scott Pero
AP English 11
August 1, 2009
How does Fitzgerald develop the theme of pessimism towards the American Dream?
A Wish America’s Heart Made
On the 12th of October, 1492, Christopher Columbus and his crew discovered the Americas. In 1607, English colonists made landfall in the Americas on April 26th, and would later colonize Jamestown on May 14th, the first permanent English colony in what would eventually become the United States. From there, America has grown, first born along its east coast, and, according to manifest destiny, it stretched west toward the Pacific. It has experienced its fair share of rough patches, such as the Revolutionary War to declare its independence from England, the Civil War that separated America itself, and the Great Depression, which challenged Americans in every aspect of their lives. When the first settlers sailed to America, however, it is unlikely they envisioned all of these hardships for their prosperity. According to Walt Disney, “A dream is a wish your heart makes”. Metaphorically speaking, a dream is a set of desires or aspirations that could, potentially, come to fruition. America’s dream, a dream of discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness, has been long sought after by any who travel to America’s shores. In the novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald develops a theme of pessimism towards this dream. The novel, revolving around the lives of its two protagonists, Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway, depicts a 1920s America that simply falls short of fulfilling the American dream. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald develops this theme through the characters and how they did not discover, individualize, or pursue happiness.
Just as the first settlers discovered America, abundant with possibility, the American Dream included discovery. One must discover new things and always keep moving forward, ultimately reaching bigger and better things. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald tears down the American Dream piece by piece, the first of which is discovery. The characters did not move forward and did not discover anything new. On the contrary, they dwelled in the past. They would not leave things behind, and so they could not move forward. Such is the problem of the protagonist Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s love, Daisy Buchanan, married another man while he was away at war. Throughout the novel, Gatsby tries to recreate their time together; he hopes to bring back the past. As Fitzgerald writes, “[Gatsby] must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream” (Fitzgerald, 161), because he lived in his dreamlike past, Gatsby paid for it, first by losing Daisy and finally by losing his life. If we focus too much on the past, we forget about the present and lose sight of the future; we can end up like Gatsby: loveless and lifeless. America’s dream for a better future cannot be realized if we care too much about the past. Not only should we care about the discovery of the future, but ourselves in the process.
Individualism is another key component of the American Dream. America’s founding fathers conceived a country where every man can be their own man, and gave us various freedoms to do so, such as the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and even the Bill of Rights. We are free in this country to be ourselves, but in the novel, the world does not work that way. Instead of moving in their own direction, people instead latch onto others’ fame and fortune to get ahead in life, like the remora attaches to a shark. Fitzgerald exemplifies this in the lavish parties Gatsby hosts, and the patrons that attend them. Only a rare few are invited to Gatsby’s soirées, but the rest simply arrive of their own volition: “People were not invited—they went there…[s]ometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission” (41). The party-goers attend Gatsby’s parties for the party, not for Gatsby. Essentially, they were using Gatsby to get to the rich and famous that came to his parties.
This notion is further emphasized when, after Gatsby’s death, Nick endeavors to contact people Gatsby knew: “One gentleman to whom I telephoned implied that [Gatsby] had got what he deserved. However, that was my fault, for he was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor” (169). People never cared for Gatsby. They only kept contact with him to attend his parties and reap the benefits. Like the remora, they are only along for the ride; they could care less about the shark they ride. The shark gains nothing from the association, neither does Gatsby. When Gatsby died, the remora no longer cared, and simply fled to find another able host. The American Dream is all about being your own person; impossible, if you use others to do so. In order to be your own person, you must be happy with yourself.
Everyone desires to be happy. Like anyone, we search for happiness in any way we can. Part of the American Dream is the pursuit of happiness as well. When the first settlers arrived on American shores, they saw a land where there descendants could be happy, and that is meant for every American citizen. Fitzgerald shows us through his writing that Americans either do not pursue true happiness, or eventually end up unhappy. For example, materialism plays a role in The Great Gatsby. The characters only care about money and success, not true happiness. When Nick encounters Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, after Gatsby’s death, he realizes this: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that held them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made…” (179). After that, Tom simply heads into a jewelry store and buys something else, further exemplifying his materialism. Most of the characters are like this, only caring about the superficial, and not the real things that matter. To Tom and Daisy, money and people are simply objects. Tom cheats on Daisy with Myrtle Wilson, who is also cheating on her spouse with Tom. This materialism is why Gatsby tries to appeal to Daisy in the first place, thinking that if he can make Daisy happy in this manner, she will leave Tom. In all cases, the characters don’t end up truly happy.
Throughout the novel, Nick never really searches for love. He does, however, inexplicably find something like it in Jordan Baker, Daisy’s friend. During the course of the story, Jordan and Nick spend more time together and talk to each other more. In the end, though, they both are unhappy. After a meeting with Jordan in the aftermath of Gatsby’s death, Nick leaves: “Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, [he] turned away” (177). As Fitzgerald writes, in the process of following the American Dream, the characters’ pursuit of happiness went sour. Nick thought he was attaining happiness with Jordan, but in the end he did not. All of his emotions—anger, love, and remorse—are used an examples of what usually happens when American try to chase that one dream and fail. The characters either pursue the wrong happiness or end up unhappy, which either way contributes to the masterful theme Fitzgerald devises.
The American Dream was something meant for every American. The dream described in The Great Gatsby, however, is anything but that. F. Scott Fitzgerald takes the American Dream—discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness—and portrays the negative side of it, woven intricately into the lives of Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, and the rest of the characters. His novel shows how America had developed in the 1920s, and of how far it had grown from its original dream. America’s heart, those that founded it and all it stands for, made this wish, but as it bloomed in The Great Gatsby, its own citizens were the ones who strayed from the dream’s path. Perhaps wishing upon a star would have been more reliable.
