Recent Bookmarks and Annotations
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bboard.pingry.org • View topic - Post questions & comments on BEASTS OF NO NATION here on 2009-11-24
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Beasts of No Nation is a very powerful novel, and like some of my classmates, it is my favorite of the course so fa
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Along with insects and mosquitos, I noticed three other motifs throughout the novel - silence, animals, and light versus dark.
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After reading a fair amount of the poems I would like to talk about Leopold Sedar Senghor's Suddenly Startled, my personal favorite.
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I agree with Blake that the common presence of insects, especially mosquitos, represents negativity. I also asked a question about their significance and I have concluded that insects embody situations that bother Agu.
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Agu is deep in denial about what is happening and what he is becoming, so he thinks about the past and future, instead.
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In Senghor’s poem “Suddenly Startled”, I noticed several similarities to Agu’s feelings in Beasts of No Nation.
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I have to agree with kmarcisc, who said that she was in between on this novel.
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Through the flashbacks, we find out more about Agu; information that we wouldn't know without flashbacks, because Agu most likely would not delve into the past with his present narration. We learn that the war really transformed and corrupted Agu, who originally aspired to be a doctor or an engineer.
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The subject matter of the novel is what really captivated me. Like Rainie, this was my first exposure to child soldiers in Africa.
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City of God comes closest to Beast of No Nation, because there are corrupted children who live lives of crime and carry guns around, but the children weren't actual soldiers. It was disturbing to see how sudden Agu transformed into a "beast."
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In the beginning of the novel, I was very worried that I wouldn't like it. The language was hard to read and it was difficult, in the first chapter, to figure out where Iweala was taking his novel. However, once I started to get further into the text, I started to enjoy it more and the language and plot became easier to figure out and understand
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also noticed the theme of camaraderie within the novel. This camaraderie exists between Agu and Dike, however, it mostly exists between Agu and Strika.
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It is almost like Mohsen in The Swallows of Kabul who turned mad when he lost his "sun" Zunaira. The Commandant went insane, and eventually died, because of a lack of camaraderie.
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I have to agree with Jenny Palaci: the African poetry really opened my eyes to what it is like to live in Africa. However, while I liked all of the African poetry that I read, there were a few poems that really stood out to me.
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"Dung-Beetle" by Breyten Breytenbach
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Kofi Awoonor's "Song of War."
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Also, Appiah talked about the use of language in poetry in his introduction to the African poems. He says that it is very important, when writing, "to mimic the way sound and sense interact with the original language" (311). This statement reminded me of Beasts of No Nation. Iweala uses Agu's broken language to portray a more powerful interaction between Agu and the world around him.
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really like Beasts of No Nation. When I began reading the novel I was annoyed with the language. I couldn't quite figure out what was going on at first. It was ironic to me that the narrator's perspective was much simpler because he was a child, meanwhile it was very difficult for me to read. As I continued reading though, I got used to the language, and I actually began to like it.
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As the novel progressed, though I still liked it, I found it harder and harder to read. It was a little ironic that as soon as the language made it easier to literally read the novel, the content made it more and more difficult to read. There were many scenes in which I really had difficulty pushing myself to keep reading.
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Like Alysia, I really liked "I am Alone" by Leopold Sedar Senghor
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the symbol of the mosquitos.
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bboard.pingry.org • View topic - Post questions & comments on BEASTS OF NO NATION here on 2009-11-24
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I thought that Beasts of No Nation was a pretty good book. It wasn't one of the best books we've read so far, but I think it was incredibly profound and very powerful with its descriptions and narration. I think my favorite part of the book was probably the way it was written.
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the use of mosquitoes in this scene was very interesting, because as the scene progresses toward the climax, Agu beating the soldier to death, the mosquitoes get closer and closer until their buzz is deafening.
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econd, I thought it was interesting how it seems that Agu doesn’t feel any real painful emotions while he is killing the soldier.
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One of the scary parts of this novel is how Agu has lost all his childhood innocence and he has become a tool of war.
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Finally, the last thing that I thought was interesting was the dehumanization and use of animal similes.
