Memories

I was afraid. In one of my earliest memories that's all I can feel. I was four, maybe five, so my sister had to be about nine at the time. I was still living in Tacoma. Laura was pushing me on the swing set in our backyard and I was laughing and I was higher in the air then I'd ever been before. Thinking this was as close to flying as I'll ever get. We were so happy and acting just like sister are supposed to; Laura wasn't ignoring me and I wasn't throwing a fit. One push to hard was all it took to unseat me and send me tumbling to the ground.

Landing on my back, I stared at the slowly spinning blue sky above me and was afraid. The wind was knocked out of me and my lungs burned, my ribs throbbed and my ankle was sending shooting pain up my leg. Laura screamed, and running in the direction of the house, told me she would get Mommy to help. I made a few tenative moves to sit up but that made my lungs and ribs hurt in an even more agonizing way. I was afraid that something was broken, I was afraid because I didn't know what was happening or why it hurt so bad. Then my Mom was there and I could let her worry and be afraid instead. Nothing was seriously wrong and I didn't need to go to the hospital but that's my first memory of being afraid or hurt. Its branded itself in my mind, my first glimpse of real pain and fear.

Robinson Crusoe: Motif

I read Robinson Crusoe and the literary feature I'm doing my graphic organizer on is motif(yes
I know in my last blog post I said it was tone but, alas I was mistaken.) The motif is that God controls or influences every major event that happens in the novel. Providence is the glue that binds all the rather improbable scenario together. The author most likely uses motif to try and convey the symbolic message that is the story of Robinson Crusoe, that if you sin and fall from the ways of God you shall be punished. Over and over Crusoe crosses the line of right and wrong and God forgives him, only once is a small penance required before Crusoe is once again excused.

The author, Daniel Defoe, was also a Puritan during the Restoration so obviously anything he wrote would be a little biased toward the omniscience of God. Defoe most likely wanted the novel to have an understandable message about God that would be blatantly obvious to any reader.

For the outside reading project I am reading Robinson Crusoe. This was written in 1719 so the writing is a little tedious and and full of horribly unnecessary run on sentences. My copy is 482 pages long and Crusoe finally got on the island on page 70. I had a no difficulty getting in to the book because events happen so fast in the beginning that they almost trip over each other, but when he becomes stranded the pace slows way down. A strong feeling I have says I am going to have a hard a time reading the almost two-hundred and fifty pages that he is completely alone and doing nothing exciting.

Of the five literary elements the most prominent is tone. I thought it would be imagery since he talks all about the necessary things he has to build to survive, but he doesn't describe things; he lectures about them. Robinson talks very introspectively most of the novel so any of the other traits were fairly rare and it wasn't hard to choose the most dominant one. The tone is pretty much the same for large chunks of the book but when an event is about to happen or Robinson makes some intellectual breakthrough the tone suddenly shifts away rather dramatically.