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Angry Black White Boy as a Hero's Journey Gone Wrong

            Throughout the first part of Angry Black White Boy, my emotions surrounding the book were kinda okaaay… maybe… huh, looks like this might go all right! Oh, this seems like a problem… eh, he’ll figure out something. After all, it’s a Hero’s Journey, right? Right? And towards the beginning, it seemed like it was working out. Whatever I thought of his ideology, he seemed to have one! He had an ability to galvanize people and somehow reach them. And he did make some good points.             By what I thought was the end of the exciting bit, when he is whisked away in the Deus Ex Machina, I had doubts. But I wasn’t about to give up hope yet! Maybe it looked like Macon had completely failed the Supreme Ordeal, but there was probably another thing coming up where he could, I don’t know, figure out how he relates to black people and become an actual supportive ally! Oh, I was so naïve.             How do we deal with a failed hero?             Where did his journey go off
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How Jack sees the world

I’ve read Room up to 2/3 of the way through After. This post isn’t going to go any further than that.                 Throughout After I’ve been seeing a lot of what we talked about on Friday: jamais vu, or defamiliarization. But another interesting trend I’ve seen has been our defamiliarization through Jack’s eyes to his world. As Jack learns about our world in relation to his, we learn so much about his world in relation to ours. By reacting with surprise to the new things that he finds in the normal world, Jack creates a sort of retroactive surprise about Room in the reader.                 The best example of this reaction is when Jack is changing to get ready for his first day Outside. As he dons a fresh hospital gown, Ma throws his shirt in the trash, calling it “a rag.” To Jack, who’s never known any different, his shirts are nice, or at least decent. Since we only see the world through his unreliable eyes, we only realize now how bad his clothes must have looked. This
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Who wants to live forever?

So we spent all of Thursday in class talking about Jefferson’s diary, and I don’t know about second hour, but in seventh about half the class was at least sniffling by the end of class. Nevertheless, we had a really good discussion about the chapter. We touched on questions like “Has Jefferson succeeded?” “What will Jefferson’s legacy be?” “What has Jefferson learned and what do we think about his inevitable death?” But through all of this discussion, the undercurrent was “What makes this chapter sad?” Shall we count the ways? At every level of construction, this chapter is full of aching beauty. Let’s go from the smallest building blocks up. At the word and sentence level, the chapter is a complete and obvious break from the rest of the book. Since Jefferson hasn’t learned to read and write as well as the other narrator, Grant, his journal doesn’t use correct spelling or grammar. Instead, it lacks most punctuation and spells phonetically and in vernacular. These stylist
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