Katya's Biweekly Reflections

       For this blog post, I want to explore the concept of love and whether Brett and Jake love each other. Although dictionary.com describes love as “ a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another perso n”, I disagree slightly. In my opinion, love is a relationship where both parties have an affection for each other and choose to cultivate their relationship. There is a difference between liking someone and loving someone, and for me, love is distinguished by the two (or more) parties actively taking the time to listen to each other and adapting. Obviously, people don’t have to change themselves completely, and a partner asking for that can actually be a pretty big red flag. However, disagreements pop up since no relationship is ever perfect, and the couple should be willing to work through that and set clear expectations for each other. That way, both parties are benefiting from the relationship.      I’m not naïve enough to believe that thi...

For this extra blog post, I would like the analyze the line “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” and how it pertains to the three timelines shown in the The Hours . During class, we discussed this line as it pertains to the book, and as I read the book, I came to the conclusion that for Mrs. Dalloway, this act represents one of the few things she can do as an individual. While in society her role is that of Mrs. Richard Dalloway, when she is planning her party, she adopts the role of a hostess and can act more independently of her husband. In the film, this represents something different.   For Virginia Woolf, this line seems to represent a kind of defiance. In the moments before she starts writing Mrs. Dalloway her husband was telling her to eat because the doctors recommended it. He even said that he could make her eat by force if necessary. As soon as he said that, Virginia said “Leonard, I believe I may have a first sentence”. Allowing her main he...

  Like the characters in Mrs. Dalloway, all the people in The Sun Also Rises have been affected by World War I, and they all deal with it in different ways. In this blog post, I would like to explore how the war affected the male characters, mainly Jake, the count, and Robert.   Firstly, we can look at Jake, the narrator and the character we get to know the most. By common sense, we should have gotten to know him quite well since we’re inside his head all the time, but it feels like we know him only at the surface level. Whenever he is at a party, he internally comments on what other people do and say, and when he talks to people, he gives only one-word answers. He never describes his feelings, and it seems like he’s more of an onlooker for most events rather than an active participant. This may largely be due to his injury, which our class decided caused him to be unable to have sex. Although this injury is not visible, it seems to cause him to lose confidence, ...