the jumping frog response

Taylor Cole
A.P. English
Ms. Brown
The Jumping Frog
The jumping frog story demonstrates realism by expressing the author’s opinion on the politics of this time. Mark Twain showed this by using a southern alliterate man talk about an old childhood friend of his who always betted on everything it was almost like he never thought before he made his actions. For example, a farmer’s wife was very ill and everyone seems to be very optimistic about her getting better but then he says I bet she won’t. This really showed realism to me because he didn’t try to sugar coat this in any way, he gave it in a this is what I know will happen and I’ll even bet on it to prove it type of way.
In the sense of expressing his political views the main character, Smiley’s dog was named Andrew Jackson, who was of course the president around this time. Andrew Jackson’s character in this story was to let dogs tear him up until the very end of the fight when he chops at their legs and makes them numb so they won’t be able to move when he finally attacks. But one day the dog thinks his old coping mechanisms during a fight are always going to get him a win, but this one dog has no hind legs. This gives Mark Twain’s real thoughts on Jackson, he feels as if Jackson thinks he can always have victories based on his own traditional ways but when the tables are turned a little differently and everything doesn’t go as planned he doesn’t know what to do and he dies out. And Twain is very straight to the point about this subject too, he leaves no details out and he makes it clear of what type of president he thinks Jackson is, and also what type of mind set that he thinks the U.S. has for voting for putting him in office, kind of like how sure Smiley is of him.
The other political view he gives us is with the jumping frog, named Daniel Webster is the jumping frog who always wins the bets. He always wins these bets because he is trained to do so. But then the same kind of twist happens with him as it did with Andrew Jackson. I feel like Smiley was supposed to be symbolizing the U.S. because once he turned his back on Webster he became full of himself and couldn’t win any bets anymore. I also think it crazy how Smiley leaves his frog with a complete stranger to go find another frog for his opponent. He was so sure that he was going to win that he could leave his most prize possession alone with his competition. It is also significant in the end when he finally realizes why his frog didn’t win, and he spit up all the crap the other man fed him. The typical reaction is for him to go running after the guy who did this but in reality he should blame himself. It’s ultimately showing that the people see the flaws of the people that they’ve voted into to higher rank position and automatically want to blame that person or other people that was of that persons influence. But in reality Twain feels as if they should be blaming themselves.

Young Goodman Brown

Young Goodman Brown Summary
This story is quite confusing in the beginning because I don’t understand why Goodman is going on a journey and why does his wife, Faith, has a bad feeling about it. He even seems to have a bad feeling about it himself. Now as he starts to travel into the wood I become a little confused myself but what I did take from it was that he was with the devil and didn’t have the slightest clue. Little does he know that this trip will change his whole life.
I think he thought he was on this trip to better his spiritual journey, but instead he ends up very confused and alone. He thinks that everyone around him is the perfect Christians and he want to become more like them. He probably thinks this trip will help but he doesn’t know he is with the devil. And in the middle of the journey the devil leaves him alone and he makes a discovery on his own. He finds that the “church” people come into this dark and un heard of woods.
The reason that they come is so that they can have communion and be converted but young Goodman can’t seem to grasp the concept of them coming into the dark unsafe woods. He starts to lose hope and calls on his wife, Faith, and ,even hears her voice faintly scream back. And it turns out that he finds Faith is there with the rest of the “Christians”. They are all there worshiping the devil and being converted into evil doers. He can’t even believe that he sees his wife their along with all the other pure and innocent people he looked up to. He tries to tstop the whole ceremony and calls Faith so that she will resist the devil and all of a sudden everyone disappears in the blink of an eye. Goodman ends up back home and it seems like everything was a dream, but when he gets back everyone ignores him even after his death.
This story is representing a man who is over come by hypocrites and he doesn’t even know it until he of course catches them in the act. And I think that Faith represents his actual faith that he was in God and when he tries to save his faith he loses the popularity of his people. Sometimes when you do the right thing people won’t respect you for it. I just think the story goes to show that not all the people we give all this praise to are the perfect people.

