Ketchup Blog

I've been having a rough time with the Tempest. It seems too all encompassing. I suppose I just need to grab a single thread and follow it for a while. The connections are all over it to many of our other readings but they have either been discussed more fully than I could have already or are a stretch or are too obvious and not really of any great intrigue. Of course, like Dr. Sexson said at the beginning of the semester, sometimes we need to state the obvious. Since I have little recent blog activity other than smartpen posts I'll have to do just that.

The Tempest:

1) Connecting The Tempest to Finnegans Wake

a) Both are magical, the Tempest has illusion written into it and Finnegans Wake is basically a spell book which shows you whatever you're looking for.

b) Both are bound by water, Finnegans Wake has a river which cuts through it and keeps our attentions fixed and the Tempest is a fixed focal point because it's an island adventure.

c) The characters are template characters for all the potential characters that could have been in their position. Prospero is the All-Father kind of persona and HCE is the everyman.

2) Stranger than Fiction and Beckett

a) Kind of a weak link but both Molloy and Harold are in bad shape and either don't know it, or ignore it and continue onward regardless.

b) Molloy is in the process of living his life, following his every desire so long as it holds his attentions then dropping it and moving on to the next thing with no real recollections, simply now and Harold spends the beginning of the movie preparing to live his life and begins doing so only at the end.

3) Life as Fiction and Beckett

a) This one's pretty obvious. Beckett keeps showing the machinery behind his work in an attempt to show us that life is fiction. We are blinded by our "daily lives" and need to wake up and live.

4) What is the Matrix?

a) Monotony. Getting in a rut of living every day like Harold Crick. We need to break free from the bondage of a 9-5 and become people again. As broken as Molloy was, he (obviously my favorite character of Becketts) lived in the now, or in the real, even when he was retrospect. That fictional character was somehow more alive than some of the fictional characters I know as flesh and blood instead of paper and ink. People dead to their lives as they run through without joy and simply process the life that is fed to them like some prescribed formula which will eventually lead them to a goal which will set them free. What goal? Now is when you're free, if you just take the red pill and dive down the rabbit hole, eat a Bavarian sugar cookie or suck on a stone. Free your mind and join the window washer who gets to jam out on his music and feel the wind on his face from a dozen stories off the ground suspended from a few cables while you get-a-talkin-to for being 5 minutes late Mr. Anderson.

Alright, off my soapbox now. See you all tomorrow.