AP Prompt (with answer)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/books/ants-among-elephants-a-memoir-about-the-persistence-of-caste.html

Throughout the passage, Michiko Kakutani reflects on how the book "Ants Among Elephants" reveals the true societal discourse of modern day India. In a short essay, describe how Michiko Kakutani uses literary devices to describe her complex relationship with the book "Ants Among Elephants". You may want to consider devices such as diction and tone.

       In the passage, it is made apparent how an outsider to India "looking in" might think that the old days of the Indian Hindu caste system has been completely removed or at least lessened in society. However, as much as it is a shock to Michiko, the truth is far from that point of view. In a reaction to the book "Ants Among Elephants", Michiko Kakutani uses literary devices such as diction and tone to express not only her overall shock at the continued existence of the discriminatory caste system in India, but also her empathy toward people who are discriminated against and disenfranchised.

     The evidence of Michiko using tone and diction in unison to show her reaction can be seen throughout the passage, especially in the first sentence where she describes the book as being a very 'unsentimental' and 'poignant' read. She continues on in this showing of sadness and sympathy by what she decides to reveal about the book's own text. She reveals the book's lecture on the caste system, how it works in society, and what it can create to and between people that prevents certain interactions from ever happening. Michiko starts revealing the contents of the book with the phrase (from the book) "everyone knows everyone else. Each caste has its own special role and its own place to live. The Brahmins (who perform priestly functions), the potters, the blacksmiths, the carpenters, the washer people and so on — they each have their own separate place to live within the village. The untouchables, whose special role — whose hereditary duty — is to labor in the fields of others or to do other work that Hindu society considers filthy, are not allowed to live in the village at all. They must live outside the boundaries of the village proper. They are not allowed to enter temples. Not allowed to come near sources of drinking water used by other castes. Not allowed to eat sitting next to a caste Hindu or to use the same utensils" (paragraph 2). This immediately reveals that Michiko is only showing interest in the very downtrodden parts of the book by using this early of an establishment of what we would consider a 'backwards culture'. This trend then continues when Michiko then adds the personal story of the book's author's uncle being turned down by a fair lady in college once she found out he was a lower caste than her, even though she had originally shown interest in him through her flirtations. 

     Whenever she finds the opportunity, Michiko Kakutani only seems to show the sad parts of the book to reveal her underlying empathy with the characters in it naturally trying to go against a society that is against them from the beginning. Michiko never dwells on the parts in the passage like the author's uncle being a Maoist revolutionary or anything that might invoke hatred in a reader but instead focuses on all the parts that would invoke empathy and sadness in the reader. 

Personal Reading

As a bit of a personal reading project I went ahead and tried diving back into Catch-22 from where I left it in the fall when our reading group agreed to abandon it because of it's long pages and structure. Unlike them, I actually found the book to be read rather quickly, even through the more incongruous parts. Personally, I find the book to be just as enjoyable as I did when I first started reading it. It uses so much hypocrisy and seems almost too true to real life for this aspect. Everyone has their secrets, personal quarrels, agendas, and desires that may or may not conflict with each other at any given point in time, and Catch-22 does a marvelous job of illustrating just how all of these things get in the way of the world turning and life going on in a personal sense. The book, for me, speaks volumes about the human condition, the breakdown of morals (as well as morale), and the overall desperation that comes with trying to get out of a situation that breaks men and their characters. It exactly defines what it's like to be in a war, where everything but yourself is an enemy while you're considered someone else's enemy, but you don't exist to make enemies and you don't want to make enemies. I will say I understand my fellow group-mates' plight, however, as I can't see most people understanding what exactly is being said in the story (there are times where even I have to reread some parts, and I'm rather adept I would say at reading this kind of writing). There's plenty of times, even, when the book doesn't seem to want to make sense in the first place and needs to be taken in strides. It's a book where not everything's important ( unlike what Dickens would have you believe, with his five paragraphs of describing a rock in a wheat field) and where some things are just there to be there, which makes it all the more realistic in my opinion. Yossarian, the main character, is not someone who knows why everything exists like a typical main protagonist, nor should he be if he's meant to be defined as an actual person. In fact, several of the other characters of the book are made out to be the exact same way, some of them don't even know things that their job in the story requires them to know. Joseph Heller does an amazing job with this kind of disjointed realism, and it really shines within the book's content. It goes to even further lengths to capitalize on this realism further into the book and I hope to find more of this kind of realism and witty humor in the following parts of the book.

