ellauri071.html on line 40: Kenosha Kid: Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow possesses an image which has intrigued readers of the novel since its introduction. Many readers come away from the novel failing to find the answer to one question: What is the Kenosha Kid? Critics have argued about the identity of the Kenosha Kid. Some have argued that it does not really exist. Instead, it is only the result of Tyrone Slothrop´s hallucinations brought on by sodium amytal (or "truth serum"). Ironically, the idea that the Kenosha Kid comes out during a dose of "truth serum" proves to be even more confusing for readers (given it may or may not really exist). Other critics have denoted the Kenosha Kid as a dance (likening it to the "Charleston" or the "Big Apple" dances).
ellauri077.html on line 800: Orwell´s confusing approach to matters of social decorum—on the one hand expecting a working-class guest to dress for dinner, and on the other, slurping tea out of a saucer at the BBC canteen—helped stoke his reputation as an English eccentric.
ellauri096.html on line 593: Maldoror is a modular (sic) work primarily divided into six parts, or cantos; these parts are further subdivided into a total of sixty chapters, or verses. Parts one through six consist of fourteen, sixteen, five, eight, seven and ten chapters, respectively. With some exceptions, most chapters consist of a single, lengthy paragraph.[b] The text often employs very long, unconventional and confusing sentences which, together with the dearth of paragraph breaks, may suggest a stream of consciousness, or automatic writing. Over the course of the narrative, there is often a first-person narrator, although some areas of the work instead employ a third-person narrative. The book's central character is Maldoror, a figure of evil who is sometimes directly involved in a chapter's events, or else revealed to be watching at a distance. Depending on the context of narrative voice in a given place, the first-person narrator may be taken to be Maldoror himself, or sometimes not. The confusion between narrator and character may also suggest an unreliable narrator.
ellauri107.html on line 466: He serenely believed that the one purpose of the real-estate business was to make money for George F. Babbitt. True, it was a good advertisement at Boosters' Club lunches, and all the varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to speak sonorously of Unselfish Public Service, the Broker's Obligation to Keep Inviolate the Trust of His Clients, and a thing called Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-class Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker, and a fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you to handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn't imply that you were to be impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn't jew you down on the asking-price.
ellauri111.html on line 458: Jesus did not die so that you could keep on sinning and then go to heaven (this is an heresy that many churches teach, especially antinomian and dispensationalist Baptists (dispensationalism is a confusing, heretical series of false doctrines)).
ellauri189.html on line 825: And finally we have non-Jews who call themselves Jews, like the Reformists, or Conservatives, and like people who went through Orthodox conversions but didn´t think about keeping the Tora for a second, yet they lied and made a big show to make rabies think they do intend to keep it. They are not Jewish. All they do by calling themselves Jews is confusing people.
ellauri192.html on line 816: The anti-capitalist message is somewhat confusing though, given that Belarus is probably the least capitalist country in Europe. Maybe it helps get the song past the censor? I have no idea what to make of this tripped-out critique of materialism and pop culture from Belarusian rock band Lyapis Trubetskoy. It’s gaudy, over-the-top and visually chaotic.
ellauri197.html on line 293: ‘How Happy I Was If I Could Forget’ is a two-stanza work where the narrator takes the reader through a series of confusing verb tenses and language choices to represent the overall lack of clarity she has for the memory that she wishes she “could forget.” The cyclical state of the stanzas’ disorganization, additionally, reflects that the narrator feels trapped in her confused loop from the memory, and the reader could finish ‘How Happy I Was If I Could Forget’ without knowing what the troubling memory is. This is yet another method of revealing the narrator’s confusion over the memory. Just as she does not know how to treat the memory, the reader does not know solid details about the memory. From start to finish then, this is a work that is structured perfectly to share and represent the narrator’s confusion.
ellauri222.html on line 195: You can see the biographical problem. From the beginning, Bellow drew on people he knew, including his wives and girlfriends and the members of his own family, for his characters. In “Augie March,” almost every character—and there are dozens—was directly based on some real-life counterpart. Most of “Herzog” is a roman à clef. Leader therefore decided to treat the novels as authoritative sources of information about the people in Bellow’s life. When Leader tells us about Jack Ludwig and Sondra Tschacbasov, he quotes the descriptions of Gersbach and Madeleine in “Herzog.” In the case of the many relatives with counterparts in “Augie March,” this can get confusing. You’re not always sure whether you’re reading about a person or a fictional version of that person.
ellauri257.html on line 419: Upon the 2009 American release (of the book, after the film of course, this is America), Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington Post that Pornografia "seems as sick, as pathologically creepy a novel as one is ever likely to read. In some ways, it resembles a rather more polymorphously perverse version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses or one of those disturbing fictions by European intellectuals that blend the philosophical with the erotic: Think of Georges Bataille's The Story of the Eye or Pierre Klossowski's Roberte Ce Soir. ... Through its sado-masochistic material and its almost Henry Jamesian analyses of human motives, Pornografia underscores Gombrowicz's lifelong philosophical obsession: the quest for authenticity." Dirda continued: "Certainly, most readers will find Pornografia perturbing, or worse: repulsive, confusing, ugly. As Milosz once said of Gombrowicz: 'He had no reverence whatsoever for literature. He derided it as a snobbish ritual, and if he practiced it, he attempted to get rid of all its accepted rules.'"
ellauri266.html on line 290: Actors did a great job. However, the movie was slow and confusing with no explanation or reason.
ellauri283.html on line 114: Beyond the Heavens is a very ethereal and mystical experience, one unlike any other movie we have reviewed. However, this is not a good thing. The ‘plot’ is very unclear and murky, consisting of vague and meandering ideas and cryptic dialogue. It’s like Corbin Bernson is winking at the audience with every scene, waiting to reveal some great secret, but it’s never revealed. The whole has a very tip-of-the-tongue feel, like the characters know something you don’t but never intend to let you in on the secret. As the characters wax eloquent and philosophize about the true nature of reality, the viewer is left, in the end, with a more confusing view of reality than before. Is Bernson advocating for or against Darwinism? Is he a creationist? Does he really believe that angels come to earth on the tails of comets? Is Bernson suggesting that reality is not what it seems? If so, what is his view of reality? Only God knows the answers to these questions as Bernson spends 90 minutes toying with his ‘big reveal’ and dancing around whatever his philosophical worldview is. It’s basically just a waste of your time.
ellauri389.html on line 77: All this lexical play upon the word "china" that Elia performs has an imperial logic: it lets a teacup metonymize the East Asian empire. Porcelain collecting is a way of possessing the country, as porcelain purchasers such as Elia display a piece of China earth in British domestic space, offering everyday access to another exotic world every time he indulges in a cup of proverbial British tea. Deliberately confusing his cup's porcelain glaze with "the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay" Elia imperially assumes the painted pictures on his teacup to be a telescopic vision of China itself ("for so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue").
xxx/ellauri224.html on line 341: What was this book even about??? The "narrator" kept jumping around with what he was talking about, quite a few times I had no idea who was speaking, and what was the point of all the billionaires? They had absolutely nothing to do with the story! It took 104 pages of confusing and pointless narrative for the guy to tell the girl (after 40 years of knowing her, no less) that he wanted to be with her. This might have been one of the most anti-climactic love stories I have ever read. The secondary characters seemed completely irrelevant to the plotline and it appeared that their only function was to take up printable space. The story was unimaginative, lacking in depth, and devoid of anything memorable. The only reason I bothered to finish it was to get one step closer to finishing my goodreads reading challenge, else I would have ditched it at page 20.
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