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When he is used for sex by the Commandant, he says that the Commandant enters him like a goat enters another goat. In Agu’s mind, the war has turned them into animals.
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Nightsong: City, by Dennis Brutus (page 377)
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"Beasts of No Nation" isn’t my favorite book ever. But for learning purposes, I think it does a good job of revealing the day to day life and thoughts of Africa’s many child soldiers.
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For Agu, everything is about survival of the fittest.
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The most poignant part of this novel is the fact that Agu’s innocence is robbed without his consent.
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Agu is battling to hold on to his past. In some ways, Strika is not only Agu’s friend, but having been with the Commandant for a longer time, Strika is also a symbol of what will become of Agu if he continues living on this way.
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I actually think that, despite its simplicity, it’s what made this novel so hard to read.
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I think the randomness of Agu’s thought process is presented very well in the language. It is choppy, but I think that’s how children think: their thoughts just move forward very quickly. Also I found that this present perfect tense represented Agu’s thrust into adulthood.
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hile I was reading this, I was just picturing a young child learning a language.
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As an ‘add-on’ to this concept of beasts, I would like to look at Agu and his development into an adult as the war progresses.
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The concept of having a romanticized idea of war before being a part of it really reminded me of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
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The dancing, singing, praying, and storytelling take Agu back to the days when he was protected by his family, and not by these people he is being forced to believe are his friends.
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When I was reading some of the African poetry in our anthology, a few of Leopold Sedar Senghor’s poems really stood out to me, particularly because they reminded me of Beasts of No Nation.
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n fact, many of Senghor's poems seem to be dealing with ancestors, including Totem (326). I would also be interested in taking a look at Okot P’Bitek’s poem, The Woman With Whom I Share My Husband. The title is rather intriguing, but the poem itself also offers some interesting language. P’Bitek compares the woman with many “animals” including: a hyena, owl, witch, and ghost. The conflict between the two women and the husband is also worth exploring.
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I realize it was Iweala's duty to make sure his novel was so compellingly horrific. That is the only way for authors to get their point across to their readers. So, I got over the grossness and was able to find some pretty unbelievable motifs and touching scenes in the novel.
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Another main symbol I found in Beasts of No Nation is the gun. At first the gun is seems like a children’s toy: “These gun are standing on wheel even bigger than my whole body and it is making me to want to go and touch them” (103)
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his poem actually spoke to me well enough to be able to relate it to one of the greatest movies of all time: The Shawshank Redemption.
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bboard.pingry.org • View topic - Post bboard work on Chekhov here on 2009-11-24
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I'm not sure how old Gayev is- i would guess somewhere in the 20's or 30's but I really have not idea.
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I really admire The Cherry Orchard as a play and I think it is very profound. The one thing that I identified with Chekhov before I read The Cherry Orchard was "Chekhov's Gun," his rule for creating a well-designed plot.
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liked the conversation about pride that began on page 29. I thought that it paralleled a few of Tolstoy's philosophies about peasants in Russia. Trofimov covers it all when he says "Intellectuals look for no truths, do nothing, don't know how to work... while treating their servants with contempt, and peasants like animals... Our fine talk serves to divert and blind us... I don't trust serious conversation" (29-30). Russians claim to be intellectuals, and to be sophisticated and educated, while they treat fellow human beings (no matter what their status) as inferiors, and therefore negate all of their serious conversation. I found this ironic coming from Trofimov though, because as a student, isn't he considered an intellectual? He has also "been thrown out of the university twice" (37).
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by mzubrow on Thu Nov 19, 2009 10:22 am
Overall, I feel that Chekov's play The Cherry Orchard blends elements of the tragedy and comedy. Although the subject of the play—the Ranevskaya's loss of their ancestral home—is ostensibly a tragic one, I found it noteworthy that Chekhov the play "A Comedy," and in so doing, presented his characters in a comic light; their speech and actions are often absurd and most are ineffectual.
