Birds

One of the smaller symbols in this book was in the last section when Stephan touches on how he was watching birds in flight. He brings up so many observations about the birds that parallel with his own life. The birds make him think of his last name and the story behind it when he says “ A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawk like man whose name he bore..” (244). At this point in the novel Stephen is struggling to figure out just how to make him self an individual. Later on in the book he talks to his friend about leaving the University and his friends and family behind. This is the “sense of fear and unknown”. The birds make him contemplate whether his actions of isolating himself from his family and friends will have positive or negative results. “But was it for his folly that he was about to leave forever the house of prayer..to which he had been born and the order of life out of which he had come?”.
He knows what he wants to do just as Dedelius knew what he wanted to do, but when he goes about doing it he gets scared of the unknown. Although the birds make him think of the fears in what he is doing, they can also symbolize his freedom. His freedom from the church and from his parents judgments, “souring out of captivity”. He says that as he looks at these birds, his mothers face appears. This is because she is one of the many people that he feels is holding him back from being a true artist.



“ It humiliated him and shamed him to think that he would never be freed from it wholly, however holily he might live or whatever virtues or perfections he might attain..a feeling of restless guilt would always be present within him..I have amended my life, have I not?”

This quote was one of my favorites because when I was reading about all of these horrible things that he was making himself do I could not stop thinking how ridicules he was being. And when he finally questioned what he was doing I couldn’t help but let out a YES FINALLY!, to myself. The organization of this entire section is important. IT starts off with him listing everything that he does to keep himself a holy person. “Each of his senses was brought under a rigorous discipline”. As the section goes on, his paragraphs get longer and longer, and suddenly he goes informing the reader of what he is doing, to letting the reader know how it affects him emotionally. This part is important because it is one of the first times that Stephen takes notice that his life really isn’t all that much better off than it had been. I also think that the extreme exaggeration of his actions in becoming a better person is necessary for his rebirth later on in the book.
This quote and section of the book is also important because this experience gives him a taste of what priest hood would be like. Although Stephen does not come out and say that he does not like this way of life, the language suggests that he is not enjoying it. Although he has gone through all of this self-discipline, he still recognizes that he is still temped by sin as in the quote above. The play on words using “wholly” and “holily” is significant in tying the thoughts that he will never get rid of all his sins, even when he puts his trust in the holy spirit.


A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was not one of my favorite books we have read this year. There were parts about the book that were interesting but many parts of the book that I did not understand fully why they were even there for in the first place. The stream of consciousness writing was at times hard to follow with him jumping around so much. The book also got difficult to understand because there were no quotations or any form of punctuation when people were talking, and although that is an important part of this books syntax, it nevertheless made it hard to distinguish between the characters talking. There were some things that I did like about the book. I did enjoy the beginning of the book when he was a child telling the story, and I can appreciate how hard that must have been for Joyce to try and remember the thoughts that were going through his read as young as he went back to. I also liked to see how Stephen gradually realized that the church should not make him feel so guilty about just living his own life because I found a subject like that easy to relate to. All in all, it was interesting to read about Stephens self journey, but was not one of my favorite books purely because I could not get a grasp some of the important sections of the book.

The Hole in the Bucket

The hole in the bottom of the bucket symbolizes the holes in civilization . Even though the man was saying that everything where he resided was going well, in all actuality it was not. There were black men starving, barely having enough every to get up to get a drink of water. The white men's original purpose for being there was for Colonialism, to make the black people more civil. But somewhere along the way, something went wrong and the evilness inside them grew and their entire surrounds turned into a horrific black hole. The hole in the bucket also symbolizes a lost cause. The black man could try and try as hard as he wanted but the fire was not going to get put out with a bucket with a hole in it. Colonialism was a lost cause, and the Africans were suffering from it the most.

"Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision-- he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath"



This quote reminds me of so many movies, when a character is just about to die and their "life flashes before them". His desire was power, temptation to the dark side, and then surrendering to it, it takes his final moments of life to have a moment of knowledge. In these movies, just as in the book, the viewer does not get the image of a character such as Kurtz looking back at his life and flying up to heaven. His last words, his last comment on his own existence after taking the time to look back upon his life are the words "the horror". The horror of his pathetic life, the horror of the decaying surroundings around him. Earlier before this quote the passage describes Kurtz's face as the color Ivory. The diction of using the word Ivory is perfect for this scene because his days in the dark side were all focused around Ivory and the money it made him, and now it is used to describe the color of his dieing face.

Heart of darkness. Just the mere name of this book gave me little to none motivation to read it. The entire book had such a predictable tone to it, being so dark and gloomy. Id like to think when someone is on a journey to find them self that the last thing they would be hoping to stumble upon is the "darkness inside them". I don't know any English proverbs that tell one to look for the evilness inside of them and they will find the truth. I did not care for how dense the language of the book was. I had to reread so many pages, trying to understand merely what was going on with the plot. Heart of Darkness may have only been 100 pages but I got so much more out of 20 pages of Invisible man then I did the 100 pages of Heart of Darkness. The only part about the book that I liked was the ending. I liked the fact that when he was faced with the evil head on, he knew enough to turn away from it. If the book had ended with him going to the dark side, it would of added to its defaults.

Once you get used to it, reality is as irresistible as a club, and i was clubbed into the cellar before i caught the hint...When one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other depending upon who happens to be looking thorough him at the time." pg 572

The prologue and the epilogue are my favorite parts of this book. In this particular quote, the diction that is used is very appreciate relating reality to a club. His reality was like being beaten with a club, and as he said it took the entire book of being beaten for him to finally realise what was going on around him. There is much to be said about the second part of the quote. Again he had the opposite words, which keeps up the the inner theme of him tangling between two extremes. What is intresting about this quote is that he is blurring the two polar opposites together depending on who looks at him. White and black are two polar opposites as well. I believe he is saying in this quote that when a person of his own race treats him invisible, then he starts to blur the evil and the good together. If a white man looks strait though him, to him that is expected and he can easily dub that particular white person "evil" and move on with his life. But when it is a black person treating him the exact same way as the white person, that is when his inner conflict comes in. What is ironic about these two statements is in the first sentence he claims to have reality beaten into him, however he is still dealing with the inner racial conflicts.

Invisible Man was the first book that I had some personal interest in. African American history is an interesting subject to me, and so reading about an intelligent black mans struggle through a horribly raciest era was a good read. While we were reading this book, I went to see Denzel Washingtons new movie the Great Debaters. There is a scene in the movie that reminded me of scenes in the book, and seeing it on the big screen got me extremely emotional. When the Invisible Man was called "boy" by so many white men, I almost read over it easily. When we talked about it in class it was brought to my attention to the seriousness of such a degrading phrase. Seeing it in the movie made me see just how the white men would treat the blacks. Although it was long, I actually enjoyed the fact that we the readers could get such a background about the main character. My favorite part of the book was the prologue, the language and his tone sucked me in after the first paragraph. I also liked to know where I was reading to, knowing that at some point in this book the main character was going to realise what was going on around him.

The Briefcase

The briefcase is a reoccurring object throughout the story that symbolized so much in itself. It was the one object that traveled with him through the entire story. The fact that the briefcase was first given to him by a white man relates to the rest of the book as a whole. At this point in the novel the briefcase symbolises the false hope that the main character will eventually come across. For example, when Bledstone gives the Invisible man the the letters that send him in the wild goose chase, it is the briefcase that he puts the letters in. He carried all of the little objects that he found in the process of finding his identity in the briefcase. The briefcase saved him from getting hurt in the up roar towards the end of the book, and it also is what caused him to have to go into the sewer hole, to escape from being robbed. The briefcase in that scene resembles the timeline of his life. Everything that he takes out of it presents a different argument of how the invisible man was ruled over by other people.