nd now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.
I enjoyed Du Bois’s writing more than Adam’s. Du Bois is concerned with his own identity and with black American’s place in the US. Adams meanwhile just whined about how he couldn’t keep up with the world and that everything is doomed. Du Bois still has hope for better days.
He felt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet
This sentence almost could’ve been placed in Adam’s autobiography without anyone noticing, if not for the last handful of words. The source of their ignorance separates them, however. Still, they both feel lost in the world.
One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
Du Bois is similar to Adams in how passionately he writes about his inability to understand why things are the way that they are. However, Du Bois calls himself the ‘problem’ which is very different than Adams who finds the world around him to be the problem. Whereas Adams tries to make sense of the world around him, Du Bois reaches inside to ask what is the point of his grim existence.
UNTIL the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and helpless to find it.
I know we went over it in class, but it is cool how Adams uses the third person and makes himself a character. Honestly, when I first read this weeks ago, I didn’t even realize Adams was the author, too. I wonder if this type of 3rd person writing for autobiographies was practiced much back then and if so, for what reasons.
Adams knew nothing about any of them
How many times does Adams say something like this throughout the excerpt? He knows nothing. We get it. I wonder if Adams was solely talking about himself in his ignorance or if he was acting as a voice for an entire generation?
the automobile, which, since 1893, had become a nightmare at a hundred kilometres an hour
It’s interesting how Adams is so troubled with how fast the world has advanced. I wonder if this topic was common back then. Even today, you constantly hear older generations rambling about smartphones and what not. The way he writes almost reminds me of the phrase, “old man screams at clouds.” But maybe that’s the whole point of the article, his self-awareness about being dumbfounded by the new world?
PERHAPS
Our narrator already knows she will not get better. Frankly, she has zero faith in her husband to come up with any strategies to help nurse her back to health. He doesn’t believe her, and therefore, she knows he will never be able to help her. She even repeats this word ‘perhaps’ twice to emphasize it. I think that ‘perhaps’ could be synonymous with ‘unquestionably’ here. She is being ironic in her use.
It gets into my hair
As our narrator is becoming mad and obsessed with the wallpaper, her journal entries have become more curt and chaotic. When she first arrived, she wrote intimately but also with lots of detail and structure. Now, she often writes short, random sentences and the language itself has become sporadic. I wonder if this happened to the author Gillman when she was writing in the hospital, sick and not allowed to do anything.
I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me bac
I think Gillman used this name on purpose to arouse confusion in the reader. Could Jane be the narrator? Jane could also be the person the narrator used to be, someone controlled and mistreated by her doctor husband and unable to ‘get out’ of her confinement. Now that she ‘can’t be put back’, she could have shed her name because of her new free self. Or maybe Jane is Jennie and it means nothing.