Multiethnic Literatures in the U.S.

Aloft, a novel by Chang-Rae Lee starts up with the main character, Jerry Battle, flying over the Long Island area. The first chapter sets up the book and just talks about Jerry Battle and focuses a little bit on how he started flying and how he acquired his airplane.
The first thing that I notice is that flying for Jerry Battle is an escape from reality. Even when in the first couple of pages he talks about what he sees. He describes a couple of things and it looks almost like chaos on the ground and a complete opposite in the air, peace, comfort, and order in a way. He needs something to get away from all of it, just like everyone else. We all tend to look for something peaceful, something that takes the world chaos and makes it peaceful, it is just what people like to do in their free time, many people do sports, listen to music, and a lot of other things. This separation from the real world makes life easier to go by, at least in my opinion. Jerry Battle in general doesn’t seem to be worried about anything anymore, and for some reason I think that everyone would want to live his life, not worrying about anything. He gets up in the morning and does whatever he wants throughout the day. However, it is almost like a dream, it is almost impossible for a regular person in the middle class society to retire in the late 40, maybe even late 50, and do whatever they want without carrying about the world around them. But Chang-Rae Lee shows that kind of life. However, on the other hand is that Jerry Battle does not seem to appreciate what he has. I think that if someone was striving for the kind of life he has, they would act in a different way.
Also Jerry Battle seems to be like any other person in real life. He might be considered to be in a higher social class because of where he lives, because he is already retired and is only in his late forties, and some other things. He seems to be like any other person in our world in the upper-middle class or maybe even in the upper class of society. He can buy a plane, he has put his kids through the Ivy League school, and he has also been taking care of his dad’s business. Jerry Battle’s wealth could be because of his dad’s successful business, which was passed on to Jerry. It seems that even nowadays a lot of people become rich due to their parent’s wealth which got passed on. There are very few people who actually become wealthy out of nowhere.
I think that Chang-Rae Lee tries to set up the book in the way that the main character is both like us and at the same time different from the ordinary man, however, ordinary might be different for everyone.

Parable of the Talents
By: Octavia E. Butler
Dave McAndrew

I was really disappointed while reading Parable of the Talents. I thought it was just another Parable of the Sower. As a matter of fact I would say it is just like it. The passage I was assigned is just like the passage everyone else was assigned. It’s the circle the book has been driving down since we started Parable of the Sower. After being interested in the first book and then losing interest by the end, I was not so thrilled in reading Parable of the Talents. Octavia Butler tries hard to keep you interested in the book by putting shooting and rape into a passage after you have already lost interest.
I thought of the passage as a huge circle. Lauren is this girl that speaks of change, yet doesn’t want change. She knows that the building of Acorn could be a positive step to a new life, yet doesn’t allow anything but Earthseed to be taught. Therefore, no change was taking place. I related the passage I read to everyday life. There are some that think everything that is happening now is good, and some that think change is what makes things better. Lauren’s positive change came when she was reunited with Marcus, this would have been a great step to take to rebuild what she had before. Yet she doesn’t think so since Marcus wants to preach Christianity and doesn’t believe in her religion.
Lauren wasn’t taking any steps for a positive change. She was living with what she had, although things are going to change. She had a child named Larkin, no matter what she didn’t want to change, it was going to happen. Bankole was offering Lauren a better life in a new community, but she wouldn’t leave Acorn and Earthseed behind. She didn’t want to teach anyone another points of view or religion. She was “stuck” and she wasn’t going to do anything different. I didn’t like certain parts of the book because there was nothing really going on, nothing was happening.
The thing that caught my eye the most was this “Choose you leaders, with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward, is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool, is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.” Lauren didn’t want anyone to choose their own leaders, she was their leader and that was the end. I thought of Lauren as a coward throughout the whole book because she didn’t choose the better life with Bankole in Halstead over Acorn. I would consider her a fool because I thought Jarret was running her in some way or another. She kept people in Acorn just to soon be defeated.
I summed it up into a circle like I said in the beginning. I knew what was happening before I read this passage, while reading it I thought of what was next before it happened. In my opinion it’s not a great way to write a book. I don’t write books so I may not know.

