Hamlet Introduction

After watching the video introduction for Hamlet I began question several things about what I expect of it. I have read several plays by Shakespeare, which lets me understand a little more of what to expect of Hamlet, but I’m still not very sure about it.

I had always thought of Hamlet as a very depressing play, but from what the Introduction by Kenneth Branagh showed me it isn’t as depressing. But this introduction is very brief for me to take a guess of what Hamlet is going to be like. But at least I now believe it won’t be such a tragic play as I thought it would be, although that perspective may and most probably will change once we read it in class.

Questions

The Road continues, and it keeps bringing up something which I can’t stop thinking of. What I’m thinking about is all the questions the son has and asks to his father. All their dialogues are basically the son asking and the father answering.

“The boy lifted the gun from the case and held it. Can you shoot somebody with
it? he said.
You could.
Would it kill them?
No. But it might set them on fire.
Is that why you got it?
Yes.
Because there's nobody to signal to. Is there?
No.
I'd like to see it.
You mean shoot it?
Yes.
We can shoot it.
For real?
Sure.
In the dark?
Yes. In the dark.”

Here we see a perfect example of the question and answer routine the man and son have almost in every conversation. It is as though the father’s only goal to fulfill is to answer every question to his son, so that he will now everything necessary to survive when he is gone. It’s like if he was giving the boy a class, a lesson of how to survive, and the boy will naturally have questions about this.

The Janitor’s Tale

There was a man who worked so hard in school,
But he was not a man who followed rules.
He was always working he never stopped,
Not even if he was hit and then knocked.
But one day something changed his life around.
It all happened when in a room he found
A lost wallet with more than ninety bucks,
Something that he just felt that was good luck,
So he decided it was his to take
A hard decision he´d regret to make.
As he got to school the very next day,
There was very little to see and say.
The school was in a lot of commotion,
And the janitor hid al emotion.
It was then that a man saw him in there
And made a move that the silence would tear,
He asked the janitor if he had seen
The theft that had happened and was so clean,
He answered to the man, nervous, insecure,
He said that he was not completely sure.
But then an officer discovered him,
With ninety bucks hanging on his belts rim.
So then the janitor pleaded his case,
But not much could he do to hide his face.
This story ends when he is then fired,
And a lesson then learned and admired.

You Change

At first I had no doubt in my mind that I hadn’t understood a word this blog was saying. But interestingly enough I re-read the passage, maybe irony, since the blog stated just a bit about that in the beginning. It was then when I realized I had actually understood the post the first time, just that I thought it would be about something else.

So basically the writer is telling us all she learned and saw in The Great Gatsby the third time she read it.

I know this blog was intended for us to understand completely the idea of re-reading things, and how each time we read something it helps us understand it better. But this time there was a different idea too, I had heard it before, but this time it really made sense, “the works stays the same; it’s we who change”.

Just a couple seconds after I read this I remembered about something my father had told me (and repeats it almost once a week) about Ernest Hemingway’s book A Movable Feast. He says, and the book says, that no matter what, Paris never changes, it’s you who changes. I know that Paris is not a book, it’s a city (stating the obvious), but this is basically the same idea. You may have gone to Paris before, and when you come back it will be the same, but you won’t. Just as when you read The Great Gatsby, or any book, another time, you will be different, making the reading experience different.

Starting A Journey

The novel begins with no previous notice. The Road by Cormac McCarthy starts by telling you exactly what is going on, there is practically no introduction. In fact in the second paragraph already we know the objective of the characters in the book, “They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.”(McCarthy - pg2) This is told to us readers in the beginning; just as we are reading the first parts of the novel the author throws us this.

It’s not every day that we read a book as direct as this one. In my experience as a reader I have encountered very little books like this one. I usually see there is a brief introduction to the characters, maybe the setting, but in this case all we know is that they must leave.

In fact, the journey starts in the second page, “An hour later they were on the road”. (McCarthy – pg3). The book has just begun, and so has the journey. It’s as though the author is telling us that the novel is a journey, and just as the man and the boy are beginning a journey you are too. This method is very effective, because he starts the book with no introductions, starting straight away with their journey, just as we are when we read this book.

The Happy Ending

There are many fairy tales in which there is an ugly being, can be the man or the woman, and the other one must decide either to love him/her or not. And if he/she does they live happily ever after since the ugly character becomes pretty. The Wife of Baths Tale is almost exactly like one of these fairy tales.

A knight must find out what it is that women really want or he will be executed. He looks for the answer for a long time until an old lady tells him that if he marries her she will tell her the answer. She helps him correctly and the knight can live as he has said what women really want which is:

“"Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee

As wel over hir housbond as hir love,

And for to been in maistrie hym above.

This is youre mooste desir, thogh ye me kille.” (1038 – 1041)

After the knight marries the old ugly woman she asks him if he would like her to change. But as he learned before, what had saved his life, he let her wife decide since that was what she wanted most in the world as any other women. Thanks to this brilliant remark by the knight his wife then becomes very young and pretty.

This is very similar to that old fairy tale of the princes and the frog. In both cases one of them is ugly and makes the other unhappy until one day the princes or knight do a sacrifice, small one, and the ugly being becomes young and hansom. They all live a happy life afterwards.