Literature Analysis Two

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

1. Briefly summarize the plot of the novel you read.
2. Succinctly describe the theme of the novel. Avoid cliches.
3. Describe the author's tone.  Include three excerpts that illustrate your point(s).
4. Describe five literary elements/techniques you observed that strengthened your understanding of the theme and/or your sense of the tone.  Include three excerpts that will help your reader understand each one.

1. Catch-22 is a story of a man named John Yossarian whose job is to bomb places he and his companions are told to for the US Air Force during the WW2. However, Yossarian believes that everyone is trying to get rid of him, so he's main goal is to survive the war and go home. However, the Colonel Cathcart kept raising the number of missions the soldiers needed to complete in order for them to be sent home. The soldiers, therefore, have to keep fighting, which may be never. The novel doesn't follow a specific time frame, rather, it flashes back and forth throughout the story much like a war. Yossarian doesn't want to fight, so he asks Doc Daneeka if he can ground him for insanity, but the doctor refuses. He reasons that only sane people ask to be insane. So Yossarian finds an alternative to be hospitalized by faking a liver condition. Later, he does what he can to delay the mission in Bologna. Hungry Joe, one Yossarian's companion, has flown the required missions, but everytime he reaches the number, the colonels raise the number of missions so that Joe can't go home. This causes Joe to have nightmares and he goes crazy. Later on in the story, Yossarian is made a deal that if he praises the officers and the colonels, then they will let him go home. He, however, knows that this will mean that he will betray his fellow soldiers and refuses the offer. He escapes the military and tries to seek for his life.     

2. The major theme of the novel is the totalitarianism of the bureaucracy. The characters are not solely responsible for their death rather, the authority is. Whenever the soldiers try to reason with them logically, the authorities don't listen to them and reason back with illogical terms. When the soldiers finish their missions which is required to go home, the authorities raise the number of missions they need to accomplish everytime they are close to finishing them. Since the soldiers are aware of this, they try their best to utilize what they can do.

3. The tone of this novel is mostly serious and at times, satirical. Since this is a war novel, there are many scenes where the main character fears for his life and wants to avoid going into combat. He knows that many soldiers died during the battle and he doesn't want to.

• "There was no established procedure for evasive action. All you needed was fear, and Yossarian had plenty of that, more fear than Orr or Hungry Joe, more fear even than Dunbar, who had resigned himself submissively to the idea that he must die someday. Yossarian had not resigned himself to that idea, and he bolted for his life wildly on each mission the instant his bombs were away, hollering, "hard, hard, hard, hard, you bastard, hard!" at McWatt and hating McWatt viciously all the time as though McWatt were to blame for their being up there at all to be rubbed out by strangers..."

• "Help who? Help who?" called back Yossarian, once he had plugged his headset back into the intercom system, after it had been jerked out when Dobbs wrested the controls away from Huple and hurled them all down suddenly into the deafening, paralyzing, horrifying dive which had plastered Yossarian helplessly to the ceiling of the plane by the top of his head and from which Huple had rescued them just in time by seizing the controls back from Dobbs and leveling the ship out almost as suddenly right back in the middle of the buffeting layer of cacophonous flak from which they had escaped successfully only a moment before. Oh, God! Oh, God, oh, God, Yossarian had been pleading wordlessly as he dangled from the ceiling of the nose of the ship by the top of his head, unable to move."

• Major Major sat down, and Yossarian moved around in front of his desk and told him that he did not want to fly any more combat missions. What could he do? Major Major asked himself. All he could do was what he had been instructed to do by Colonel Korn and hope for the best. "Why not?" he asked. "I'm afraid." "That's nothing to be ashamed of," Major Major counseled him kindly. "We're all afraid." "I'm not ashamed," Yossarian said. "I'm just afraid."

4. The five literary elements that were helpful to understand the theme and the tone were:

1) Symbolism: The hospital in the novel symbolizes the shelter and the refuge people seek to go to avoid the war.

2) Allusion: In the story, Heller mentions many allusions such as Washington Irving who is constantly repeated, Michael de Montaigne, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, the Bible, and Homer. These references related to the scenes when they were used and further enhanced my understanding of the novel by helping me make connections.

