Identity promt rough

In a well organized well written essay explore the idea of identity in the Virgin Suicides and Never Let Me Go. Do others create our identity? Or do we create our own using the people around us as a guide? 

my prompt

In a well written, well organized, and well constructed essay explore what motivates the characters to continue living the lives they are forced to live instead of trying to escape or just committing suicide like the Lisbon sisters using Never Let Me Go and Handmaid's Tale and/or Virgin Suicides.

a very rough draft

In a detailed, well organized and concise essay explore what it means to live, and what it means to be alive using Never Let Me Go and another book from the semester.

a rough prompt

My prompt is super rough but here it goes.

In a detailed, well organized, and concise essay, explore the value of the human life, both literal and figuratively, in the books we have read this semester. Investigate self worth, who determines value, and how they determine value? What gives someone the right to decide someone else's worth? Slavery?

Prompt

My prompt is similar to Talias because mine is also about the past.

In a well written and well organized essay, explore how the telling of the past affects the narrators ability to live in the present and move forward in the future in Never Let Me Go and another book read this semester.

I was thinking of doing the Goon Squad because it was the book I enjoyed the most but then again it's the only book that moves forward in time, not backwards, so that's my problem.

Prompts?

I'm not exactly sure if this is what I will end up writing about as I am still interested in the past and the fake life they are living and would like to incorporate that somehow, but here is one prompt I am considering writing about.

In a well thought out and well constructed essay, explain how being classified as un-human has effect the characters and their outcomes in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and any other book we have explored this semester.

I just thought of this one so this could be another prompt but I'm not sure:

....explain how a characters acceptance or denial of the past has shaped their future (whether it be their actions or emotions) by exploring Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and another book from this semester.

Thoughts: I don't think I will fully be able to answer this until the end of the book, but I find the idea of how they measure a soul interesting. Also is a soul almost an illusion/myth/lie (similar to how we were talking about love) and what gives someone the right to classify someone as having a soul or not.

Side-note: It is interesting how Hailsham which seems to be the ultimate form of deception in this book (if I am going off that idea) was just destroyed.

Prompts

So I have been thinking about what prompt I would write about at the end of this book for a while, and I keep going back to the names. I came up with one in class about names, and it's growing on me. I actually like it. I haven't quite figured out how I will support this idea or write about it, but i'm up for a challenge soon here is my prompt:

In a well organized, well constructed, and well supported essay, explain how the effect of names in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier, show how the names of the characters effect the hierarchy of them in these two books.

Another one I was thinking about was:

In a well organized, well constructed, and well supported essay, explain how the past effects the present life for characters like Kathy H. in Never Let Me Go and The Boys in The Virgin Suicides.

Blog journal #2

Right now I find the idea of souls really interesting, kind of like what we were talking about in class, but also similar to what Sophia was saying about how others view them. I also thought Ruth's outburst (being created from trash) and the idea of deferrals was really interesting. I also find the idea of possibles very interesting, mostly because they think they would be completed in someway or their lives would have an answer/meaning if they knew who they were, but they aren't their possibles and aren't like them. They wouldn't get any real answers about themselves from meeting one.

Quotes:
"this notion of theirs that there were all kinds of possibilities open to us Hailsham students that weren't open to them" (165)

"'I think I would,' Tommy said. 'I don't see how it matters. Even if you found your possible, the actual model they got you from. Even then, I don't see what difference it makes to anything.' Thank you for that profound contribution, Tommy,' said Ruth" (165)

"It's daft to assume you'll have some sort of life as your model" (165)

"We all know it. We're modelled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren't psychos. That's what we come from...you look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, thats where you'll fine where we all came from" (166)

"'Because you'll already be with me, stupid,' Ruth said. 'I'm keeping you'" (152)

"if you were a boy and a girl, and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you" (153)

Questions:
How do you measure a soul?
Who decides if someone has a soul? What does it mean to have a soul?
What impact does being created from "trash" have on someone?
What classifies someone as human?

New AOI/Tommy

I really liked the idea that we were talking about in class of what makes an individual and how art somehow makes up who you are. Also the idea of "they vs. us." it's something that i really want to look into more and potentially write about. If you guys have any quotes that you've found let me know.. :)


"'But you can't blame us,' I said. 'We'd been taught to think about each other, but never about the guardians. The idea the guardians had differences between them, that never occurred to us.' 'But we were old enough,' Tommy said. 'By that age it should have occurred to us.'"

Do you think that Tommy is more individual than the others since he is not creative? Normally we'd think about creativity making somebody more individual but in Hailsham it seems like it would make him more individual and have more of an identity by not sharing the same interest in being creative that the others do.

Journal

I know this is much earlier in the book but I was really curious about Ruth's claim that Madame is afraid of the students. Kathy later explains "she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn't been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders" (35). I was interested in this because it was something I didn't necessarily understand (my new years resolution). How could someone with much authority be afraid of the students? And why would she make it known? Does she want them to know she's afraid?  Why is afraid? I really like the comparison to spiders because I know exactly what Kathy was trying to say. Spiders are small and couldn't harm a person, yet humans are still extremely afraid.

