I was really excited this semester to be in a class with a focus on learning about a text in unconventional ways. A course where we get to tweet in class, and the teacher is totally fine with it? Sign me up! I realized pretty quickly that the projects we were assigned were, in fact, […]
For the final reflection for this course we were asked to talk about a number of things regarding the projects we took on, namely if we liked them, how well they did or didn’t work, and something we learned because of an insight brought on by the projects. I’m going to start by saying that, […]
Our group was fortunate in the line up of projects with book subjects. It’s actually a lot more difficult to pinpoint projects that did not lend themselves to highlighting and analyzing thematic aspects of their literary counterparts. Specifically, I’d like to explore how the following projects worked and did not: House of Leaves as a […]
Chances are, if you read Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods, you found it easy to conclude that John Wade suffers from at least some amount of PTSD. In fact, the entirety of Chapter 16 is seemingly devoted solely to making a case that John Wade is a victim of PTSD. But our […]
In the Lake of the Woods is experimental and similar to House of Leaves. Framing Style Tim O’Brien has a unique set up to the story as a whole. The novel jumps from the present, to flashbacks for John, for Kathy, to interviews, and back to present. For me, this is what stands out the […]
Never before in a book have I been so struck by references to smell. The word and related terms and actions appear in the book at least 40 times. This frequency is strange for a sense that we use so comparatively little in our everyday lives. So why is it so prevalent in In the […]
I’m pretty sure you can’t talk about Vietnam without a certain level of horror, but what really gets me in In the Lake of the Woods is how frequently it references dead kids and abortion. Now, regardless of where you stand on the issue, abortion is not a happy or normal subject. By default, fetuses […]
Choose your empathy shoes: Chapter 5: Hypothesis 1: Kathy ran away with a secret lover in an attempt at a passive, non-confrontational escape. Chapter 9: Hypothesis 2: Kathy panicked when she saw John boiling the houseplants and ran away. “Maybe she lost her way. Maybe she’s still out there.” Chapter 14: Hypothesis 3: “The […]
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history. ~Hannah Arendt Black and White Picture a war hero. Starched pressed suit pasted with badges to honor his courage, his righteousness, his virtue. What if you found out he had a past. A foggy past of shadowed images crawling about a […]
Although most readers are assuming John killed Kathy, there is enough support to show he might not have. The two pieces of evidence that stand above the rest are that John is literally obsessed with her and also her history of already cheating, so maybe she left for another man again. First of all, Kathy […]
“You feel this sizzle happening inside you; that’s where evil comes from. It comes from not just badness or not just from fear. It comes from a combination of these things, boiling inside you and stewing together.” ~Tim O’Brien, PBS Special Purpose At first it seemed like a tropical vacation for the men of […]
At the end of chapter 20 in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods, it is very clear that not all of John Wade’s behaviors are entirely typical even before he goes away to Vietnam. The most obviously problematic thing Wade continuously does both before and after their marriage is stalking Kathy. The fact […]
Hostile Environments as a Reflection of Nature and Nurture Within the first four pages of In the Lake of the Woods, there is a distinctive sense of “wilderness.” On the first page of the text, in the first chapter, “How Unhappy They Were,” I was struck by how many references to nature appeared. […]