Raymond-The Creep That Got Away With It

Raymond is such a creepy guy. Let's just face it, he's a total creep. He lives off of women, in more ways than one. He's a pimp, so his job and how he earns a living is based off of women, selling and advertising them more specifically. But the focus goes beyond his job. Raymond had a mistress, a Moorish woman, whom Raymond suspected of cheating and thus decides it's right for him to beat her and make her suffer.

Now let's pause here for a minute. There is absolutely no proof whatsoever that Raymond's mistress actually did cheat on him. All we have is his word. It could be that Raymond's mistress didn't realize she was "monogamous" or whatever with Raymond, and thought she had more sexual freedom. Or maybe she was actually one of Raymond's women from his job, so she had to be with other men to make a living. Or it could be that she didn't cheat at all, and Raymond just made the whole thing up! I can totally see that happening. Raymond doesn't strike me as a guy who has respect for women, which explains both his job and how he deals with his mistress. I mean, he has this whole plan to lure her back to him with a seductive letter, written by Meursault and not him interestingly enough, only to beat her. He's like an abusive Don Juan. You'd think that after having been hurt the first time around, his mistress wouldn't return to him. You'd think she'd know better. But she doesn't. She returns to Raymond, just as he planned, and the abuse is hard to miss.

What amazes me is how he gets away with it all. First off, Raymond has to have some sort of charisma to not only make Meursault write the letter for him but to make it convincing enough to have his mistress return. I would have to think that Raymond dictates the letter to Meursault to write, though it's not really that clear, because Meursault doesn't strike me as the seducing type, despite his swims with Marie. Then, his words must've been pretty convincing to make his mistress return to him. Then what happens? Raymond beats his mistress up in a public place, with many witnesses, and doesn't suffer for it at all! Once again, Meursault acts as Raymond's "pal" and covers for him with the police, but even the police fall under Raymond's charismatic spell. They take his story about how his mistress was cheating on him as a perfectly good and plausible explanation for the beating. That just really blows my mind. How is infidelity a good reason for abuse? It's so sexist too, because if Raymond's mistress had beaten him up for cheating on her, you can tell that she would be the one off to jail immediately. However, if Raymond says that it was his mistress who was cheating and that's why he beat her, then he gets off without a hitch, and an almost nod to his masculinity from the police. And that's just sickening. What's even more sickening is the fact that this not only happened in the 1940's, but still happens today. But that's a different subject all together.

Moving on to Raymond's finest achievement in the entire novel: getting away with murder.

Ok, ok I know what you're going to say. Raymond didn't actually murder anybody. True, yes, I will agree with you there. But he definitely had a hand in it. He got Meursault involved in his problems with the Arabs, and not just involved by Raymond telling him about the issues, oh no Raymond has Meursault armed and ready to fight the Arabs with him! Meursault doesn't really care about anything, and so Raymond is able to once again charismatically manipulate him into always coming to his rescue and taking his side of the story. Though Raymond did not shoot the Arab, Meursault shot him with Raymond's gun, and in a way was simultaneously ridding Raymond of his problem while also taking the blame for it. The Arab is dead, and Raymond is free to live a happy, womanizing life in the world with no threat of jail time. Meursault gets all the blame, and to me it seems like it's all Raymond's fault. He's an accomplice to the murder, definitely, but once again he gets away with it.

Happy Ending?

If you had shown me the final scene of The Metamorphosis, and just the final scene, as if it was from a movie, I probably would've awwwed and said "Aw, what a beautiful scene! Everyone looks so happy! It's all so pretty and wonderful!" However, reading the book, that last scene is far from happy. It's...dark humour in a way. I mean, it is happy that Mr. and Mrs. Samsa and Grete get to live their lives now and move on, but it's just...for one they move on way too quickly. Um, hello! Your son JUST died. You can't take off work to picnic and vacation and plan to leave immediately! True, they weren't quite so sure that Gregor was the cockroach, but if they thought that he wasn't, then where the hell did they think he was? Did they think Gregor had just deserted them? Did they think the cockroach had eaten him? The entire family speaks with Gregor at the beginning of the novel when he is a cockroach, they know he's in the room at least. So how can they just completely forget about their son, especially after all he's done for them. The family just seems ungrateful.

