Week 3 Blog-a-Thon

Week 3 Discussion-

Question 1

Agreement is found with Annemarie Muth’s point that Shakespeare finds controversy within his idea of what love should be. Although she claims that in this sonnet, he has finally found “constancy” in his writings about love, the derision in his mind can still be seen. Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 speaks hopefully of love. Within it, even he places doubt on its solidarity by way of the last two lines. “If this be error”, allows him a loophole of air through which to breathe should anything said prior be found false. The lines, leading up to this proverbial “If”, are sound in supporting Muth’s assessment that he has finally found constancy in love, but she places insufficient weight on the regression that lurks at the end. It could easily be drawn from his words that he has, in fact, found faith in love, especially when reading the line “within his bending sickle’s compass come” – a blatant reference to death being the only dissolution to love. What is more difficult to see is the hesitancy that continues to reside in his rhetoric.

Another blatant misguidance is Muth’s reference to the last lines being his proclamation of arriving at a conclusion. Shakespeare is still obviously conflicted, and beckons the audience to disprove him. Irony is clear, evidence of personal experience is lacking. This sonnet reads much like a dictionary definition of what love is intended to be from the mind of the writer, and leaves the reader the task of assumption regarding his true feelings and experiences within the projection of his solid idea about love.

Question 7

Tim O’Brian’s self –explored account in “The Things They Carried”, familiarizes the reader with both the tangible and intangible items “humped” about by the Vietnam soldiers every day, and blatantly re-defines the masculinity of American soldiers by humanizing their individual stories, and meticulously calculating the weight of everything they carried. Carrying items related to necessity and mission specifics, the story lists the items that the soldiers bring with them into battle. O’Brian explains the use of the word “humping” by saying it “implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.” Giving the reader an introspective look at the life or death lottery these soldiers face, and softening the image of the men who fight the war, O’Brian allows the reader a peek at the burdens, both physical and emotional, that these tough men carry. Although Lt. Jimmy Cross’s photos of Martha weighed only 10 oz., they weigh heavily on his heart throughout, and are eventually discarded because they become too heavy for him to bear as he loses a man to their distractions.

Although the title is implicative of this, and although it can be readily seen that eventually the author will address the subject of the intangible burdens they carry, there is a single passage which is pivotal to the entire piece. “They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections …They carried their own lives.” Upon reading these lines, the gravity of the soldiers’ burdens is treacherously splayed in words of humble power. All gender and masculinity is ripped from their façade of bravery. They are shamelessly reduced to the frail humanity that they all share. “It was not courage, exactly: the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.” These words again, reiterate the facts that not only were they soldiers reacting to their duties, but that they were humans, and acting out of fear – a trait quite elusive in approaching the topic of masculinity.