Freudtastic

Ah, Sigmund Freud, one of the greatest philosophers/ scientists/ (whatever great title you would like to place here), writer of the essay, The Interpretation of Dreams, in which the mentality of Hamlet and Shakespeare is analyzed.

In this paragraph from Freud’s famous essay, Freud uses his idea, based on the Greek play, Oedipus Rex. This idea, in a nutshell, is “The Oedipal complex is a term used by Sigmund Freud in his theory of psychosexual stages of development to describe a boy's feelings of desire for his mother and jealously and anger towards his father. Essentially, a boy feels like he is in competition with his father for possession of his mother. He views his father as a rival for her attentions and affections.” It is named Oedipus Rex complex because of the Greek play in which Oedipus kills his Father and marries his mother. This idea surges from his own feelings.  It might be radical (and a bit sketchy in my opinion), but it is shown well in Act 3 Scene i of Hamlet.

In Act 3 scene i, It is clear that Hamlet has a strong feeling towards his mother and a hatred towards his stepfather. It is clear through the word he uses to describe his “villain” Uncle (stepfather) and his “good” mother.

The craziest part of this is that he looks at Shakespeare inner mind and states that his childhood memories of this Oedipus Rex are grown back by the death of his Father. Well that is usually what writers base their works on, their feelings, memories, and whatever.

At the end of it all, Freud is a scientist, and like all theories they can be changed. This idea could be wrong, it could be right, but from what I see on Google, it that there is no update. Please inform me if there is new research being done or if someone finds new results comment a link below. For know the theory stays.

Info on Oedipus complex is from About.com. Link= http://psychology.about.com/od/oindex/g/def_oedipuscomp.htm 

Hamlet, Not Just a Play

You know when they say, “use your personal experiences to make your character come to life”. Well how do you use personal experience to play Hamlet, a murderer, well you use the feelings of the night of the murder. Inmates can most defiantly complete this goal. Well from this one hour documentary with no images just the voice of Jack Hitt what I saw is a new perspective on how to read Hamlet, well not really a new one, but one with a new twist. This one that states that Hamlet never reacts and blah blah blah, but adding an inmate’s perspective and how it could be interpreted in a prison scene.

What really stood out to me was when someone said “at least I can feel human in here” and all of the last five minutes where the crew of Missouri Eastern Correctional Center performance of Hamlet really touched me and made me think profoundly of the situation. That was when this really shifted from, one way you could read Hamlet and act it out to a talk with a really deep message. It was based on how reading it and how their past was connected, and they were all touching. It was also not full of how it COULD make one feel, but how it actually CAN make one feel.

“These guys call it as they see it and its true.” This play is much more than a play or an art, but it was a way to correct the error of the inmate’s past.

Shakespeare, what more is there to say...ALOT!!

            Yeah, Hamlet essay to read! Cool or what? Well this is the fun task I had to complete over these 4 day weekend. In these packet of excellent essays on Hamlet I found one that was most intriguing, One by August Wilhelm Von Schlegel. The reason for these is because He changes the message of the weather he is pretending to be crazy (Which in my opinion makes you crazy) or if he is actually crazy, to why he pretends to be crazy.

           

            “He is … of a highly cultivated mind … susceptible of noble ambitions” What Von Schlegel was saying, in long complex essay words, was that Hamlet his smart enough to know how to climb up the noble ranks. That greed in a combination to Hamlet’s intellectual mind leads him to create this unreal insanity. He goes on and on with this idea, but I have a question not only about Hamlet, but also about insanity. Does it really exist?

   

Greedy Enough??

            Yep, a nice complex questions that hopefully will have you up all night thinking about. Does insanity really exist, or is it a technique to get attention, good or not? Well as a base we have to know that there is no true answer because we don’t know what goes on in there, we can on ponder.

            I believe that one can control their brain, but never really understand why. Some might say it is Greed ( Von Schlegel), and the list goes on and on. SO insanity is something made up for attention. It is short and simple but it works.

            Please leave a comment with your opinion…  

The End of the Line.

It's the End… well I have achieved the goal of getting to the last page… I'm sad it ended, but glad because now I can inturpurate the Allygory of the Novel, The Road.

An alygory, an extended metaphor… whatever… yea McCarthy left us a cool, scare, true, underlining message in the end of the Road for us to find. Well it is pretty cool, it is about how we have to protect Nature or else she will kill herself by simply walking out the door.