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In particular, I believe it is important to recognize that the play takes place during a crossroads in the course of Russian history--a point at which large-scale industrialization occurring in Chekhov's word provided, in his mind, a proletarian solution to Russia's inequity caused by what scholars refer to as "the evolutionist-technological vision of his earlier literature"
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From reading this play and looking at the comments of some of my peers, I have several questions about Chekhov's work. First, does Chekhov foreshadow what changes
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The main difference that I found while reading Cherry Orchard than most other stories that we have read so far this year is that the story is mostly driven forward by the characters’ such diverse characteristics that clash so much that they actually end up meshing, strange as it sounds. There is the central plot of the
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I found the book extremely hard to read, but I think it will be much easier to understand once we act it out. I am hesistant to comment further at this point because I'm not confident in my understanding of the story.
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bboard.pingry.org • View topic - Post questions & comments on BEASTS OF NO NATION here on 2009-11-23
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by kmarcisc on Tue Nov 17, 2009 5:51 pm
11/17/09 Questions:
1. The novel begins with the Agu depicted as being in a room. He seems like he is hiding, because there "is light all around me coming into the dark through a hole in the roof" and his body is "crunched up like one small mouse in the corner" (1). Agu then thinks that his "father is coming to bring medicine", but is not surprised when a stranger walks in and begins to beat him (2). The next time Agu describes his location, he says he "can see the bottom of truck parking just little bit away from me" (3), from this I deduct that he's is laying on the side of the road. How did he get from the house to the roadside? Who brought him there? Later on page 10, Agu tells the Commandant that he got where he was because his "father is telling me to run...I am just hiding in the bush and running this way and that way not knowing anything" (10). Was Agu hiding from them in his 'shack' before they captured him? Why would he lie to the Commandant? What is he hiding?
2. Agu describes the 'soldiers' in the beginning of the novel as looking a bit disheveled. He says, "around all the truck, just looking like ghost, are soldier. Some is wearing camouflage, other is wearing T-shirt and jean, but it is not mattering because all of the clothe is tearing and having big hole. Some of them is wearing real boot and the rest is wearing slipper. Some of them is standing at attention with their leg so straight that it is looking like they do not have knee. Some of them is going to toilet against the truck and other is going to toilet into the grasses" (4). Clearly, the army seems very unofficial. Later we learn that Agu too becomes a soldier, he says, "Just like that. I am a soldier" (11). He need not pass any test, all he has to say is that he is not spy. What kind of army is this, and why is entrance into the army so easy? Are all the soldier victim of the same torture Agu was put through, is that why all there clothes are torn?
3. Who is the commandant? Who is his enemy? What is the war over?
11/22/09 Comments on Beasts of No Nation
I was not particularly fond of Beasts of No Nation, but at the same time I didn't dislike the either.
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Iweala had Agu tell his story in present progressive tense, partly to reflect Nigerian Pidgin English, according to freelibrary.com. Agu's occasional switches to past tense are striking.
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As I'm writing this Bboard post, I am actually finding myself at a loss for words.
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Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation is one of my favorite books in this course.
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I did not particularly like Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation. I eventually became accustomed to the language, but for a while I struggled with it.
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bboard.pingry.org • View topic - Post questions & comments on BEASTS OF NO NATION here on 2009-11-23
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I was not particularly fond of Beasts of No Nation, but at the same time I didn't dislike the either. Overall, I would say the novel was a good read with a compelling but disturbing message. The novel was very straight forward, which I both enjoyed and disliked.
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This is probably my favorite book that we've read in class so far. I found it so engrossing (and easy to read) that I finished it in one day. Unlike some of the other students, I found the prose simple, easy to read, and not distracting at all. What's more, I think the simple prose added to the voice of a child. Also, I really like the idea of viewing such a horrible crime, child soldiery in Africa, directly through a child's lens. In my opinion, this point of view is more interesting than perhaps an article by Kristof on the same subject-though I love his work-as well as more realistic, because it is the children who experience this problem in the first place.
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Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation is one of my favorite books in this course. While it was a little difficult to read at first – with the seemingly incomprehensible language – I ended up thoroughly enjoying the book. In my opinion, it was probably the easiest book to read in this course - as it was so engaging and generally straightforward. Additionally, by reading Agu’s moving journey from boyhood to manhood, I learned a great deal about the horrifying reality – or at least I believe that it is the reality – of child soldiers in Africa
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I did not particularly like Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation. I eventually became accustomed to the language, but for a while I struggled with it. Even though the language was very powerful and I see why the author used it, I had a tough time reading it. I think the topic of the novel is very important to know about but at the same time it is very disturbing, more so than the other novels we have read so far this year. Some parts of the novel were so sickening that I had to stop reading.