In the first chapter of Parable of the Talents, by Ocatvia E. Butler, Lauren has a conversation with one the surviving members of the Dovetree family, Aubrey. They talk about the attack on the Dovetree’s house, killings, and the destruction. Aubrey started talking about the description of the attackers and the way they acted.

“…attackers were men, but they wore belted black tunics – black dresses, she called them – which hung to their thighs.”
“They all wore big white crosses on their chests – crosses like in church.”

These two phrases sound all too familiar. They sound like a description of cloths that Ku Klux Klan wear, however, it is not. The current Ku Klux Klan is white robes with a variation of red or black cross on the chest or back area. The people who Aubrey talks about were black tunics with red crosses. This illustrates to me that the whole country, nation, is back to where we were when the Ku Klux Klan could walk the streets and literally kill people who they thought were not fit in their society. However, this might be not be the case since these people wear black tunics, which might show that it is similar to what has happened in our history, it is not the same, but very closely related. I once heard someone say something similar to, “For every country to move forward, it needs a revolution once in a while.” Revolutions happen when something drastic happens where people do no like what is being done (in a simple way). “Desperate times call for drastic measures.” When there is a revolution the nation is pretty much is set to the beginning. New rulers need to be put in place, new laws have to created, and new ways of living have to be established. In Parable of the Talents, this isn’t the case. Even thou they don’t call the people who attacked Dovetrees Ku Klux Klan, they are. We are back at the begging and things are going to go bad again. This is another circle of life which repeats itself, different time same concept.

“Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, ‘simpler’ time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same god, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country.”

There was a time when all this was considered the right thing to do, however, it was never established as a law in a society we live in today. Taking this phrase and looking at the present state of the United States religion, there is no way US will ever be “taken back to that magic time of one religion.” US is one the religiously diverse nations and that cannot be taken away from a nation like the United States of America.

In the novel, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, the characters and other inhabitants of the future United States face an all too familiar world of little access to essential resources. This world in which it is difficult to obtain an income, food, and adequate medical care is not all that foreign if compared to today’s society. Today, those who are not on the top of the social class hierarchy deal with limited access almost daily. They fight to obtain a job in which will pay enough for them to get out of debt, they struggle to obtain healthy foods (without having to travel long distances), and they attempt to gain adequate and affordable healthcare and justice. This is exactly the picture that Butler paints in her novel, except that instead of only affecting the poor, it sweeps the country on a large scale, making a full life even more difficult to obtain.

            One of the first and most obvious things that the characters in Butler’s world do not have is access to money. The only money they are able to obtain is by either stealing or by taking money from the dead. If any characters are able to hold a job, it usually does not pay enough for them to support a family or to buy necessities to live on. Butler writes, “Wages – surprise! Were never enough to pay the bills” (288). Even when people were able to earn some type of wages, they couldn’t afford water and food. These kinds of occurrences are strikingly familiar to today’s world. Jobs that pay a low salary never quite get people out of debt. They also leave people with a low amount of money to buy food. Another similarity between this fantasy world and our current one is the distance people are made to travel to obtain food. Butler’s characters cannot find adequate stores that sell food and clothing at affordable prices. This is not a far off idea if the poorer areas of cities today are closely examined. People must travel further distances in order to buy the things they need, much like the people in Butler’s world. This problem of access to resources is what sets classes apart from each other in today’s society, and unfortunately, in Butler’s world, this lack of access is what keeps Lauren and her followers on the streets.

            In addition to not having access to money and proper food, the characters in Butler’s world do not have access to medical care or to the criminal justice system. Doctors and hospitals are long gone and the people are left to either not receive medical care, or to simply make due with that they have. Along with no medical care, these people cannot depend on the police for assistance. Often the police charge outrageous prices for routine investigations or worse, they don’t respond to a call for days. Again, while these situations might seem shocking to think about, they are going on in the world today. In poor areas of the city, police many times are slow to respond; if they respond at all. With Bankole’s situation, Butler writes, “The deputies all but ignored Bankole’s story and his questions. They wrote nothing down, claimed to know nothing.” (316). In this instance, the police didn’t even give Bankole a chance – they had their minds made up that he was a criminal. In the end, the lack of available resources is the community’s downfall. Because of the unavailability of water, food, money, and medical needs, they are left fending for themselves. They steal and share, make their own food, and try the best they can to survive under the less than perfect conditions that now make up their lives, just like some people do in today’s world.