Thursday, October 3, 2013
Hating Hate is Good?
Harry Mulisch's novel, The Assault, eludes to blurred lines and stark contrast between light and dark as well as love and hate. Anton Steenwijk is taken to jail as a child and meets a prisoner whom tells young Anton of a poem she was thinking of writing. This women wanted to write of the "light people have inside them"(38), but instead of continuing further with information on her poem, she reveals information about light and darkness/hate. "Hate is darkness" (38) she says, but then reveals that "we've got to hate Fascists"(38) and everything is fine with that, making the distinction between good vs bad or light vs darkness obscure. The difference between the light and the dark may not always be clear, however, the detainee clarifies that they "hate in the name of the light, whereas they hate only in the name of the darkness" (38), thus protecting her reason to hate the Fascists. Hate comes at a price though. To fight the dark hate, the people considered light must "become a little like them (the people considered dark)" (38) and ultimately "become a little bit unlike ourselves" (38), thus immersing the light into darkness or the in-between state of gray. In order to combat the opposite of anything you must lose a bit of yourselves and become more in the likeness of your enemy.
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Your word choice is well thought out and the sentence fluency is incredibly well structured. There are however some minor tweaks you could make to improve them,
ReplyDelete1) You could make a smoother transition between the first and second sentence by inserting another sentence to help with the transition. Such as "This contrast can be seen when Anton is taken to jail.....
2) Your final sentence feels out of place I would suggest removing it.
3) You tend to use reveal a lot I would suggest switching it out with a synonym such as uncovers, divulges, etc
You should focus more on the so what clause and better explain what you have pulled from the novel
You could focus more on diction and word choice and tone when analyzing the novel, why did the author write it like that, what is he/her trying to convey through their writing style
Overall your post was really interesting and good, I especially enjoyed your title it was incredibly creative and stood out from the rest of the blogs, it hooked me, also you did a good job of employing MLA format and of using the active voice, you also analyzed the passage quite well