Reflections:
-The Road
By looking at the dialogues between the father and his son in The Road, we can see that only a person or a group of people with “long term goals” is able to distinguish themselves and be distinguished by others as the “good guys” or the “bad guys”; this is an important factor of life because our long term goals shape our worldviews and consequently our decisions in our lives. On page 160, the boy asked the man “What are our long term goals?” and the man said “I don’t know.” Because they did not have any goals the boy asked a few times during their journey if they were still the good guys. He also asked how he could distinguish the good guys from the bad.
These questions brought a conflict to my view of school and classes. It proposed that I should have a goal for the end of the year for each class so that I can have a standing in the classroom, but this does not only go into a performance for a class; this principle, as we have seen, applies to everything we are involved in, with or without other people to see us. This is what I have learned from The Road.
I didn’t understand the author’s use of symbolism with the color red and orange. He used this to describe the bad guys in the novel, and described the boys face as being orange, the bad color, when he was looking at the fire shortly afterward and a few other times after that. The only reason for that would be to show that the boy is becoming a bad guy, which doesn’t make sense at all because he was equal to or better than his father, the man. This was shown when they had contact with other people. The boy clearly had a goal of helping and caring for other people and a dog, but the man’s goal was to survive with the boy. Which is the better goal? The answer to that lies in one’s worldview and his priorities. But then who is right?
-Blink
By looking at the dialogues between the father and his son in The Road, we can see that only a person or a group of people with “long term goals” is able to distinguish themselves and be distinguished by others as the “good guys” or the “bad guys”; this is an important factor of life because our long term goals shape our worldviews and consequently our decisions in our lives. On page 160, the boy asked the man “What are our long term goals?” and the man said “I don’t know.” Because they did not have any goals the boy asked a few times during their journey if they were still the good guys. He also asked how he could distinguish the good guys from the bad.
These questions brought a conflict to my view of school and classes. It proposed that I should have a goal for the end of the year for each class so that I can have a standing in the classroom, but this does not only go into a performance for a class; this principle, as we have seen, applies to everything we are involved in, with or without other people to see us. This is what I have learned from The Road.
I didn’t understand the author’s use of symbolism with the color red and orange. He used this to describe the bad guys in the novel, and described the boys face as being orange, the bad color, when he was looking at the fire shortly afterward and a few other times after that. The only reason for that would be to show that the boy is becoming a bad guy, which doesn’t make sense at all because he was equal to or better than his father, the man. This was shown when they had contact with other people. The boy clearly had a goal of helping and caring for other people and a dog, but the man’s goal was to survive with the boy. Which is the better goal? The answer to that lies in one’s worldview and his priorities. But then who is right?
-Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
I could not make up mind to make a good introduction for my reflection on Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre. So, I will start off with what came intrusting to think about through this book. Marilyne said that language is like a life-sustaining resource, it can be depleted, contaminated, or filled with artificial stimulants, page 1. Later, on page 16, she used the food analogy again to say that language has been industrialized, and she used her tone to sound negative about it, but although it is true that language may have its dents today, it is more widely spread at the same time. Because more people have a minimal degree of language education, there are more possibilities for dents. This is where I disagree with her: there may be the same amount of stewardous people for language in an industrialized and a third world scenario, but the third world scenario had minimal dents because language could only be accessed by good stewards of it; in the industrialized language scenario, most people who had no language capacity in the former scenario now have minimal language access. This is a positive thing, and this is why I disagree with her on this subject.
A lot of the information in the book was info that one could just think of with no help from articles and come to the same conclusion. This is why I did not really conclude that this book was useful compared to other books and stories.
Official book review of The Road
The Road, a Pulitzer Prize Winner novel by Cormac McCarthy is an apocalyptic fiction story of a man and son with a small cart of treasures searching for peace and a home in the south. They meet bad guys and possibly good guys on their journey and try to not engage with other them as much as possible.
This book specialized in creating an easy environment for the reader to enter in to. As I read it I lost track of time and the only way to show or recap certain parts in the book was to describe the events that took place and hope that the people you are talking with are able to remember the same parts of the story. It is a perfect example of what would happen if man kind were to betray itself and become wild.
English 