Death of a Salesman Afterword

I will admit, this play hit me in a way that seemed a bit too close to home. The struggles of all of the characters in the book I see or have seen throughout my life expressed in several different ways and have seen reactions to similarly to those of the book's characters. Death of a Salesman not only shows these scenarios and the reactions to them, but projects the emotions and personal feelings toward those actions the characters face to the audience, reflecting just how real the situation is where someone loses everything they hold to the highest degree in their life yet still can't face that reality of everything going from perfect to abysmal. How a house of card can come crashing down so quickly, to the point where some people might not find the willpower to go on living anymore after seeing how easily everything could've been fixed if they had just done this instead or not done anything at all. Death of a Salesman plays on everyone's biggest fear: the fear of failure, regret, and losing sight of the present. This is best expressed through Willy Loman, who is the embodiment of these fears coming to fruition in a person and the most focused main character in the play. Willy has lost all of his hopes and dreams in both his family and his career. His kids seem to have thrown away the future he thought they had and felt they needed to have a sustainable standard of living, even though he knows that he was the main cause of Biff's, the elder and most promising child in Willy's mind, failure and inability to finish high school that could have been easily averted. In addition to that, Willy has not reached the prestige and honor he thought he would have in the salesmanship area of business. All of the connections he had, or thought he had, have either died or never considered him their 'friend' in the first place. On top of that, he's now too old to have any hope of making any new connections and loses his job because of it. With everything in his life going bad, Willy does the only thing anyone in the same position would do: reminisce about when everything was all well and good, ignoring the reality of the situation he's in and never even wanting to acknowledge that it exists. Unfortunately, reality has its way of coming back to hurt anybody who ignores it. Willy feels the full force of this when he finally finds the point in his life that made everything go sour and believes that there's no hope for him any more. To me, this seems exactly what kind of downward spiral most people would fall into if they were to lose every hope, dream, and overall happiness in the real world. The human brain likes to feel happiness, so what it might end up doing is bring the past that made someone happy to the forefront of their consciousness so they can see a reason to continue. This can lead to that person seemingly become out-of-touch with everyone around them and even see their own futility (which can potentially lead to trying to 'end it all' so to speak). This is why this play hit me very close to home: I've sen what happens when someone loses everything or feels like they've lost everything. Just like in the story, it never ends up being pretty at the end.

3 Questions on Author

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/books/review-american-war-omar-el-akkad.html

1. Why does the author of the passage find it necessary to include the reviewed book's author's past as a reporter who mainly focused on civil unrest, the War on Terror, and controversial torture methods so early on in the review? Does this help persuade the reader to consider the review as credible?

The reason the review's author includes the author's past with the subjects involved in the reviewed book is to simply inform the reader why and how the book's author is able to write such descriptive and alarming dialogue on the images of torture, civil unrest, drone strikes, and perpetual collective fear in order to receive the critic's reaction. It establishes the author's credibility early while also establishing the critic's credibility by showing just how much research the critic has done into the background of the author and where the author is coming from when approaching these subjects. This adds a slight amount of persuasion to the passage to convince the reader that the critique is, in fact, credible. However, it is relatively negligible as it is expected for critics to look into the background of the books they review. Effectively, all this does alone is prevent the passage from being written off as uncredible and misleading.

2. What does the critic include paragraph 4 in the passage? What does this do to the reader of the critique?

The critic includes paragraph 4 to give the flaws of the book to the reader, establishing that all though their opinion of the book is positive there are still areas where it falls short because of the basic fact that no book is entirely perfect. The author further emphasizes this by stating after the fact that these faults in writing pale in comparison to the overall world the author has created in the book. This furthers the critic's credibility to the reader since she is able to show the negatives of the book in an otherwise positive review.

3. Why does the critic include specific plot points in the review if they are trying to convince readers to read the book? Is giving parts of a book away sometimes beneficial in persuading others to read it?

The critic includes these important plot points in her review to give the reader an idea of the character's relationships in the book itself rather than fruitlessly try to explain exactly how every relationship in the book works. This allows for the reader to help draw their own conclusions on the environment of the book and just how they feel they would like reading about such an environment. Giving specific pieces of a book to readers can be beneficial in persuading readers to read a specific book when put into the right circumstances and when the critic knows to be brief about such a thing. The wording the critic uses in revealing such a point in the book is very generalized and also states that the background of the relationship between the characters is obvious (i.e. likely to come about either early in the book or can be easily expected in the environment of the book's story). However, if this kind of plot revealing gets too descriptive of the actual ending points in a book it would more than likely spoil any joy in reading it.
 

Community Read Update

While I am still reading Death of a Salesman, I decided that with the knowledge of the first act of the book in my head I would go back and reread the introduction to see if it made more sense than when I first read it. It is not that I did not read the introduction in the first place, but simply that the introduction consisted of a fair amount of 'holes' in it that seemed to require a better understanding of the book's actual story to fill in the gaps. These 'holes' were quite easily filled  by the first act and made the entire introductory passage become a lot more clear and up front about why the play was written and what Arthur Miller's motivations were in writing it. In the introduction, it is revealed that Miller wanted to write a book that referred less to the bigger picture of America and more to the details, the fine print, the 'little guy': the general population of the country. This want to write a book about such a seemingly insignificant subject in the grand steam of things was in part inspired by Arthur Miller's other hit play The Crucible and its success in the subversive telling of what McCarthyist America, an age in American history where people were 'witch hunted' for their supposed loyalty communism and when the play was written, and what that ideological pressure did to certain people and communities within the United States through a fictional story during the Salem Witch Trials (where people were similarly persecuted through faulty/biased evidence). Miller didn't want to be a playwright who only focused on political discourse and the trickle-down of that discourse into the common man's life. Instead, he also wanted to focus on how society, traditions, and ambitions directly affected the individual person's life. Miller then had to think of a way to deliver this message to the public in a more digestible form than a journalism article. He soon found it in the form of one of his uncles. During his childhood, Miller was often seen as being in competitions with one of his cousins by his uncle (the cousin's dad, to avoid confusion). Miller's uncle would often brag about the cousin's achievements in just about every way imaginable. Sports, academia, scholarships, there was no apparent end to the list of Miller's cousin's accomplishments. Miller also states in the intro that, even after his uncle just saw the premier of The Crucible with him the first words he said out of the theater was that Miller's cousin was doing well. This gave Miller the idea for the character of Willy Loman and his ambitions for himself and his boys to become rich and great like their neighbors and their relatives. Miller then goes on to mention how, after he had the character of Willy and what he strives for in life, it was simply a matter of seeing how that world would come crashing down as Willy looses hope in both himself and his dreams.