When the Bad Guy Is Really the Good Guy

It's the end of the nine weeks.  We've all made adjustments (hopefully) in terms of using technology and dealing with a new teacher's (or student's) idiosyncrasies (look it up - great word).  Maybe you've adjusted to the fact that I like parentheses (for random asides) and ellipses when I want to suggest something more but let you figure it out - like this - can you guess what other weird punctuation mark I like....? See, that means I hoped you would notice.  OK, enough.  I do mean to blog about a book, but I also wanted to introduce some not-so-formal writing tricks that you can use sparingly in your writing.  The blog, while graded, is NOT as formal as your AP essays, so play around a little.

I am pursuing my goal in reverse this week; instead of looking for nonfiction to pair with popular fiction, I grabbed some fiction that pairs with our nonfiction.  The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is, as you know, about race, so I chose to read some classic fiction that deals with issues of race that still existed long after slavery ended.  As I've read, I've found that the novel also plunges into issues related to poverty and self-worth, but I've already talked about that a bit in class. I meant to post about The Bluest Eye this week, and I will post about it eventually, but I'm not ready to distill all the thoughts I have.  For now, I'll throw this out there - have you ever read a book that makes you loathe a specific character and then turns around and gives you a back story that makes you understand that character's perspective, makes you feel that character's pain, and suddenly makes you feel sorry for the bad guy?  That's where I am in The Bluest Eye. To lighten the mood during exam week, I'm going to post about my "for fun" book instead.

                    

In American Gods, a fantasy/adult-Percy-Jackson-novel, we meet another theoretically bad guy who has a more decent side.  Neil Gaiman introduces us to his main character, an imposing guy named Shadow who is getting released from jail after serving three years for assault.  Seems like he should be the bad buy, but turns out that he is a misled, confused guy who means well and ends up being our wayward hero.  In a nutshell, his wife gets killed in a car accident the day before he's released, his best friend dies with her (they were having an affair), and he gets hired by a mysterious stranger to be his guard or errand boy or something - the job description is never well-defined.  Turns out that the stranger is a god from olden times who is looking to restore the role of gods who came to America with the many immigrants who traveled to the country, gods who eventually lost their power.  As the main god character (don't want to give away his identity...) says, "there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon"(137-138) These gods, these shallow, superficial gods, have apparently earned the loyalty of Americans and replaced their old, traditional gods. The book raises interesting questions about what we "worship" and about whether humans should ever worship anything, especially when we realize that these gods controlling our hero seem to have their own questionable agendas and behaviors. What I appreciate most is that Gaiman covers familiar territory, the gee-Americans-are-shallow rant, while also adding his own clever spin by bringing in gods of the past in the form of modern characters lost in America, characters who can't quite find their way in a country that doesn't seem to have core values anymore, characters who feel rejected by the very groups that once revered them.  At the same time, these characters are funny and bizarre, and poor Shadow gets caught in hallucinatory scenes that may be dreams or may be his new disturbing reality. Part of me wonders if Shadow may himself be a god, a dark-force god, because really, what kind of name is Shadow? Guess I'll find out...