Two Thumbs Up for "Down the Rabbit Hole!"

I attended “Making Up is Hard to Do” and “Because I Said So.” I will blog about “Making Up is Hard to Do,” but I want to briefly mention an interesting observation made during the Q&A of the other panel.

Two of the papers in “Because I Said So” presented back to back with completely opposite arguments. One student wrote about Four Lions, a dark comedy about unlucky terrorists; he proposed that ideology is most dangerous when it is brought to life in its most extreme form by a follower’s overzealous, uncompromising belief in it. The next presenter, however, made a case to support ideology’s ability to free its followers from oppression, as demonstrated in Kindred. What we learn from this seeming contradiction is this: what matters is not the vehicle for your experience, but how you use that vehicle that shapes your experience and what you learn from it.

Back to the first panel. Three of the papers proposed interesting ideas about the identities of their respective protagonists. One student wrote about Billy from Slaughterhouse-Five, claiming that he is a Christ-like figure. She believes that he has a high capacity for empathy and many other qualities that Jesus possessed. However, she did not use this comparison as a way to elevate Billy’s character; on the contrary, she used his similarities to Jesus as evidence for Vonnegut’s anti-Christian ideas. That is, if humans only pursue moral action in response to fear and threats, then they are not inherently good. Another student defended the characters in On the Road, suggesting that they are not rebels, but reformers wishing to improve their narrow-minded, nuclear family units. The third student gave an interesting analysis of the use of green and blue colors in The Great Gatsby to signify Fitzgerald’s loss of his Irish identity to the melting pot of America and the clash between Eastern and Western values. I think all three presenters did especially well in offering unique perspectives on well-known, well-analyzed works (yay for alliteration).

--Ly