Author: lmahoney

Overall, I have mixed feelings about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oskar Wao. There were certain things, such as the footnotes and genres, that I really liked about the novel however there were some things that bothered me. First, Diaz’ use of footnotes and genres was really entertaining because it  not only gave insight into the… Continue reading Oskar Wao

While Oskar seems like an unreliable narrator in parts of the novel, I still thoroughly enjoyed the novel as a whole. One theme that I found in the novel was the importance of human bonds and connections. Characters in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, specifically Oskar and his granparents, cope with disaster and… Continue reading Connections in EL&IC

While the man and the boy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road certainly experience traumatic events, I feel like they do not succumb to trauma itself. They experience intense emotions such as sadness, fear, and even terror but they do not let these emotions and traumatic events cloud their judgement. Instead of succumbing to post traumatic… Continue reading Trauma in The Road

Parable of the Sower, with its pervasive violence and degradation of a futuristic world, reminds me of a movement in the 1990s called In-yer-face theatre. While Parable of the Sower is in fact a novel, it still contains similarities with this kind of drama. In-yer-face theatre is “the kind of theatre which is blatantly aggressive… Continue reading In-Yer-Face

The idea of death seems to be a recurring theme in White Noise. We see this theme through the characters, several of whom have a terrifying fear of death specifically, Babette and Jack. In fact, the question “who will be the first to die” occurs several times throughout the novel. Babette discusses this fear when… Continue reading Death As a Theme in White Noise

DeLillo writes, while Jack Gladney and his family are shopping in a busy supermarket, that “I realized that the place was awah in noise…and over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension” (36). Four our class assignment,… Continue reading Messages in the Mundane

One idea that really bothered me in Lucifer’s Hammer was its portrayal of women. Pournelle and Niven, who are clearly authors of their time, merely portray women as promiscuous and unlikable secondary characters in the novel. This is especially seen in characters such as Maureen Jellison, Marie Vance, and Loretta Randall. First, there is Maureen… Continue reading Thoughts on Lucifer’s Hammer

Adding on to our class discussion of the significance of the scenes in Hammerlab, I think the astronauts’ discussion was important. In the novel, they discuss the fragility of the Earth. Niven and Pournelle even add a quote by Robert Heinlein saying that “The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the… Continue reading Man’s Ingenuity in Lucifer’s Hammer