But I digress. Anyways, back to the final scene, there's such an underlying dark, ironic, humorous, call it what you will tone. Something just feels off. Like, you feel that the scene should be fine and happy, but it's not. Something feels wrong. And that something is the absence of caring and love. This is a family overjoyed at death. That in and of itself is just creepy. You would think they would at least show some respect to Gregor, even if they didn't know it was him. Then again, they really haven't been showing Gregor as the cockroach any respect at all. Grete tries to, but it soon becomes too much for her to deal.

I think Grete being happy at her brother's death is really one of the saddest parts of the ending of the novel. Grete really seemed to care about her brother, probably the only one in her family who did, and he cared for her back. He was going to pay to send her off to the conservatory so she could violin! And what does she do? She gives him some food for a little while, moves the furniture out, cleans up his room, but then all those little chores suddenly become too much for her? Gregor spent his life in a job he despised to provide for his family! Grete's little chores to help her brother is nothing compared to what Gregor did to support his family. I think the idea of Grete treating Gregor like a little pet is very accurate. The first couple of weeks, she really enjoys him, wants to take care of him, wants to play with him, learn everything about him, etc. But then he just becomes a pain. He always needs food, he always needs this, he always needs this, etc. It's like she got tired of taking care of him. And that's just sad.

The family's just so oblivious to everything! They can't open their eyes and see what their son has done for them! They complain about the lousy apartment Gregor chose for them, but if it weren't for him they wouldn't have been able to live in an apartment in the first place! Did the family really despise him that much?

I just can't believe that a mother and father could dislike him so. He cared for them, he truly cared for them, and he did everything he could to keep them supported. He didn't want to see his family suffer, and so he suffered for them. Why, then, can they not at least respect him for it? It seems like the parents played favorites with their children, and much preferred Grete to Gregor. There was never any talk about setting Gregor up with a woman to get married. No, it was all about work for him, and then once he was a cockroach it was "Well, what do we do with this?" With Grete, they notice how beautiful she is, how wonderful, and how she should get married.

It makes me wonder what the novel would've been like if Grete had woken up as a cockroach. She doesn't have as much duty to the family as Gregor does, but if she really is the favorite, then the family reaction would have been completely different. They would've cared for her, tried to make things better, I think, actually cope with the situation instead of just pushing it aside to a room and letting it die. I don't know. Things would've been different.

But anyways, it's just such a shame that the Samsa family can't see how much Gregor has helped them. All they can see is the trouble he's caused them, and so their celebration at his death, no matter how uplifting it may seem, is just way too off-putting and wrong. And that's what I think Kafka wants us to see. I can just see him, writing the final scene, grinning and laughing at the dark humour of it all. Gregor has always wanted to help his family however he can, and in truth, the best way to help them was to die.

What a wonderful life.

Kafka's Cockroach Communication

Once Gregor is transformed into a cockroach, he loses all sense of appearance-wise humanity. Inside, he is still the same man, just with a new perspective. Yet, he still craves love and attention from his family, and has a sense of duty towards his work. His mind hasn't stopped working, he is still thinking and desperately wants to share his thoughts with his family. If only he could communicate with them. However, with his transformation, Gregor not only loses his human appearance, but his human voice.

He tries to talk to his family, he really does, and at the beginning it seems like they at least sort of understand him.

"Gregor," someone called--it was his mother--"it's a quarter to seven. Didn't you want to catch the train?" What a soft voice! Gregor was shocked to hear his own voice answering, unmistakably unmistakably unmistakably own voice, true, but in which, as if from below, an insistent distressed chirping intruded, which left the clarity of his words intact only for a moment really, before so badly garbling them as they carried that no one could be sure if he had heard right. Gregor had wanted to answer in detail and to explain everything, but, given the circumstances, confined himself to saying, "Yes, yes, thanks, Mother, I'm just getting up." The wooden door must have prevented the change in Gregor's voice from being noticed outside, because his mother was satisfied with this explanation and shuffled off." (Kafka 5)

However, this understanding doesn't last very long.

"Did you understand a word?" the manager was asking his parents. "He isn't trying to make fools of us, is he?....that was the voice of an animal." (Kafka 10)

Still, I have to wonder, if communication really is that impossible for Gregor. It seems that if he talks really slowly, with very precise unmistakably and pronounciation, that his family can actually understand him. So why doesn't he just do that? Ok, I can understand talking like that can be a pain, and that maybe his family wouldn't stick around long enough to hear Gregor out, but there are still other ways to communicate!

