ELA Review of the Semester

I think that all of the activities we did with Maus were especially meaningful, seeing as they focused on one of the worst crimes against humanity ever. The story was powerful to me because it was told from the point of view of one of the people who went through the concentration camps, and it showed first-hand (sort of) what the horrors of the camps were like. For me, the response projects were the most challenging thing we had to do. There were so many types of ways to create a response to our current assigned reading, and that was by far the hardest part of the assignment. I don't really think there's anything I'd change about the class, but I do really like the way the seminars are started. That's one thing I'd like to stay the same in the class.

Violence in Books 22-24

In these last two books of the Odyssey, Odysseus sheds his disguise and kills the suitors of his wife. Telemachus and Athena aid him, as well as two lesser characters. But was all this murder and death justified simply by Odysseus' nostos? I don't really think so. You would think that Odysseus would have learned something from ten years of war that maybe violence isn't the answer, but he has several reasons to be this angry and driven. First, these suitors have been insulting him and putting him down as he wanders around disguised as an old man. They threaten to kill him multiple times, and this alone could be considered a reason to kill them. But wait, there's more. The suitors have been dishonoring his home and land for ten years, they've been eating all of his food for ten years, they've been slaughtering all of his animals for the past ten years, and worst of all they've been trying to convince his wife to marry one of them for the past ten years. It's a wonder he didn't try to kill all of them when he first got back. So, killing the suitors is justified, but what about the servingwomen he massacres afterward? He forces them to clean up the whole mess he made killing the suitors (all of that blood and gore), then he takes them outside and kills them. I mean, they did swear their service to him, and they did serve people other than him, but is that really a good reason to kill them? That's why I don't think all the killing was justified.