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In The Poetry of Our World, a poem that was very powerful was “Saturday in the Sand-Slums” by the Angolan poet, Antonio Agostinho Neto. The word “anxiety” was repetitive it seems that there is always a fear of something bad happening: everything from “anxiety/ in the uniformed man” to “anxiety/ in the cinema loudspeakers” (348).
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I find the point of view of the book what makes it most interesting to me, because the other books we have read have been from adult perspectives. I am interested to see how Agu develops throughout the book, and how the change in narrator will affect our opinions.
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like Rainie said I had to put it down some times because of the horrible and gruesome scenes and descriptions.
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I like the way Iweala makes sure that you can never forget that the book is being narrated by a child, besides the broken sentences and blunt speech he has passages dispersed throughout the book that remind me of something my little sisters would have said.
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The last thing I wanted to talk about was how our perception of the Commandant changes throughout the novel.
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When we first read about the Commandant abusing and raping Agu, is when Agu's view (and mine too) turned around 180 degrees. He has changed from the "rescuer" to the pedophile and a horrible man who I can't even bear to read about. What Katie also said, which I hadn't thought of that before, was how the Commandant does not survive because he has no friends. After reading her post I do agree, and saw this as a fit end for the Commandant and his treachery.
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Beasts of No Nation was probably one of my favorite books so far this semester.
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The writing style is simply genius;
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The flashback chapters were often mixed in between the story of Agu as a child soldier. I personally liked how that was set up because of how jarring it is.
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Agu's narration is scarily emotionless at times.
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ts simply scary how he was forced to turn out. I found this interesting because I had just written a paper for Psychology about how children, depending on their environment, can grow up with little regard to human life and kill without any qualms.
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n the beginning of the novel, I was very worried that I wouldn't like it. The language was hard to read and it was difficult, in the first chapter, to figure out where Iweala was taking his novel. However, once I started to get further into the text, I started to enjoy it more and the language and plot became easier to figure out and understand. Overall, I really liked this novel.
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PAL: American Authors -Alphabetical List on 2009-11-19
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PAL:
Perspectives in American Literature
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bboard.pingry.org * View topic - Post comments on Tolstoy and his stories here on 2009-11-17
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There was one passage from the story that I would like to talk about in class because I was not exactly sure how to interpret it. This passage is from page 35, where the narrator talks about when Simon (a serf) came "to beg some boards and to make a coffin for his daughter, and a rouble to pay the priest for the funeral." The narrator runs upstairs, gets out all of her money, and then walks to Simon's hut and places the money on his sill. I thought that this passage said a lot about the narrator, but I was not actually sure what to make of it. Why did the narrator do this? Did it have something to do with Sergey or was it just something that she decided to do?
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bboard.pingry.org • View topic - Post questions & comments on WAITING FOR BARBARIANS here on 2009-11-16
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I think the biggest theme in the novel is “barbarianism vs. civilization.”
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However, I think a more complex issue is whether or not the Magistrate is one, an enemy of the empire or two, a cog in the Empire.
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In my opinion, the Magistrate never chose to turn his back against the empire—the empire simply put him in that position. And that new feeling of justice and relief that his conscious is suddenly “clear” is so naïve, because in reality, there is no way that he can be a defender of the natives until he truly understands what they have experienced/ how they have been treated. By the time he really does experience what they went through, he becomes completely powerless, degraded to the point where he doesn’t even want to be a martyr anymore—he just wants to “live outside history” and perhaps eat a good meal (150).
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However, does the Magistrate really want to see reality and the brutality of his people? Or is he in denial of the very empire to which he belongs? Now that I’ve finished the book, I do think that the Magistrate is a very conflicted man.
