African-American Literature

During class discussions, one of the debatable topics we came across was who we felt more sympathy towards: Rochester or Antoinette? Like everyone else, I was on Antoinette's side in the beginning of the novel because we were hearing her side of the story and experiencing things with her. In the bathing pool scene with Tia and Antoinette, while I did think that Antoinette was being ignorant about the social cultural issues at hand, I also felt bad for her for not knowing right from wrong because her mother never distinguished them for her. I felt that Annette was a relatively absent mother who is partly to blame for the way Antoinette turned out. However, Annette also dealt with her fair share of struggles, especially after losing Pierre to a fire that is solely her husband's fault. Because of this, Annette's spiral into "madness" was justifiable as any mother who loses a son would go crazy. Seeing that Antoinette's mother-figure was Christophine, I had sympa...

In yesterday's panel presentation, we talked about how Meursault could be exhibiting characteristics of Alexithymia (a personality disorder characterized by a lack of social attachment and emotional awareness) and how his act of murdering the Arab was really him enacting his revenge on his absent father. Much of the author's argument is that Meursault's cause of Alexithymia stems from a childhood trauma of having an absent father, but I think it's hard for the readers to connect with this rationale since we aren't given any information about how Meursault feels about not having a father or what Meursault's relationship with his father was like. While I do agree with the plausibility that Alexithymia could have caused his actions on the beach, I think it's more probable that it's due to him not having a strong, constant relationship with his mother. Even though his mother was present for a major part of his life, they had a very distant relationship, whic...