Thursday, January 15, 2015
The American Male: Age Ten Response
The paragraph that I chose to respond to begins "It happened to be Colin's first day of fifth grade." I was torn between responding to this paragraph and one a few paragraphs up, but I ultimately decided on this one because I feel that this one shows more than it tells. This paragraph gets deeper under the surface of the serious topics that still float among childhood naivety and it shows how they mix together in really stark ways. Throughout the piece, the narrator's voice is very childlike to reflect Colin's childlike thoughts and opinions, with low diction and simple sentence structure exemplifying that. Phrases like "he is brave" as a complete sentence, followed by an example about how huge jungle cats that he claims to roam his neighborhood do not scare him show the childlike voice and also show the exaggeration of ten-year-olds. But in this passage it brings the reader to a more serious place with huge questions sitting in the consciousness of children but not yet understanding of their weight. In discussing AIDS and HIV, an extremely heavy topic that a ten-year-old would have no reason to understand the seriousness of, a childlike imagination comes back to semi-lighten the heaviness, but also make the reader strangely uncomfortable, by asking whether or not falling in a pool of blood would spread the disease. The reader is aware of how serious this topic is and it puts us on edge because we know that these children don't understand the serious topic that they're throwing around casually, and it puts the reader further into the mind of a child. This also happens when abortion is mentioned; Colin is not old enough to understand the huge and tireless debate surrounding abortion, so he throws it around as if it were just another option that comes along with pregnancy, with no malice or shame attached to it. This childlike innocence to heavy topics really grounds the reader with a time that we were that innocent or a time that we have experienced another's childlike innocence in a jarring way. Susan Orlean describes these instances as "jolts of sobriety in the midst of rank goofiness" and what this does is bring the reader into the mind of Colin, the American male at age ten.
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I like how you critically analyzed Orleans’s writing style like how it shifts to childlike diction to reflect Colin’s.I agree that this narrative does allow us to look back in our past to when we were children and conveyed this “young, wild, and free” idea; back to the time that we questioned serious topics that were bigger than us.
ReplyDeleteLike you pointed out, kids this age don’t really understand heavy topics such as abortion or HIV/AIDS. Nonetheless, Colin pitches these topics without really understanding them and I love how Orleans included that in her narrative.
On a whole, I like your commentary on this short narrative. You introduced compelling points that further examined the implications of youthful innocence and how the tone/writing style reflects that.
Clever title!
ReplyDeleteI totally agree! I was going to choose this paragraph too because it stuck out so much to me. I really like how you touched on the fact of these kids talking about such serious topics so nonchalant and how it made Colin a much more childlike character. I also really like how you did a lot of deep analysis into such small sentences like "he is brave". I found that to be quite compelling as well!