Like, Gregor could've established some sort of communication with his sister at least. Since he can think, he could potentially maneuver his food around so that it forms messages, or come up with some other kind of system or code. It just strikes me that after he finds out his family doesn't understand him, he just gives up on communicating with them. Lots of issues could've been solved if he had just managed to reach them. I really think he should've spelled out something with his food, or written something on the wall or ceiling. Something! 

Just because you're a giant cockroach doesn't mean you have to stop talking to people.

Drunks and Diction

As Hemingway said himself, "The Sun Also Rises" is a book "about a few drunks." Obviously, there's a lot more to these characters than just their drinking, but I'd like to take a minute and focus on that aspect of them. First off, they're a lot more than just drunks. They are super-drunks. I mean, seriously! What is their alcohol tolerance level? Do they permanently have a constant blood alcohol level? It's absolutely insane how much all these characters drink! Like, drinking light for them is a bottle of wine, two beers, and an imitation absinthe. How can they handle that much? Are their bodies really that accustomed to that much alcohol? It blows my mind.

You have to also wonder how the hell anyone of them survive. How come none of them have died from alcohol poisoning? Even simpler than that, how come none of them ever seem to wake up with a hangover? We get snippets of them passing out, Robert Cohn especially, but very rarely do the characters seem to complain of a headache, or show any regret for their actions from the previous night. Instead, they just seem to wake up, go out, and drink some more! It's insane!

Also, what I find really insane, and also really funny, is how whenever anybody talks in the book, they talk perfectly fine. Nobody slurs! Never! Not once! No slurring! Nothing! It blows my mind, really it does. I mean, Hemingway probably didn't write them as slurring because then the entire book would be unintelligible, but still! If it had had the occasional slur...even by Robert Cohn! I mean, it's just so funny! It seems like all the characters have such a high alcohol tolerance level, that even when they're so drunk they're about to pass out, they can still have a coherent and intelligent conversation. I'd like to see "The Sun Also Rises" written with slurred words. I think it would be more accurate, and insanely hilarious.

Voice of Our Generation?

When we were first starting "The Sun Also Rises" a question was asked that I've been thinking about and meaning to write about for a while. What is the voice of our generation? We were discussing what exactly is meant by the "lost generation" to which Ernest Hemingway as well as many of his characters belonged to, with ideas ranging from all the people who died in the war to a more specific "lost generation" referring to Jake's war wound.

But anyways, what is our generation? We're not lost, we're not the baby boomers, no one's really identified us as anything specific quite yet. I mean, we're the technological generation I guess. The iPod generation, the Internet generation, the Facebook generation. There's been so much technological growth during my generation, and it doesn't show any signs of stopping yet. Almost every teenager my age has a cellphone, has a Facebook, has a laptop of their own. 20 years ago, this never would've happened, hell even 5 years ago it would've been a rarity. Does this mean that we're the technological generation and Steve Jobs is our voice?

But technology is only one aspect of it. What about politics? A lot of people have classified us as the 9/11 generation, since we were all alive for the tragedy and experienced the repercussions of it. I visited New York before 9/11, and I remember treasuring my little souvenir of the Big Apple with tiny figurines of the Twin Towers after the disaster. I in fact returned to New York very recently, and my hotel was right next to the 9/11 memorial. It was a bit of an eerie thing to see reflective pools where once the Twin Towers had stood, and to know that I had seen both before and after. I remember how airport security used to be, and now I experience the hassle of travel constantly. My life, and definitely the majority of other lives of teenagers my age has been changed by 9/11, so does that mean we're the 9/11 generation? If so, who would our voice be? George Bush?

Ugh, I would not like it if George Bush was considered the voice of our generation. I'd rather it be Obama. And it very well could be! My generation is also the Obama generation. We were all very involved in his election, and I remember sitting in the library crowding around a TV to watch his inauguration. I, and many other teenagers my age, will be able to vote in the 2012 election, and we will have such an impact, having been so involved in the 2008 election, even though we couldn't vote. So, is Obama our voice?

But what about entertainment! I would love it if Lady Gaga was the voice of our generation, and it makes sense considering the impact she's had on teens all over the world. But then again, could we be the "Glee" generation? The Disney Channel and Nickelodeon generation? The "16 and Pregnant" generation? The "Jersey Shore" generation? The list goes on and on.

I guess it's not very clear what sort of a generation we are. I'm just throwing out all sorts of ideas here. Maybe it's possible to be more than one type of generation. I don't know. I guess I'll just have to wait and see 50 years from now what historians label us as.