It’s sad, but true. We are making mother nature go against its self and eventually, if we don’t change, just gonna get up and leave us hanging high and dry.

What I’m trying to say out that through out the novel, the wife represents Mother Nature and she leaves the family (killing herself). But He leaves us with some more information that changed my mind on the sadness of the whole travels of the Boy and Father.

Metaphor... 

At the end the dad dies :’(, but the boy finds away out to brighter days. What this represents is the family is humanity, the dad is the old ways, and the boy is the new ways. Yes sacrifices have to be made, but things can get better.   

WHAT NO COMMAS!!!

I learned a lot in the interview between McCarthy and Ophera, but in specific his lack of punctuations within the novel, The Road.  Through out the book we see thing like this: “Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.” (2) Or some of this “Nothing to see. No smoke. Can I see? the boy said. Yes. Of course you can. The boy leaned on the cart and adjusted the wheel. What do you see? the man said. Nothing.” (5).

This made it harder to read, but it made me look at it more carefully. 

McCarthy says its because when he was little he was thought that punctuations were made to make reading easy. Well I think they are, but that is not what he wants us to think.

I think he is trying to give more room to interpretation. Well with less commas and semicolons comes more room for the reader (me and you) to come up with our own way of well… reading the text (The Road).

The truth of the matter is that he can say one thing and we can interprate another, but there is a reason why there is a lack of punctuation, many, but there are.  

A Nature Without a Mother

The mother of the boy and the wife of the father is seen many times in the dreams of the boy and the father. She represents many things, but one I see is the idea of Mother Nature.

 In many scenes we see her in she is part of the nature. For example in the fathers memory of her outside of a house in the, “Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts”(68).

 Also we can connect that Mother Nature has left the world of The Road because of the lack of colors in the majority of the novel, where the mother does not appear. Cormac writes, “They came to an old iron bridge in the woods where the vanished road had crossed an all but vanished stream. He was starting to cough and he'd hardly breath to do it with. He dropped down out of the roadway and into the woods.” This is one example of what we can see throughout the novel.   

Sweet Dreams

          Dreams… something we all have experienced. They help us cope with the real world, with what we are dealing with. Usually they are full of beauty and harmony. They give us this joyful warm felling. Some are not that peaceful. Some are horrifying, terrific, so frightening they wake us from the horrible moment we are passing.

Yet we don't wake up before the horror is over. We wake up just before we die, but we suffer the deaths of people that are close or that of people that we don't know. We stay up just until the last moment, until we wake up dripping sweat in a drenching wet bed because of our heart rate that flies off the scales.

            In the Road all his dreams are to the contrary of what I just stated in the previous statement. The father (who is still remains nameless) and the boy don't suffer beside what they see in real life. Their dreams are full of the beauty of what they once lived. An example is, “The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts”.   

Bad Guys???

      What are the “Bad Guys” that the boy and father mention every time they see a sign of civilization or people? I think it could be an evil monster that is created by the nuclear radiation mixing in with some sort of animal that made it smarter, stronger, and more vicious. It could also be a group of people that they are running from that have become wild and crazy for food and will find some at no mercy. Well one thing is for sure, they are running from something, and it is “bad”. 

Trash

Something that I can see in almost every page are verbs that end with ”nt”. This is something that I see in not only what I have read, but in the pages that follow, as I skim through them. This shows the depression and lack of confidence that the characters have. What i think this represents is a feeling of no way to go forward, and a feeling of last resort of getting down to a "good" life.  

This is no the only thing that shows a sorrow tone. The descriptions of the areas they travel through, the description of how everything is “trash” around them. They live in trash, literally, they are sleeping in trash bags and carrying a shopping cart as a pack where they keep thier old, trashy food and cloths.

The words that McCarthy uses in this monotonic writing shows the not only sadness, scariness, and darkness of the lives they were thrown into, but how we have to fight the same thing, but not only to the extect they have to live in, One full of death, bad times, and hopefully a happy, warm ending.

???

What is the conflict? What effects the Characters? What effects them to change if they change? How will they fight the people they encounter and control themselves? This are all questions that will be answered later in the readings, but for now I can only guess. Well I realized that the father and son are living on the road running from the cannibals and living a hard life. The Father and the Son have no name, so far, and I'm trying to find out why that is. It could be because everyone “loses” (well does not need) an identity once the world ends or maybe they just forgot what they were. There surroundings are hard and they need to find food and not fall for the people they find. To be able to answer more I'm gonna have to read on, see you next time.