3) Imagery: With the imagery, it helped to visualize what the characters were actually seeing and experiencing during their battle.

"Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all."
4) Alliteration: The following alliteration helped me to makes connections with the occupation and their field of study.

"There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts..."

5) Repetition: Heller uses this to explain deeper about the situation: what caused the event, what the consequences were, etc.

“McWatt was crazy. He was a pilot and flew his plane as low as he dared over Yossarian’s tent as often as he could, just to see how much he could frighten him…Sharcare. He was crazy too”

Tools That Change the Way We Think

"Back in 2004, I asked [Google founders] Page and Brin what they saw as the future of Google search. 'It will be included in people's brains,' said Page. 'When you think about something and don't really know much about it, you will automatically get information.'

'That's true,' said Brin. 'Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world. Right now you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it could be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk into, or you can have computers that pay attention to what's going on around them and suggest useful information.'

'Somebody introduces themselves to you, and your watch goes to your web page,' said Page. 'Or if you met this person two years ago, this is what they said to you... Eventually you'll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer."

-From In the Plex by Steven Levy (p.67)

Internet/media/technology use has made it easier for me to obtain the gist of a topic rather than searching in depth. Routinely, this has made me lazier, lazier, and lazier. It's just that Internet allows me to save time by getting the information in an instant rather than going to the library and search through the books. However, what I am beginning to realize is that modern people are indifferent to education than older people who learned in the formal way. Back then, there were no websites that summarized books or calculators to solve a problem. They had to actually spend hours and hours of time devoting to their assignments. I, on the other hand, can read from a book, but if the deadline for a book report is coming up and I didn't even read a page from my book, then I can go online and search for a summary and get the job done in an instant. It's that simple. Using Internet this way is beneficial in the short run, but detrimental in the long run. The major difference between them and us (as in modern kids) is that they actually wanted to learn and were dedicated to their work. We, on the other hand, give up if things get too complicated and try to find an easier way to access information quickly.

In Search Of

• Watching the Video:

a)I learned from the video that the searches we do influences the future search results. I believed, like the rest of the people, that everyone would have the same results when he/she would type in something. However,the video clearly showed that two people searching the same thing in the same time and place, can have totally different search results.

b)I now know that some information are left out due to my personalized search history. It makes me wonder whether or not I am able to access to all the information despite the edit. I would like to have all the information so that my searches wouldn't be biased.

c)
-How long will Google, Facebook, and other companies use filter bubble to limit people from getting all the resources they need?

- Why are they doing this? To help you to make easier access to information? To limit you so that you won't have too much information? Who knows...

What we know is that we need to be aware that this is happening and inform others about this so that they too would know what's up.

d)From now on, I'm going to make my searches more precisely so that the filter bubble wouldn't automatically direct me to my common search results. I won't rely on my search on one search engine; I will use multiple search engines so that I'll know everything I need to know.

• Researching Shakespeare After the Video:

Yesterday, I researched about William Shakespeare through Google by typing in "Who was Shakespeare" and used the first two websites (wasn't Wikipedia!). In some of my previous researches, I used Wikipedia and the first results were always from Wikipedia. However, since I haven't used Wikipedia in a while, I see other website links that come before it. It's really cool/afraid of how it can do this in a short period of time.  Now back to Shakespeare. Instead of typing Who was Shakespeare, I typed Who was William Shakespeare and got different results. Again, I noticed that Wikipedia wasn't the first link. Then, I typed, "Who really was Shakespeare, and again got new results. It amazes me of how one word difference can change the result. I was able to get some new information that I wasn't able to with my first search. Truly, the video gave me a new insight on how to do my searches online.

"Who Was Shakespeare?"

