In Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead does a great job narrating the idea of growing up, and reaching the stage of adolescence where you start to gain more responsibilities, such as being able to pay for your own things. To get this money, one must work, and Whitehead's experiences growing up that are detailed in the novel are quite similar to many teenager's experiences in the workplace. Over this past summer, I got my first summer job, and was eager to work to get my own money, as Benji does the same in the novel. Now, looking back I don't know what I was expecting. I know I wasn't expecting sunshine and rainbows, but whatever I was expecting, I should have expected both better and worse of some certain aspects. Food service jobs? Good. People who come to buy things from food service jobs? Less good. People are who truly make the work experience bad or good, and I dealt with my fair share of bad over the summer, just as Benji does in the novel. Dirty clothes, coming home ...
In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, we see an early representation of mental health institutions, and how bad they were compared to now. If we look at mental health institutions now, we don't typically see electroshock therapy being used, more things are focused on bettering the person instead of electrocuting them until they conform to society's standards. The use of lobotomization is also a much more frowned upon practice, as they were done very unprofessionally in their early days, where they were named icepick lobotomies, super ineffective and unsafe, and especially unsanitary procedures that would be a tool, most commonly an icepick, being placed through a patient's eye and going through to the brain, and disconnecting certain nerve endings. No anesthesia was used in these procedures either, and we see a character in the novel who has undergone a lobotomy and it completely changes a person's behaviors and mannerisms. I believe if this book took place in more modern t...
In Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, Jason Taylor explores the life of being bullied in school. He is not very high in the social hierarchy, but not the lowest of low. In this spot, there isn't much you can do to improve or really drop in ranking, but if you start acting cool and confident and make people notice you, then you might shift. Just like in BSG, real life has these hierarchies as well. In my years of school, I have noticed certain people tend to "shine" more than others, and it made me really take notice of the social construction around me. At every school, there are those core people who stand out more than others, and everyone seems to know them. In BSG, that is the exact same thing we see. I believe that there are very defined cliques in BSG as well, and in our real life setting of Uni. People tend to stick to their groups, not really branching out to other groups, but with Uni there is a little flexibility. Everyone knows each other, and it isn't ...
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