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As Will mentioned, the Magistrate and Donald Woods from Cry Freedom are very similar characters, both trying to change circumstances that are largely out of their control. In the beginning when the Magistrate voices his concerns to the government, their "suspicion is no doubt confirmed: that [he] is unsound as well as old-fashioned" (52), and it is only later on that he realizes that he must take action to bring about change.
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he magistrate could not be more right; it is petty differences like those mentioned that tear people apart, just like in the 1960s when the color of people's skins tore our country apart, and in the Holocaust when different religions and colored eyes and hair led to the deaths of millions. I completely agree with Jenn's comments that all of this is rooted out of each societies' desire, or rather need, for an enemy.
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One of Tanvi's questions that I too expanded upon asked about Colonel Joll's motivations for killing and torturing the "barbarians". She asked whether or not this was all simply a defensive mechanism, and I would definitely answer yes to this. Joll, and the Empire's government at large, is protecting himself from having to take the blame. The barbarians, whom he claims are a danger to the Empire, are merely his scapegoats. The government instills fear in the people that these barbarians are truly dangerous, and from this fear comes hatred and disgust.
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he relationship between the magistrate and the barbarian girl symbolizes how they can never truly understand one another. The magistrate sympathizes with her plight, but he can never fully comprehend what she has gone through, for "what does [he] know of barbarian upbringings?" (56). Thus, they can never truly love each other and the barbarian girl ultimately desires to return to her people and never wants "to go back to that [town]" (71).
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I think Cry Freedom helped to put a lot into perspective for me. The two most powerful scenes for me came at the end. The first, as I'm sure most of my classmates will agree with me on, was the scene where the children protesting for better schools were brutally shot to attacked. The second was just before the credits rolled and there was a list of the causes of death of anti-apartheid protesters while in the custody of the government. Seeing the names of all those courageous people who fought for rights and change, and then seeing the blatantly false causes of deaths named such as self-strangulation, falling down flights of stairs, hunger strikes, etc, was hard to look at.
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In my comments I described how although we can empathize, we can never truly appreciate and understand something we have never experienced.
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What side is the magistrate really on and what side is really the barbarians?
I tend to believe that the magistrate is more on the side of the barbarians than the Empire, but as for who the real barbarians are, I'm not sure.
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I think the entire point of Waiting for the Barbarians is that we don’t know.
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By blurring the line between the civilized and uncivilized, he leaves us instead with the notion that everyone is the same underneath.
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I think Neha's comments really illustrate the transformation of the magistrate beautifully. She shows the progression of his feelings through each stage of the novel. I agree that he starts of generally indifferent, but like the characters in Cry Freedom, once he sees first hand how the empire operates, he has trouble standing by idly.
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I find it interesting that he groups himself in "us" category, meaning the people from the mother country. But he believes that the barbarians deserve to rise up against "his" people. He knows there are lessons to be learned from them and that they are not as primitive and barbaric as the empire believes them to be.
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he magistrate is an incredibly insightful narrator and a brilliant character. I think that he and Donald Woods have a lot in common. They are both outsiders and do not belong to the groups that they stand up for
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At first I was really confused as to how Waiting for the Barbarians had anything to do with the apartheid in South Africa. However, after reading a few book reviews and articles on the apartheid I’m finally beginning to see the bigger picture.
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Like most people, Steve Biko was my favorite character. Even so, I think Donald Woods' character has the most interesting story and transformation.
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Steve's logic is just so infallible that Donald can't stay stuck in his old, ignorant ways. It is not long before Donald converts his entire newspaper staff and family with him. Once they know the true goals of the black people and the cruelty and corruption of the politicians and law enforcers, every person who is exposed to the truth in the film joins Steve's side.
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At this point, it hit me that the magistrate is not as innocent as he may seem. He too has moral faults. From an objective point of view the magistrate really was in the wrong. He did allow "irregularities", he "contracted a liaison with a streetwoman" that had "a demoralizing effect on the prestige of imperial administration", his decisions "were characterized by arbitrariness", and was "besotted with" a barbarian girl (83). When put this way, it is difficult to decipher whether or not the reader is intended to view him in a negative or positive light.
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I'd like to address some of my questions that I posted when I first started this novel. I wondered why the magistrate felt so trapped when form my point of view, he was in a very nice situation.