2.  Shakespeare, one the most renown English writers of all time, is a real mystery. There are many speculations about his personal life and how he, a glover's son, had written the outstanding poems and plays. What the most people believe is that Shakespeare was born around April 1564 in Stratford and died on April 23, 1616 (on the day of my birthday!!!). When he ws 18, he married Anne Hathaway and had three kids. Later, he and his family moved to London where he became a actor, poet, and a playwright. With his 38 plays, he was known as the greatest dramatist ever to live. Later in 1608, he moved back to Stratford and settled there. What we are left to wonder is...was Shakespeare the true author of the plays and poems he wrote? How could a person from a lower class know about all the concepts only nobles would know? William Shakespeare isperceived by students as the greatest English poet of all time. By reading some works of Shakespeare such as Julius Caesar, Hamelt,  and Romeo and Juliet, I'm able to see a connection between all three works so far. The all have to relate to death and how it affects the characters in the plays. My struggle is that I am not able to grasp the full idea in the first read but rather after I discuss it in class.


Search Engine:
- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/merchant/shakespeare.html
- http://www.ljhammond.com/essays/shak1.htm

"Notes on Hamlet"

3. Post to your blog under the title, "Notes on Hamlet." Explain how your thinking about the play has evolved from the time we began reading to the end of Act III. Has anything changed your mind about the plot or characters since the ghost showed up at midnight? Where do you see things going from here?

3. In the very beginning of the play, I had trouble understanding the plot of the story. After going over the acts and each scenes with Dr. Preston and our classmates, I was able to grasp what was going on and follow along. The plot is becoming more interesting and curious because we, as readers, know what the characters are experiencing without them knowing what's up. Since now I have a pretty decent amount of description and personalities of each character, I am able to ascertain their behaviors. By observing Hamlet's scheme in Act 3, I am able to adumbrate that he will kill Claudius eventually. 

"To Facebook or Not to Facebook?"

1. Write about your initial impressions of Facebook, the benefits and risks associated with using Facebook, and an explanation of how reading the article and discussing in class informed your thinking.

1. At first, I thought only college students used Facebook. My sister had one and I thought it was way better than Myspace. So in the summer of my freshman year, I made my first account on Facebook and started using it. Since then, there has been new features on Facebook which some people liked, and others didn't. Although I personally found it hard to get used to the new changes, I didn't mind it after couple of weeks. The major benefit of Facebook is the capability to reconcile the lost relationships between families, friends, co-workers, etc. For me, for instance, I have family members in South Korea and talking to them on the phone would cost a lot of money. However, through Facebook, I can send a message to them for free and get a response as soon as they see it. It's that simple. The risks of using this is that personal information and other vital facts are known to the world without you knowing it. After reading the article, I took notice of the advertisements and other facts it stated and I quickly deactivated my account. I didn't do it solely because of the article; I did it because FB is wasting too much of my time.

"(Don't) Be Hamlet"

Journal Topic:
Now that you've mastered the text of "To be, or not to be..." reflect on Hamlet's dilemma and help him make up his mind. Use the text of the play and your own logic to support your opinion.

Answer:
     "To be, or not to be-that is the question:" In Shakespeare's Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1, this soliloquy is one of the most illustrious soliloquies in the entire play which many people recognize This quote is the main theme of Hamlet's soliloquy where he is asking to himself whether he should live or die. This is a very important decision in his life and it can't be condoned with careless thoughts. Hamlet discusses about whether he should put up with all the hardships that he's facing or rebel against it. He also says who would bear the humiliations that the world places when they could take out their knife and end the whole thing.
     "Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And, by opposing, end them?" In the first part of the soliloquy, Hamlet thinks of two decisions that he can act, either to ignore the situation or take action. If I were him, I wouldn't overlook the situation and take action in a decisive way. In the preceding acts, Hamlet does a good job by not taking action immediately. I would advice him to maintain his momentum and remind him of what he's been waiting for...to revenge Claudius for his crimes. In the end, though, I would tell him to kill Claudius because I agree with his "madness."

     "For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th' oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th' unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin?" In this quote, Hamlet mentions that no one wants to bear the humiliations people do and can end it by killing themselves. For Hamlet, he should take action against his uncle rather than end the pains of the present moment. If he wishes to calm his anger and ease his melancholy, he need to take care of business before his dies. 

      Hamlet's soliloquy talks about Hamlet's thoughts and ideas of whether or not he should commit suicide or not. I would explicitly tell him that there is a end to a start. If he kills himself, then nothing would be solved for both himself and the apparition's claims.