AP English 11
August 1, 2009
How does Fitzgerald develop the theme of pessimism towards the American Dream?
A Wish America’s Heart Made
On the 12th of October, 1492, Christopher Columbus and his crew discovered the Americas. In 1607, English colonists made landfall in the Americas on April 26th, and would later colonize Jamestown on May 14th, the first permanent English colony in what would eventually become the United States. From there, America has grown, first born along its east coast, and, according to manifest destiny, it stretched west toward the Pacific. It has experienced its fair share of rough patches, such as the Revolutionary War to declare its independence from England, the Civil War that separated America itself, and the Great Depression, which challenged Americans in every aspect of their lives. When the first settlers sailed to America, however, it is unlikely they envisioned all of these hardships for their prosperity. According to Walt Disney, “A dream is a wish your heart makes”. Metaphorically speaking, a dream is a set of desires or aspirations that could, potentially, come to fruition. America’s dream, a dream of discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness, has been long sought after by any who travel to America’s shores. In the novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald develops a theme of pessimism towards this dream. The novel, revolving around the lives of its two protagonists, Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway, depicts a 1920s America that simply falls short of fulfilling the American dream. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald develops this theme through the characters and how they did not discover, individualize, or pursue happiness.
Just as the first settlers discovered America, abundant with possibility, the American Dream included discovery. One must discover new things and always keep moving forward, ultimately reaching bigger and better things. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald tears down the American Dream piece by piece, the first of which is discovery. The characters did not move forward and did not discover anything new. On the contrary, they dwelled in the past. They would not leave things behind, and so they could not move forward. Such is the problem of the protagonist Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s love, Daisy Buchanan, married another man while he was away at war. Throughout the novel, Gatsby tries to recreate their time together; he hopes to bring back the past. As Fitzgerald writes, “[Gatsby] must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream” (Fitzgerald, 161), because he lived in his dreamlike past, Gatsby paid for it, first by losing Daisy and finally by losing his life. If we focus too much on the past, we forget about the present and lose sight of the future; we can end up like Gatsby: loveless and lifeless. America’s dream for a better future cannot be realized if we care too much about the past. Not only should we care about the discovery of the future, but ourselves in the process.
Individualism is another key component of the American Dream. America’s founding fathers conceived a country where every man can be their own man, and gave us various freedoms to do so, such as the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and even the Bill of Rights. We are free in this country to be ourselves, but in the novel, the world does not work that way. Instead of moving in their own direction, people instead latch onto others’ fame and fortune to get ahead in life, like the remora attaches to a shark. Fitzgerald exemplifies this in the lavish parties Gatsby hosts, and the patrons that attend them. Only a rare few are invited to Gatsby’s soirées, but the rest simply arrive of their own volition: “People were not invited—they went there…[s]ometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission” (41). The party-goers attend Gatsby’s parties for the party, not for Gatsby. Essentially, they were using Gatsby to get to the rich and famous that came to his parties.
This notion is further emphasized when, after Gatsby’s death, Nick endeavors to contact people Gatsby knew: “One gentleman to whom I telephoned implied that [Gatsby] had got what he deserved. However, that was my fault, for he was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor” (169). People never cared for Gatsby. They only kept contact with him to attend his parties and reap the benefits. Like the remora, they are only along for the ride; they could care less about the shark they ride. The shark gains nothing from the association, neither does Gatsby. When Gatsby died, the remora no longer cared, and simply fled to find another able host. The American Dream is all about being your own person; impossible, if you use others to do so. In order to be your own person, you must be happy with yourself.
Everyone desires to be happy. Like anyone, we search for happiness in any way we can. Part of the American Dream is the pursuit of happiness as well. When the first settlers arrived on American shores, they saw a land where there descendants could be happy, and that is meant for every American citizen. Fitzgerald shows us through his writing that Americans either do not pursue true happiness, or eventually end up unhappy. For example, materialism plays a role in The Great Gatsby. The characters only care about money and success, not true happiness. When Nick encounters Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, after Gatsby’s death, he realizes this: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that held them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made…” (179). After that, Tom simply heads into a jewelry store and buys something else, further exemplifying his materialism. Most of the characters are like this, only caring about the superficial, and not the real things that matter. To Tom and Daisy, money and people are simply objects. Tom cheats on Daisy with Myrtle Wilson, who is also cheating on her spouse with Tom. This materialism is why Gatsby tries to appeal to Daisy in the first place, thinking that if he can make Daisy happy in this manner, she will leave Tom. In all cases, the characters don’t end up truly happy.
Throughout the novel, Nick never really searches for love. He does, however, inexplicably find something like it in Jordan Baker, Daisy’s friend. During the course of the story, Jordan and Nick spend more time together and talk to each other more. In the end, though, they both are unhappy. After a meeting with Jordan in the aftermath of Gatsby’s death, Nick leaves: “Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, [he] turned away” (177). As Fitzgerald writes, in the process of following the American Dream, the characters’ pursuit of happiness went sour. Nick thought he was attaining happiness with Jordan, but in the end he did not. All of his emotions—anger, love, and remorse—are used an examples of what usually happens when American try to chase that one dream and fail. The characters either pursue the wrong happiness or end up unhappy, which either way contributes to the masterful theme Fitzgerald devises.
The American Dream was something meant for every American. The dream described in The Great Gatsby, however, is anything but that. F. Scott Fitzgerald takes the American Dream—discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness—and portrays the negative side of it, woven intricately into the lives of Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, and the rest of the characters. His novel shows how America had developed in the 1920s, and of how far it had grown from its original dream. America’s heart, those that founded it and all it stands for, made this wish, but as it bloomed in The Great Gatsby, its own citizens were the ones who strayed from the dream’s path. Perhaps wishing upon a star would have been more reliable.
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