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the majority of the book moved very quickly and drew me in. While it is a short book, it is so incredibly deep that I wish that we could spend an entire semester figuring out the deeper meaning.
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an interesting theme in this book was that of civilization vs. barbarianism
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The first reason for why he feels trapped is because of "his alliance with the Empire" (78).
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The barbarian girl is like an ancient city he's excavating, he wants to know why the city was abandoned or destroyed. In short, the magistrate is not "free" so to speak because he feels surrounded by mysteries that he feels powerless to uncover.
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In the above-mentioned actions of the Empire, it is difficult to say that those people are humane and civilized. They enjoy the suffering of others they don't know, and treat other human beings worse than they would treat animals. They treat them like bugs under their feet. So if the people of the Empire aren't civilized, who is? How can you say who is civilized and who's not? What differentiates civilized people and barbarians? These are questions that this book really makes us wonder about.
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What this book has made me realize is that how civilized someone is isn't a one-dimensional quality. What i mean is that there is more than one dimension to being civilized.
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A child who appears smaller than he or she actually is could be a symbol for weakness and defenselessness. The cold is making the children small and defenseless, so the cold and snow could very possibly be a symbol for the Empire that makes the barbarians recede back into the mountains.
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ne passage in the book discussed how the nomads would probably outlast the Empire in that region anyway, that the Empire was an insignificant passing event in the grand scheme of life for the nomads. So perhaps the nomads are greater than the Empire, even though they lack the same kind of "advanced society" that the Empire has.
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When the old man is interrogated in the granary in the beginning and when the magistrate is interrogated by Colonel Joll, it is clear that the goal of interrogations is not to get the truth but to get what the interrogator wants to hear. They will probe and probe until they get what they want, whether it is true or not is irrelevant to them.
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First, the magistrate is holding out a coin in the dream, which directly relates to when he gives the barbarian girl a coin a little bit earlier in the story.
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Second, the barbarian girl is described as being "muffled in a coat too large for her," just like the children in his dreams who are "muffled." Although the magistrate's dream of the hooded girl began before he actually met the barbarian girl, I think that he transformed the dream around the barbarian girl. The dream itself simply symbolizes his need to understand things. the hooded girl is the aspect he doesn't understand, so when the barbarian girl enters his life, the hooded girl becomes the barbarian girl.
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In these few moments that the magistrate stopped to think, the waterbuck disappeared into the tall reeds. When I read this scene, I was struck by how an activity that was commonplace for the magistrate, became something he could not do. He could not pull the trigger and kill the waterbuck. The only explanation I can think of for this is the barbarian girl.
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I'm not exactly sure how the waterbuck relates to the barbarian girl, but I am almost a hundred percent sure, that the barbarian girl has something to do with the magistrates inability to pull the trigger.
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I would like to begin by saying that I really enjoyed reading this novel. It reminded me of White Teeth in that I felt I had to read it slowly and try to absorb everything Coetzee was saying as I was reading. It was much more difficult than Swallows of Kabul, but I would say that the 'intense' language made the novel worthwhile. I felt I had to search for the meaning behind the words, and I liked the experience. What I liked most about Waiting for the Barbarians is not only its language and story line, but also its themes which manage to be both broad and narrow.
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The movie as a whole, though, I thought was really beneficial to understanding what we were reading about. I thought it fit in nicely with the material we were reading and boosted our knowledge of the severity of the situation.
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Coetzee’s motif of sunglasses and light.
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the scene in which the Magistrate sees the Colonel without his glasses is the scene that made things clearer (no pun intended) and consequently, is my favorite in the novel.
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This novel is undoubtedly one of the most powerful that I have ever read. The imagery and the symbolism were just amazing, and I found myself reacting to the scenes in ways that I have never reacted to novels before.
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The girl knows where he goes and naturally feels unwanted, and rightly so. The magistrate often suffered “fits of resentment against his bondage to the ritual of oiling and rubbing” (41).
And I think this ties back to, as Jenn notes, the side the magistrate is truly on. I agree with Jenn when she says that the Empire put him in his position of defending the barbarians. He never truly decides to choose one side over the other.
