revision of third prompt essay

link to original: http://idontwanttogototheshowtonight.blogspot.com/2012/11/third-prompt-essay.html

1970. Choose a character from a novel or play of recognized literary merit and write an essay in which you (a) briefly describe the standards of the fictional society in which the character exists and (b) show how the character is affected by and responds to those standards. In your essay do not merely summarize the plot.

The America in which Willy Loman lives in Death of a Salesman is one that prizes respect and success over all else. It is a society that believes a man is nothing if he is not well liked, a belief Willy holds strongly, and one that has caused Willy and those close to him a great deal of dispair. Having seen the great successes of his brother and Charley, Willy is in denial, avoiding the fact that he is not particularly successful, and he overexerts himself in an attempt to achieve all-star status. His internalization of society's measure of a man's worth takes a toll on his mental stability, and drives him to lash out at his son for not striving to conquer the business world. Arthur Miller uses Willy to show how the American values have become corrupt.

Though mostly proud and boisterous, Willy shows his feelings of inadequacy a few times throughout the play. In Act One, for example, he confides in Linda: "I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don't seem to take to me... I know it when I walk in. They seem to laugh at me." (23). Earlier, when announcing his sales, he stated a very exaggerated result and meekly decremented it down to his real numbers: "I did five hundred gross in Providence and seven hundred gross in Boston... Well, I - I did - about a hundred and eighty gross in Providence. Well, no - it came to - roughly two hundred gross on the whole trip... The trouble was that three of the stores were half closed for inventory in Boston. Otherwise I woulda broke records." (22). Willy is afraid of being judged for his less-than-stellar performance, so he exaggerates his abilities and makes excuses for his shortcomings, and often says he's more respected than he is. As the play progresses, Willy's mental stability deteriorates, perhaps because of his repressed feelings of inadequacy. After losing his job in Act Two, Willy's mental stability is almost entirely gone; he is forced to confront the fact that he is not as successful as he would like to believe. He is ultimately driven to suicide (pardon the pun) to avoid the unavoidable; after his final confrontation with Biff there is no question anymore that neither Biff nor Willy are successful or important men.

Willy internalized this belief so firmly that he raised his sons by it as well. In Act One, he tells Biff and Happy "be liked and you will never want." (21). Biff says "I'm thirty-four years old, I oughta be makin' my future," which shows that the idea was at least partly instilled in him and his brother (21). So when Biff leaves for the West and becomes a drifter, Willy is unsurprisingly critical. He and Biff argue incessantly every time Biff comes home because Willy feels he is choosing to be worthless.

The fact that Willy's insistence on societal values both destroys 

 his relationship with his son and brings about his own demise is a hint that Miller believes these values to be flawed. Miller takes issue with the external validation Willy is seeking, and the successful dork Bernard is the embodiment of what Miller believes good ideals are.

ceremony analysis

yeaaah

Characters:
Tayo is the main d00d. He's half white and half Laguna Pueblo. He is trying to reconnect with his native roots with a ceremony that will cure himself and the land of ailments caused by witchery.
Grandma is supportive of Tayo. She listens when he cries and whatnot. She is full of stories, so she is possibly a Grandmother Spider character.
T'seh is a Yellow Woman character that Tayo sleeps with. She shows him Josiah's cattle.
Josiah is Tayo's late uncle and an important father figure. He raised Tayo to appreciate the land and his heritage.
Rocky is Tayo's late cousin/sort-of-step-brother. He embraced white culture fully. He died fighting in WWII.

Author:
Leslie Marmon Silko played a 'key role' in what Wikipedia calls the 'Native American Renaissance'
As a mixed-race author, she has personal experience with the things Tayo experiences.

Setting:
Post-WWII southwest USA. It flashes back to Tayo's tour in the Philippines from time to time though, or to his childhood.

Style:
The narrative is third-person omniscient, but it sort of adopts the perspective of the people it's talking about but only sort of. I don't know how to explain this. When it talks about Rocky and his embrace of white culture the narrative sort of talks with irreverence toward the native culture. And when the narrative is explaining Tayo's thoughts it speaks sarcastically about the whites. It's really cool.

Themes:
Only siths deal in absolutes. Not all things white are evil, and not all things Laguna are pure. Betonie collects cool white stuff and there was that cool white rancher, and then there are the drinky Laguna guys and their self-loathing white envy.

Plot:
Tayo, a returning WWII soldier who was on tour in the Philippines, is apparently suffering from severe PTSD. His homeland also seems to be suffering with him because of a drought that is plaguing the Laguna Pueblo people. The narrative jumps around in time so I don't know how to best summarize the plot; this explanation will probably jump around too. Tayo was previously treated in a hospital for his PTSD, but his problems still remained. His flashbacks to the death of his cousin Rocky and a hallucinated death of his uncle Josiah persist. His sickness varies in severity, so he can do things like to go the bar to drown his sorrows with his fellow Indian veterans. During one such binge, he attacks and almost kills Emo, one of the vets. Tayo's grandmother realizes white medicine isn't helping Tayo recover, so she suggests that the medicine man Ku'oosh treat Tayo with a traditional ceremony. When this doesn't work fully, Tayo is sent to Betonie, another medicine man who is mixed-race, like Tayo, and more in-touch with white culture. Betonie acknowledges that times are changing, and thusly, traditional ceremonies must change to remain effective. He performs the beginning of the ceremony and leaves the brunt of the work to Tayo. Josiah's cattle, a hybrid of Mexican and Hereford cattle, are important for a bunch of reasons so Tayo goes North to find them. He comes upon a house, and in this house lives a woman, and this woman is named T'seh. They bang, and Tayo leaves to find the cattle. They're in a white guy's pasture, so Tayo cuts a big hole in the fence to steal them back. The cows leave, nbd, but some rangers catch Tayo. The rangers leave to pursue a mountain lion, though, allowing Tayo to get off scot-free. The lion is actually the lover of the lady he stayed with earlier, and Tayo follows the cattle to their house. T'seh says she'll keep the cows there until Robert, a character of slight importance throughout the book, can come to get them. Tayo goes home, and then the police chase him, and he has to hide overnight in a mine. Emo beats Harley, Tayo's best veteran pal (by my assessment), to death to lure Tayo out, but this doesn't work. Tayo goes to Ku'oosh's hut where it is revealed that T'seh is a spirit that helped Tayo out, and then the ceremony is complete and both Tayo and the land are healed.

Quotes:
"If a person wanted to get to the moon, there was a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions..."
This is a neat quote that briefly explains some things about Laguna beliefs. I don't think it's necessarily important to the theme, but I did think it was interesting.

"You don't write off all the white people, just like you don't trust all the Indians."
This quote exemplifies the theme mentioned earlier. Betonie is acknowledging that times do change and that sometimes the truth is not... Laguna or white. (eyyyy)

no idea how many course responses I've done at this point

well here we are. Ceremony didn't suck like I thought it would. It was still pretty boring sometimes, but it wasn't because of the topic, but the style. Native culture in the novel didn't seem gimmicky, and I think that might be what turns me off about it in other works? I don't know. I liked the examination of the relationship between whites and the Laguna people.
we're starting Fifth Business now. I think the thing about Davies making up the source material for Fifth Business is pretty funny, and the book doesn't suck. The writing style is very pompous, but the narrator is a character I can make fun of so I don't mind.
I'm gonna fail the ap test let's write more prompt essays and maybe do some multiple choice