Scarlet Letter. Jumbled Thoughts.

I’ve never come across a book that frustrated me so much, yet, was so intriguing to me as The Scarlet Letter. 

This book shows in very good detail the beliefs, values, and priorities of the people living in this time period. As a group, people of this time lived solely to please their creator and to secure their places in heaven. This is the reasoning behind the shunning of Hester Prynne. Hester is a sinner. The townspeople believe that to let her live without punishment is to commit a sin themselves. Therefore, she is shunned in the village she lives in and is forced to wear a scarlet letter A (signifying she is an adulterer). Hester comes to wear this A proudly. Even when the elders are considering letting her take it off she wears it as a symbol of what she’s been through. She also makes no attempt to hide Pearl, her daughter, who is also a permanent symbol of her sin. 

Pearl is a symbol throughout the entire book. More than anything, she is there to remind the reader of the consequences of Hester’s actions. At the end, however, once her father publicly admits to being her father she becomes a person. A character, rather than a symbol.

Arthur Dimmesdale, Pearl’s father and Hester’s former lover, is plagued with guilt throughout the entire story. I didn’t see it, though, as guilt for the sin he has committed. It is guilt for not taking credit for his daughter. This guilt is with him with everything he does. That is clear to the reader throughout the entire story. 

Appropriately named, Roger Chillingworth is a cold, unfeeling man. Disguising himself as a doctor, he never lets Dimmesdale get to far away because he is planning revenge for the affair Dimmesdale has engaged in with his wife. At the end of the novel Chillngworth dies. Much like a leech, with no one to feed on, he has no way to survive.

The Great Gatsby. Jumbled thoughts.

I loved The Great Gatsby. Not only was it my favorite book of summer reading, it’s one of my favorite books ever. It had a way of making me feel as though I was in the book experiencing everything the characters were experiencing. That connection was the main reason I enjoyed the novel so much.

To me, Tom was the most interesting of all the characters. It seems to me that he has just about everything but doesn’t see it. Although he has a beautiful, loving wife, he has an extramarital affair. He is high in social standing, wealthy, and powerful. Yet he bully's people as if they’re threatening to him. Tom is incredibly arrogant and seems to be very prejudice. I noticed throughout the book that he sets very high social standards for all those around him. He himself, however, makes no attempts to also meet the standards that everyone else is expected to live up to.

When I began The Great Gatsby I saw it as a story of love, infidelity, jealousy, and expected it to continue in that direction. After getting further into the novel, though, I started to see it as less of a love story and more as a depiction of America as a whole in the early 1920’s. The Great Gatsby tells a story of an America in which there was a post-war rise in the stock market, making it possible for anyone to get wealthy. An America in which the poor and the rich had a need for bootleg liquor, and the craving for wealth and high social standing rather than the achievement of more significant things such as discovery, the pursuit of happiness, and individualism (chapter 9) led to many problems.