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The magistrate is caught in the middle. On the one hand, he is horrified by the treatment of the barbarians. But, on the other, he believes it is “easier to lay [one’s] head on a block than to defend the cause of justice for the barbarians” (108). And in addition to that, he can’t truly fight for them because he doesn’t understand them! In my opinion, what he wants most is his life of “placid concupiscence” (9) back.
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I want to talk about a scene that was particularly powerful for me: the scene on pages 102-110 in which soldiers bring barbarians to town and publicly humiliate and torture them.
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I really enjoyed this movie, and like many others who’ve posted, I learned a lot about the apartheid.
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This is one of the most surreal books I have ever read, and I just love it. I find that in most books, if there is a dream sequence, there will only be one, and the book will have its main focus on that one dream, but what I love about Waiting for Barbarians is how there are so many dreams, and each one of them is different. It’s like there is a whole other story going on within the Magistrate’s mind, which helps reveal more about the story taking place in the real world.
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Overall this was definitely a great book, and something that has changed how I think about future literature to read, and how society works in general.
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This book has so many different levels and so much going on that I have to agree with Jenn when I say I really am not quite sure where to start.
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I agree with Aaron's thoughts on this novel as well. I also thought that the book was very surreal because of all of the dream sequences. Aaron mentions that the dreams act as another story going on in the magistrate's head. It was a new experience reading a novel with dreams taking on such a prominent role.
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The bread shows that she can give to the magistrate and help him. He can depend on her. It would be like if Dr. Dineen realized that she needs her students just as much as her students need her. This may not be the case just yet, but we're working on it.
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As I was reading, I found one key dilemma that is at the heart of the novel: action vs. non-action.
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The narrator seems to be very interested in youth itself and the youth in his village.
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bboard.pingry.org • View topic - Post comments on Tolstoy and his stories here on 2009-11-16
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I still think Tolstoy meant to give Peter the possibility of being saved from his frivolous life in society
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I thought the use of the word sacrifice in Death of Ivan Ilych was also interesting to relate back to the use of sacrifice in Family Happiness
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Tolstoy’s other use of sacrifice in Family Happiness is much more consequential and also relates to the Ivan Ilych’s family life.
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I think it would be interesting to again talk about religion
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I think it would be also interesting to discuss the idea of death as a process that can be overcome—how Ivan must struggle to get in the dark bag and finally proclaims “Death is finished!” (152).
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why is there so much French?
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The story also seems to parallel Sonya and Tolstoy's early relationship (if someone could refresh my memory of when exactly Family Happiness was written it would be much appreciated).
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I was also intrigued to here that Tolstoy disliked Turgenev, who is one of my favorite Russian authors (admittedly, I am familiar with only a few). Turgenev's First Love does indeed paint a different picture of Russia, and provides the world with a heroine much different from Anna Karenina or Masha. I would be very interested in learning about Tolstoy's opinions on Dostoevsky, another Russian master that shares in enriching Russian authors' monopoly on gloom and existentialism (I mean Dostoevsky practically invented existentialism). Another reference I found very intriguing was Tolstoy's declaration that he was better than Pushkin.
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Family Happiness does indeed reflect a young unmarried Tolstoy, but is still very similar to Anna Karenina.
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Why is Sergey not married and how old is he?
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Perhaps Tolstoy was brilliant enough that he was able to predict how is own life was going to turn out, but even if that was not the case he still gives a very detailed analysis of Marya's thoughts during her whole experience with marriage. I find his ability to understand people and accurately display their thoughts to be highly impressive and I wonder how he was able to do this.
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have just gathered that Ivan is an impressively boring person with a severe neoclassicist attitude about the world.
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bboard.pingry.org • View topic - Post questions & comments on WAITING FOR BARBARIANS here on 2009-11-13
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must admit, sometimes I found this novel difficult to follow. The train-of-thought style Coetzee used threw me off at certain parts of the novel when the narrator would skip around between his thoughts, his actions, and the actions of those around him. However, I did enjoy this novel overall. It was very powerful, the way it described the feelings of the narrator and his dilemma over the unfathomable doings of the Third Bureau.
