Caged Birds Long for Freedom
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
History
is defined as a series of past events that are connected to someone or
something, including their triumphs and failures. Thus it is natural for the
history of mankind to repeat itself, influencing the way the next generation
learns on how to live and act to their surroundings. It challenges people on a daily basis to either deny or accept society’s
misconceptions of them, Society in other words, helps or hinders the creation
of that person's identity.
For the past few weeks, my classmates and
I have been reading and analyzing one Richard Wright's popular works of
literature, Native Son. The novel is compromised into three books - “Fear,”
“Flight,” and “Fate” - whose contents are established by Bigger Thomas’s
development as a black man who's constricted by his environment’s white
conformity. To quickly summarize, Bigger Thomas a twenty year old black male
living in the community of Chicago during the 1930's suffers greatly from the
racism and oppression forced upon him. As a result, his personality developed
into one of irrationality, predatory and anxiousness. For the lack of a better
term, he's caged. The white community during the time saw Bigger's caged self
as a joke, a joy to their daily lives as they watched him cry. They viewed his
crying as music to their ears, loving the way the minorities (blacks) during
the time period suffer. Heartless I know.
From the
very beginning, the point of this blog point was to answer, how does culture help or hinder the creation of someone's
identity? The answer is this:
To see
whether a person’s identity is shaped by his/her culture, we need to understand
what culture consists of and what the characteristics of a personal identity
are. Since we are social beings, our knowledge, beliefs and behavior are
acquired from the social group we live in. We have inherited our ancestors’
discoveries, beliefs and customs which have been gathered and altered
generation after generation and to which we will add up new elements for the
generations to come. Thus,
culture has a major role in shaping our identity; however, does that bring us to the conclusion that all
individuals living in the same culture end up having the same identities? Such an assumption is quite traumatic, for it reduces
us to robots and denies the fact that a person is a “being” that has self
awareness, is of a dynamic nature and is in interaction with its community. Not
only are we part of our society, but we are also living beings that exist by
themselves, through introspection.
5 comments
I love your blog it is set up differently and gives the reader a detailed analysis of Native Son by Richard Wright. However, I feel like you could have talked a little less about the details of Native Son and more about how culture hinders or help form someone’s identity. When I started reading your post, it was unclear about what you were talking about. In my opinion, starting with how culture forms someone’s identity and giving more detail on that and less about Native Son would make your blog post stronger. I did enjoy getting a feel for your understanding of the novel and how you connected it to how culture formed the main character Bigger Thomas’s identity. My only advice would be to next time start with what the topic of your blog is and then lead in to your analysis!
ReplyDeleteThe way your blog is set up is so neat, I love it! Your ideas and claims prove that you have spent a great amount of time working on it and its really great. I loved how detailed you were with summarizing Native Son, I think that would be helpful to anyone who has not read the novel (yet) which could help them understand your points of view. You had really good word choices as well which strengthened your post and great transitions but I do agree a little bit with Rose, using more details or information on how culture forms or affect one's identity will strengthen your post!
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to your next post!
Oh I loved the title as well 😊
DeleteI love reading you posts, everything is so structured, neat, yet vibrant and catches the eye. I feel that you give us a little but of everything, from explanation of the book, answering the question, outside information, and quotes. And you manged to make everything flow smoothly and neatly. One thing that I particularly liked about this post was your analysis of the book Native Son, and how you picked out such a tiny detail from the book that many have overseen and probably did not think anything of it and made it into something so much more. Even though the post is a lot, it does not seem like it, because everything connects to one another. Fantastic job! Looking forward to more.
ReplyDeleteYour posts have thus far been very intellectual and thought out. They did not seem like you did them in one night! For this one, I particularly enjoyed the transition into answering the actual question! The way it was brought to the racism connections to the pigeon and then the cultural identity was fabulous. You made great metaphors too, which only helped the understanding of this post. One thing to focus on would be punctuation and grammar mistakes, mostly with the lack of commas that could've been there. Other than that, it was enjoyable!
ReplyDelete