Blog journal

I was (and still am) originally interested in how Kathy approached the past. Particularly at the beginning when she says "there have been times over the years when I've tried to leave Hailsham behind, when I've told myself I shouldn't look back so much. But then I stopped resisting" (5). I find Kathy's approach for the past really interesting as unlike other characters we have seen she isn't trying to run away from her past. I am really interested to see how this will affect Kathy's future. I wasn't really sure where to take this idea and now after tonights reading I think I may be taking it more in the direction of growing up. It seems to me that in order to grow up/fit in/be normal Ruth seems to think she need to forget everything about Hailsham and leave her past behind, but Kathy is taking a very different approach. Ruth is also "struggling to become someone else, and maybe felt the pressure more than the rest of us because, as I say, she'd somehow taken on the responsibility for all of us" (130). I'm not quite yet sure where I am going with this, but right now this is my starting point.


Some quotes:
"we didn't really want to leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because underneath, a part of us stay like that: fearful of the world around us, and ––no matter how much we despised ourselves for it––unable quite to let each other go" (120)

"you were never embarrassed about your collection and you kept it. I wish I'd done that too" (131)

"struggling to become someone else, and maybe felt the pressure more than the rest of us because, as I say, she'd somehow taken on the responsibility for all of us" (130)

"so many of their mannerisms were copied from the television" (120)

"there were two quite separate Ruth's" (129)

"We certainly didn't think much about our lives beyond the Cottages, or about who ran them, or how they fitted into the larger world. None of us thought like that in those days" (116)

"Like you say, Kath. We're going to be leaving here soon. It's not like a game any more. We've got to think carefully" (110)

(betrayal is on 127)


Questions:
Do you need to let some of the past go in order to grow up?
What is the benefit of being normal?
What leads someone to betray someone else's trust? How do people react to betrayal?
(not a thinking question) What is Kathy looking for in the porn magazines? And why is art so important?!?

Technology and Names

While I was reading this nights reading, I kept thinking about what my original plan for my topic or AOI was going to be, names and why were they or why were they not important. Then, I realized that towards the end of the reading, technology also played a main role.

Names:
-NO one has a last name of their own.
-Is this because it is insignificant? My thinking is that it just doesn't matter. Once they go on to give donations and all the weird stuff they do, they are just like numbers to people. The names do not actually define who they are and that is why it is not important for the guardians to put in an effort making every child at Hailsham a last name.....JUST a thought.

Technology:
-Before being exposed to technology, at Hailsham Ruth, Tommy, Kathy, and the rest all acted the way they were taught from each other and the guardians. Then, they all go to the cottages where they watch TV and see how the outside world acts and they start to copy and do what they do on TV. My big question is...why? and Why does this really matter to them enough to start acting like that after so many years of being taught different? Is this what the guardians and Miss Emily were trying to avoid by making sure they did not watch TV and make the music very limited?

Games

"Soon we'll be leaving Hailsham. It's not a game anymore." (104)
This quote really caught my attention and I began thinking about the idea of a game. Why is Hailsham just a game?  How can Ruth see Hailsham as a game when it is literally the only thing that she knows in life. The game seems to be trying to deal with the Guardians and figure out as much as possible. It's an interesting concept because there is an implied recreation with games, and them leaving its as though there is no more recreation but how much do they really know about whats coming next.
It comes again when Kathy is talking about reading at the cottages. She compares it to sex at Hailsham and describes it as "a little game we all indulged to some extent" (123), which goes against what Ruth said about their life no longer being a game but they still do participate in this game of secrecy and gossip. Also a page later when Kathy and Ruth are arguing and Kathy realizes her mistake and describes it as "a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece you see the mistake you've made and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to." (124). In many ways an argument is like a chess match, but it does comeback to the idea of its a game, and why is it not more than that? In the next chapter Ruth and Kathy get along just fine so its like their argument really was just a game but maybe it wasn't, who knows?

Circles & Art

"The craze was for several people to sit on the grass around a single Walkman, passing the headset around. Okay, it sounds a stupid way to listen to music, but it created a really good feeling. You listened for maybe twenty seconds, took off the headset, passed it on. After a while, provided you kept the same tape going over and over, it was surprising how close it was to having heard all of it yourself." (103)

This passage really got me thinking about Asha's idea of circles and view points. Each of this students are getting to hear a different part of the song at first, but after a while they get to hear the part of the song that someone else had started out with. In other words, their all getting to see a different part of one song. This also got me thinking about the idea of art and how important the role it plays in their lives is. When they buy something at the exchanges, its almost as though they're buying a piece of somebody, and when the art has to do with Hailsham itself--Patricias calendar--its like they're looking in at somebody else's point of view.