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In the end, though, the narrator was able to stand up for the Barbarians against the oppressors and thus deal with the dilemma he is so often faced with.
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I also found an interesting motif within the novel. The narrator seems to be very interested in youth itself and the youth in his village.
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There is one theme within the text that is consistently mentioned. That is the theme of sight.
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I enjoyed the content of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, but it was difficult for me to read. It took me many sittings and I had to take a break pretty much after every twenty pages. However difficult it was to read this book, I drew many conclusions from it and now can relate it to many real conflicts.
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Like the Nazis who were just following orders, the soldiers in the novel just do what they are told and think nothing of what they are doing because that is just how it is. The magistrate, on the other hand, has “not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times” and could easily just ignore the interrogations (8). However, he knows that “from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering” (21). When he is more aware of what is going on, he wishes that “the barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them” (51).
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The transformation inside of the magistrate reminded me of Sartre because he starts to disallow others to affect his thoughts, even though he is surrounded by people who do not agree with him.
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Another controversial topic in the novel is torture. Torture, it seems, has always been used during wartime, and the expert, Colonel Joll, swears by it. “In his quest for truth he is tireless” and he does not stop until he gets the answer he wants (22).
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I also think that the movie focused too much on the editor’s family and their trials and tribulations which were minute compared to those of the black South Africans. I found many connections to Waiting for the Barbarians and the editor in a way is like the magistrate because he starts seeing what is actually going on and that even though he is in the majority, it does not make it right.
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As I read Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee, I was constantly highlighting, writing in the margins, and tabbing interesting statements. I was fascinated by the relationship between the magistrate and the barbarian girl, the symbols of eyes and seeing, and the magistrates continuous confusion of emotions. Although I could talk about almost every line in this novel, I will try to focus my comments on the previously stated topics.
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I also think that the type of eyes or seeing of each character represent that persons subconscious.
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I also think that Coetzee uses a double meaning for seeing. When characters see things, they physically look at it and also interpret the truth of what they see.
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Definitely the most confusing part of the novel so far is the Magistrate as a character. His interactions with others and his thoughts depicted by Coetzee constantly cause me to flip back and forth on my opinion of him as a human being. At first I respect him and think he’s a good guy; As Kara said in her post, “Instead of turning a blind eye, he takes in the barbarian girl. Instead of passing her on the street, he takes her in.”
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Despite my confusions, today’s class discussion helped me clear up some of the cloudiness in my view of the Magistrate, especially from the perspective of his dreams.
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His second dream shows his dealings with the new presence of the barbarian girl in his life; to me, the relationship between the two of them is the most confusing part of the novel.
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A returning level of normalcy surrounds his third dream as Colonel Joll has left on his expedition. The Magistrate has realized that the man who died was his barbarian girl’s father and he spends much of his time interviewing his men, trying to figure out how they could have let this happen.
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The coin as an act of kindness may be foreshadowing into the paternal care the Magistrate provides for the barbarian girl. The Magistrate’s dreams have certainly helped clear up a lot of my confusion regarding him as a character and his motives for his actions.
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Discovery and deciphering are really what the Magistrate is all about. His digging through the dunes and investigating the strange symbols and language he finds shows his desire to understand even a world that ceases to exist where he lives. Even his ridiculously confusing relationship with the barbarian girl is made less confusing when looking at it from a sort of explorer’s perspective.
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His rhythmic rubbing is a hobby for him, not for her, deciphering her past.
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To be honest, for the first large part of the movie, I had a really hard time understanding the accents of the characters, so it was really hard for me to follow.
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I've enjoyed Coetzee's Waiting For Barbarians overall. It's been interesting watching the corruption unfold from the perspective of someone who was in a position of authority in government already. This perspective is actually what captured me most about the book in the beginning after finding out the narrator was a magistrate - especially after watching Cry Freedom in which the main characters were not government officials.
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I just wish the movie had emphasized how big the socio-economic gap between Whites and Blacks in South Africa was and still is today. Although Biko's death was shown, the movie could have done more to show just how impoverished the Black people of South Africa were as far as living conditions.
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