Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Text Explorations 5/19

Cale Houghton
Text Explorations due 5/19
Passage 1: Junior says about his mother and father, “I guess the whole night I’d been waiting for a blowup, something between Papi and Mami, this was how I always figured Papi would be exposed, out in public, where everyone would know,” (40).
  • It seems like Junior is almost romanticizing this vision of his father getting humiliated. The reason I say this is because he says he was waiting for it, and it goes over this fantasy he has of his father getting caught. This makes me wonder, why does he do this? Maybe he really just hates his father, and wants revenge on him.
  • Blowup - An angry argument. So Junior is picturing his mom actually being angry at his dad. Most of the time, she just acts afraid of him. This shows how it’s almost a dream for Junior that his mom would become angry at his dad. I think he sees how miserable she is because his dad is always pushing her around. So to me it seems like he is dreaming of his mom having an excuse to yell at and humiliate his father.
  • I also am curious why it’s different that everybody would know, besides his father's humiliation. Maybe this is just part of giving his mom an excuse to yell at his dad, and break free from him. Because if it was in front of everyone, he would not be able to twist the story at all, and his mother would have her family backing her up. So maybe that is what Junior wants.
Passage 2: About Aurora, Lucero says, “She’s got the shakes - even in this light I can see that. It’s hard to kiss anyone like that, hard to even touch them - the flesh moves like it’s on rollers,” (49).
  • “The shakes” isn't in the Merriam Webster dictionary, but I think it probably means that she is in withdrawal from some drug. So if she is obviously having such a hard time being away from this drug, why is she hanging out with Lucero? Maybe to her, he is actually a relief from the drugs, and this story really is about love, at least on her part.
  • But at the same time, we can see how on his side the relationship is very confusing, because he seems disgusted by her. This goes back to my claim that the narrator tells the story in such a way that keeps a lot of basic details from the reader to model the confusion that the characters go through in the story. I think in my essay I could use Lucero’s relationship with Aurora as support for this.
  • Junior says it’s hard “to kiss anyone like that”, and yet he just did kiss her. This brings up the question, why did he kiss her, is she disgusts him, and makes him not want to kiss her? It seems like he is almost addicted to her. He can’t help but open the door when she knocks, even though he knows it's not going to turn out well. It’s kind of ironic actually, because she is addicted to drugs, and he is addicted to her.
Passage 3: About his mother, Junior says, “She didn’t treat me badly upon her return but we were no longer as close; she did not call me her Prieto or bring me chocolates from her work. That seemed to suit her fine. And I was young enough to grow out of her rejection. I still had baseball and my brother. I still had trees to climb and lizards to tear apart,” (84).
  • In this quote he says that he was young enough to grow out of her rejection. To me, this implies that now, he wouldn’t be able to grow out of her rejection. So why is it that when he was younger he could grow out of rejection, but when he gets older he can’t? Maybe it has something to do with how his younger self didn’t know as much about the things his mother had done for him as his older self, or that he didn’t care about her as much then.
  • He also says “That seemed to suit her fine”. This is interesting, because he is her son, yet she is fine with just ignoring him. Yet she always seemed like a good mother, but here she is okay with just ignoring him. It seems very uncharacteristic, and a lot more like his father to do that.
  • Although it wasn’t on Merriam Webster, I looked up what Prieto meant, and a rough translation is “blackish”. I thought this was very interesting because in later stories, Junior often associates being darker with being worse. Yet in this story, he recalls how his mother used to call him dark as a term of affection. Maybe this reflects how his mother has a different view on these things than others, and maybe even himself. She just loved him for who he was.
  • It was also surprising to me how violent young Junior was, that he thought of tearing apart lizards as just an everyday hobby. Maybe this is reflecting these violent feelings he has, even if he tries to hide them. His father left him when he was little, and he has lived in poverty his whole life. So I think maybe these violent tendencies are just signs of how he realizes these injustices that have happened to him, and that he is angry about them even at this young age.

Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/ (Sorry I couldn’t find the password for bard.edu library).

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