a waffle analysis

What I love about "The Story of an Hour" is how succinct it is but also how vivid it is. In this short story, Chopin covers a snapshot of Louise's life — one hour that changed her life both literally and emotionally. As a connection to the epiphanic approach in writing, this story's plot rises with the husband's death, reaches the epiphany when Louise realizes she's now free, and falls when she sees her husband in person and dies. Considering the reader-response perspective, Louise's death has many subsequent interpretations. Some may feel sympathetic for Louise, but others may feel sympathetic for Louise's husband, thinking that he did nothing wrong all this time yet comes home to witness his wife dead.  Interpretations are heavily dependent on our mindset, values, and experiences. What we are skilled in, from philosophy to science, also impacts our views. Coming back to the concise yet vivid scenes in "The Story of an Hour," I think this me...

Choices. We make them every day, but too often are they heart over head and centered around our own wishes. Each choice has its own implications, but those made with blind optimism against reality can yield grave consequences like Oedipus’ self-harm and saddening truths like Nea’s realization of Sourdi’s decision. As stated in Poetics , tragic figures are kings whose fate elicits “ feelings of pity and fear in the audience. ” Exploring the rationale behind the suffering, Aristotle wonders if we sympathize because we “ suffer a similar hamartia, ” fearing for our own lives. In a sense, that makes us tragic figures. Though we are not kings, Greek tragedies expose the potentialities of our blind self . Reading Oedipus not only provokes pity—as Oedipus realizes his life had been a lie—but it also compels the audience to question their own life. While we might not have a prophecy behind us, there are most certainly things we don’t know about ourselves, things hidden and varying in severi...

 "'I was trying to protect you,' I said through my tears. ''I was trying to save you!'" Nea's actions are often characterized as impulsive and immature. However, digging deep, the main source of her actions come from love. As she was an immigrant of a single-parent household with five children in a restaurant, her life wasn't easy. It certainly does not improve when her sister leaves her, "settling down" for security rather than love and shattering the dreams the sisters always discussed.  Nea's protective instincts that cause her to exaggerate the circumstances highlight her "immaturity". Maybe it's the hardship of dealing with change that causes this, but there seems to be a point where Nea "crosses the line" in which she thinks the worst of Sourdi's circumstances. This overprotective nature compels me to ponder upon my grandparents, specifically when they came to the US and lived with me for an extended ...

Ever hear the phrase "scratch beneath the surface"? As we discuss complex characters, that is what comes up in my mind. Often I find myself in the pitfall of surface reading, but learning to analyze complex characters is one step out of the pitfall. Humanity is so complex; we have our conscious, subconscious, but also our unconscious. With college essays, we've had to delve deep, introspecting, trying to dive deep underneath the iceberg to reach our unconscious thoughts that represent our growth, epiphany, piths.  Through our building community initiative, we expose parts of ourselves that may not be obvious on the surface level. As I wrote my statements, I started to recall a memorable sermon I attended about the Johari window. Although the focus then was for religious purposes, it is also extremely applicable to analyzing a character/person and receiving feedback. The window is a matrix of four selves: open, blind, hidden, and unknown. Currently, we are exploring the o...

This week was a thick week of introspection and soul-searching; late at night, I scour through the files of memories hidden in the back of my brain to find that one moment of epiphany. Now that it's ingrained in me, however, I seem to search for epiphanies in my daily life—or at least, some new understanding of life in each and every day. I don't look much to the positives each day, as the hours seem to bucket as one, with no more sense as to what day of the week today is and much less what date it is (for me, the days are essentially A, B, and weekend). Always wanting to take the advantage to look more at the glass as half full, I believe a great new way to end the day is by reflecting positively, locating that epiphany of each day. Although each day doesn't have a large epiphany necessarily, there are definitely moments of new insight that I have every day. And by exaggerating our daily successes and findings as epiphanies, we can definitely feel better about ourselves an...