miscellaneous iterated circles

The story of Room is one of escape, of breaking past confinement to reach freedom. By the chapter 'After,' it may seem that we have reached that point, as Ma and Jack have broken out of Room, but still they are not truly free. One of the first things that constrains Ma and Jack still is their weakened immune systems, due to being totally isolated from the outside world and outside illnesses. This impacts Ma and Jack in slightly different ways. Ma knows and understands the situation and seems to consider more an inconvenience than anything. Jack, on the other hand, has been raised to be pretty much terrified of germs, and early on things the scrape on his knee and his dog-bitten finger are going to be the death of him. Even though Jack has left Room, he still brings it with him. For example, his vocabulary. Even though Jack is a remarkably literate five-year-old, the outside world still has an impossible array of things he does not have words for, so he tries to describe the

Despite the fact that A Lesson Before Dying is about a boy in a jail cell who physically cannot go anywhere, it is still very much a journey. For Grant, there is still a nontrivial physical journey: around 13 miles to Bayonne. However, this rapidly becomes routine for Grant, not remotely heroic. Instead, the journey is a mental and emotional one, that attempts to reach out to Jefferson and inspire him. At the very beginning, Grant does not attend the courtroom with his Aunt and Miss Emma, instead choosing to distance himself because he already knows exactly what will happen. The first ordeal therefore becomes merely pushing Grant past his attempts to isolate himself from the issue. In the jail cell, there are more than physical walls that separate Jefferson from the rest of the world. Jefferson is silent, seemingly emotionless and ignoring his visitors. He then turns mocking, seeming not to recognize Grant, perhaps trying to drive away his visitors rather than experience/cause the

Addie Bundren is a rather mysterious figure in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying . The first portion of the book has her sitting in the death-room not saying a word to anyone, or even looking in Anse's direction. Only at the moment of her death does she call out to Cash. The next portion of the book sees Addie dead, in the coffin (accidentally augured), and on the road. She is very dead at this point, but she still maintains a significant presence in the plot, with Anse's adamant declarations that "this is what she wanted" or the omnipresent stench that follows the cart like a blight on the land. In the paradigm of the Hero's Journey, Addie, residing in her coffin is a Talisman, but she seems to be a bad-luck charm or a harbinger of misfortune as well, given the reactions of people outside the Bundren family. After the river crossing, we get a chapter narrated by Addie herself, even though she has been dead for a week at that point. We learn that Addie Bundren is

In O Brother, Where Art Thou , Ulysses Everett McGill is fairly obviously intended to parallel Odysseus. In many ways, they are alike. In others, they are rather different. To me, the biggest difference between Odysseus and Ulysses is their fatal flaw. Odysseus' flaw is pride, that he must reveal his name to Polyphemus, or that his emotions get the better of him and he acts rashly. Ulysses, however, struggles with vanity instead. We can see this with his insistence on getting Dapper Dan pomade instead of Fop, or when he wakes up after the sirens, immediately worrying about his hair. It's implied that the Sheriff was able to track Everett and company because of Everett's distinctive pomade. (At the end, we see the bloodhound sniffing in Everett's massive stash of Dapper Dan). While Odysseus and Ulysses both have a way with words, in general Odysseus is better with them. Odysseus is very quick to fabricate elaborate stories (as much a storyteller as a liar), but Evere

Odysseus lies a lot. He's a crafty man, deceptive, tactful, calculating. Since he is the only one living to tell his story, we are sometimes left wondering how much of his story is really the truth. In the court of the Phaeacians, Odysseus spends whole books just telling stuff that happened to him. The only others to witness those events were Odysseus' crew, who died. In a number of places, Odysseus portrays himself as being heroic, stronger, able to stay up for days and nights on end, just plain better than his crew. (It's always the crew that wants to stop and rest on the island, that wants to open the bag of winds, that eats the Sun God's cattle.) Yet at the same time, he also portrays himself in sometimes unflattering ways. When Eurylachus leads the rest of the crew to eating the Sun God's cattle, Odysseus gives him spoken lines and reasonable arguments. Or when Odysseus reveals his name to Polyphemus, over the protests of the crew, cursing them and dooming

When I was younger, I read the Belgariad  series by David Eddings. It's a five-book series that fits very well into the Hero's Journey archetype. It fits so well that it might sound cliche, but the series' conformance to the tropes and elements of the Hero's Journey is not a bad thing. The protagonist, Garion, starts off as a farm boy under the care of his Aunt Pol. The Call to Adventure first comes with a disreputable-seeming vagabond storyteller who apparently knows Aunt Pol. The three of them, and the reliable smith Durnik set out on a journey (I don't remember to where, it's been a while since I read it). They meet other companions along the way (Silk the thief/merchant/spy, Lelldorin the hotheaded and impulsive archer, Ce'nedra the beautiful but somewhat spoiled Imperial Princess, and others) as they seek out the Orb of Aldur. Along the way, it is revealed that the storyteller is in fact Belgarath the Sorcerer, a legendary figure of incredible magi