Tom Walker and the devil

The devil and Tom Walker is a very ironic story. The story begins with a history lesson about how a man by the name of Kidd the pirate left behind this great treasure, this treasure is taken over by the “black man” which in this case is the devil. But year’s role past and there is this man named tom who seems to be going thru a rough patch in his life. It almost seems like him in his wife need to be in the middle of a divorce, which is ironic because I don’t even think divorce was created around at this time. Any who he stubbles into the devil one day and comes across a large lump sum of riches. And we all know the trick to making a deal with the devil and riches. It’s never going to turn out fair.
Tom is a different kind of man, although he is not portrayed that way in the story. Ironically he goes home to the wife that he can’t stand and asks her what he should do. She of course says that he should sell his should to the devil so that they can be wealthy for the rest of their days. He disagrees with her purposely, anything to make her mad since he dislikes her. So she decides to take matters into her own hands. This is not the typical action for a woman in these days but she gets some confidence and decides to approach the devil. He ends up murdering her or making her disappear and no one ever hears from her again.
Tom is very pleased with what the devil did, and decides to make a closer relationship with the devil. I don’t understand the motive behind this action. I personally think that the devil purposely set this up. His plan was to kill the wife and then he knew it would bring him and tom closer. The devil proposes the whole sell your sell deal to Tom once again. At first Tom seems to fight the temptation, because the devil once him to be a slave holder. This is ironic to me because he is known as the “black man” so wouldn’t this make him African American? Anyway this slave deal doesn’t get him, but the next thing he offers is becoming something like a crook. So Tom sells his soul and starts cheating people out of their money but of course they don’t know. Times have gotten rough and they have no one else to turn to but Tom. He becomes a very wealthy man because of this but all of these riches mean nothing. His conscious begins to get haunted and he decides that he wants to become a full fledged Christian. His gut feeling tells him he should do this, but he should know that once you’ve sold your soul there is no way out.
This is different because Tom was a man who was not of superstitions but now he keeps a bible everywhere he goes. But one day not even the bible can save him. He ends up cheating the last person he can cheat and it was a poor old man who really didn’t deserve it. But some sort of evil side came out of Tom and in the blink of an eye the devil was at the door to take him to hell. I believe the moral of this story is: it doesn’t matter how many earthly riches you have it won’t do you any good in the afterlife. The whole story he and his wife were debating their souls over materialistic things. It just goes to show how much people will do for the hope of being rich

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the house of Usher is about a horror story. I think it was made to shake you up because it did indeed scare me. Just reading it made me feel as if I was there every step of the way and the author used good pathos because the feeling was definitely there. Don’t get me wrong I did enjoy the story it was just some nightmare to it.
The beginning of the story made you a little confused at first because you have this guy riding on a horse and stopping at a place that sounds like a night mare. It took me a minute to start really following the story plot. What I finally got from it was that there is this guy visiting this old friend of his named Roderick, and this old friend of seems to be sick. He has an illness that just seems to be insanity to me at first but it really is just the fear of his own home. It seems that his family has a history of never passing to the next generation, but he does live at home with his sister whom we later find out is his twin.
While the narrator is staying with his friend he helped to brighten his gloomy days by just spending genuine time with him. The house does tend to creep the narrator out from time to time also, but he doesn’t let it get to him that bad. The longer he says with his friend the weirder things get. His friend twin sister soon dies and he wants to bury her in the basement underground so that people won’t try to dig her up and study her. So they bury her and as time goes by things get really scary.
They are having a regular weird night at the mansion and then all of a sudden things get crazy. One night they see a strange fog coming from the bottom of the house and they don’t know hats going on. So the narrator thinks fast and tried to read Roderick a story to keep him calm so they can eventually fall asleep. Roderick is having other thoughts and starts blurting out about how his sister wasn’t dead and that she was buried alive! So the narrator of course doesn’t believe this and blows the whole thing off until his twin sister really does burst thru the door!
In the end the narrator gets out of that night mare of a place. The house ends up crumbling to the ground as soon as he leaves. I think that it is ironic that he made it out just in the nick of time. It makes me think that maybe he was the reason that the house didn’t fall apart. Maybe his friend was so urgent about sending him a letter to get him there because his positive energy would keep the house standing for a little while longer.

The Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Taylor Cole
AP- English
10-08-09
The Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
This particular story just gave you the brief over view of how hard life was for slaves. It also goes to show that just because you were a fair skinned slave doesn’t life is going to be a piece of cake. In this story we walk thru life with a fair skinned slave who from what it seemed at first had the perfect life. She soon realizes that she is a slave and life seems to go downhill from there.
After her initial slave master dies she is thrown into a situation which is out of her control. She is to live with the children in law of her old slave master and this life isn’t anywhere close to as nice as her old life. She has to adjust to a total new life of actually doing real slave work. She witnesses some of the most violent slave beatings she’s ever seen. But she indeed has to get used to this because this is the treatment slaves “deserve”.
She ends up losing her father, and she expects her mistress to let her grieve. She doesn’t understand the slave life. The simple fact of considering herself as a human being is a privilege. At any moment she can be taken away from her position in the house. She finds it very hard to live under these conditions, sometimes she might not get to eat. Luckily she had her grandmother who is a great asset to the community when it comes to food. But thru all of this she does get to encounter the evilness of the human nature of the slave master and mistress.
As she gets older other trials come her way, like her grandmother getting sold into freedom. This was a great blessing to her grandmother but in a sense it was a curse to the girl because she no longer has a source of food, nor does she have someone to run to when she needs love and understanding. And if I thought adolescence was a stretch in this day in age, than is definitely was worse for slave girls. Her becoming a woman on her own had to be a struggle. She was already a beautiful girl and her being fair skinned didn’t help. This made her master more attracted to her and this made her an easy target so that he can molest her. She had already witnessed other situations where maybe a master had took advantage of a slave girl and got her pregnant. She knows that no good will come of this but there is nothing she can do about it.
I know that this slave girl’s story is not a pity story but a informational story that will hopefully make people want to help the slaves. She even shouts out to the people living in the north at the end, people that could have possibly helped need to know the graphic story. They needed to see how it felt to be a slave every step of the way. They needed not to count the house slaves out because they did have it just as bad as any other slave in the fields.

Aren't I a Woman?

Taylor Cole
AP-English
9-28-09
“Aren’t I a Woman?”
I am very inspired by Sojourner Truth’s “Aren’t I a Woman?” She was very brave to be speaking her mind so thoroughly at this time in history. She is speaking of how African American women get different treatment than white women. Now as we all know back then it was common for black women to be treated of lower class than whites, but Sojourner thought to bring it to everyone’s attention since they we’re trying to stress women’s rights they might as well stress if for everybody including blacks.
She went into detail about how she goes thru daily struggles that white women don’t even have nightmares about. She can handle pain like a man and even eat as much as much as a man or more but she still isn’t even considered a woman. She used pathos and very descriptive words when she told of how she had to watch all thirteen of her kids which she gave birth to almost be sold in to slavery. I felt her pain, she felt as if only God can hear her cries. She doesn’t see how she can go above and beyond for things and still not considered a woman.
I like how she gets straight to the point with facts and continues to repeat her question of aren’t I a woman? I know it has to make people really sit back and think about how much African American woman go thru. She makes the point if white people naturally having the upper hand, and would it be such a burden just to help out the less fortunate for a change. I also like how she flip script on the men who said that women shouldn’t be treated with respect because Christ wasn’t a woman, but it takes a woman to deliver a boy so that it can become a man. I also have a though that they shouldn’t b comparing men to Christ, because just because Christ was a man doesn’t mean that man should be treated like Christ.
As for the re-written copy of Sojourner Truth’s speech, I feel like that was disrespectful. She has her speaking as the typical uneducated black woman. Why does the typical black woman have to talk like an ignorant slave? I think that Sojourner had haters back then because white woman might have been jealous that they didn’t have enough courage to stand up for their rights earlier in the past. I know it is a good argument because she could have presented herself that way. I just can’t believe that she would do something like that, if she had enough respect to stand up for her rights and demand them then I know she had more respect for herself then to go out and speak as if she had no education.

Spontaneous Me

Taylor Cole
AP-English
Spontaneous Me
Spontaneous Me is a poem talking about a number of subjects. This male author doesn’t want to be the typical male macho author when it came to writing a love poem. In a way this poem kind of confuses me as to what he is talking about. Though I will say he was very descriptive with whatever he did.
In the beginning it seemed as if he was describing a beautiful day. He described it so well that I wanted to be there myself. He wanted to stay away from the typical male poem, so when it came to love he left out no details. It seemed as if he was describing making love to the love of his life. He talked about the images that popped into his mind while this was going on.
He talked of lots of beautiful things like how every curve of her body was an aspect of love. It showed that he cherished every part of her body and he took none of it for granted. He talked of how he would lay and cuddle with his love and how peaceful and serene it can be. He feels so attached to her.
As he gets into the subject of them parting, the story takes a twist. He begins to get into a negative drone. He speaks of a motherless child and other lonely scenes. This shows how much he is in love with this woman. He is more than mentally and physically attached. It’s almost like he gets depressed just thinking about it. He places a dark image and feeling in your head , for example a dead leaf hitting the ground.
It begins to sound like he can’t live without her. He even sounds as if he wants to start a family with her. He is so deeply in touch with her, my only concern is does she feel the same. He really doesn’t speak of the mutual feelings they have. I wonder if there is a reason for that.