Re: struggling poor student
Posted by:
jerrygarner7 (---.lax.untd.com)
Date: June 08, 2022 04:42PM
The father of blank verse: A red wale in the sunset
“Friday” is a novel concerning a tiny fishing village, named Robinson Crusoe. The seven inhabits, all males, are named after the days of the week. Their name order determines the social ranking in this extremely class conscious hamlet.
Friday was subordinate to Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
He was constantly degraded by his five social superiors.
The author attempts to show that degrading is a learned and rigid behavior by having Friday, himself the victim of constant humiliation, continues the rude behaviors by seizing every opportunity to degrade and humiliate Saturday.
This simple tale of depicting learned societal prejudices follows the patterns of how a construct is locked into the members of society and cannot be altered.
There is only one source of income in Robinson Crusoe, waleing. The small hamlet is located at the edge of a harbor, and the wales visit the harbor daily; the men do not have to take long voyages to capture wales.
They row their skiffs out, killing a wale or so a week, spending the rest of their time boiling the wale down to oil.
There are sub-plots which I do not quite grasp, one of the wales that visits the harbor, almost daily, has a large red letter ‘A” on his skin. There was much speculation by the residents of how as this birthmark came to be on the wale, but the author never achieves definition.
The wales were plentiful in the harbor, so they could spend their nights
at home No women are mentioned in the story, so what it was that these men did during the night is remains without definition; we are told that Friday spent his evenings kicking Saturday’s ass, but it would seem after a few years this would become tiresome.
The conclusion is when the waling men attempt to kill the great red ‘A’ wale. The great whale, with the letter 'A' marking his identity, tears
up their boats, killing four of the waleing men. There are twenty pages of narrative
given to the wailing of the fishermen as they bemoan their fates.
Friday, who had disappeared from the narrative, appears in the water, as the great red wale is killing the other fishermen.
Ann Rand appears in a Deus Ex Machina ploy, as the wale is bearing down on Friday. She delivers an ideological discourse that it is the fate of waleing men to be eaten by the great red ‘A’ wale. There is no coast guard, and if there were, it would not be their duty to rescue individuals from peril. All the wailing in the world will not alter
this ideological stance-period.
Friday accepts that he is going to be eaten by the wale. He becomes aware of the awesome responsibility involved in being a member of society, which may or may not exist solely to provide food for wales: The narrative does not clarify this topic.
Friday, makes one futile attempt to survive as the wale is bearing down on him, he grabs Saturday, who is also in the water, and attempts to thrust Saturday into the mouth of the great red ‘A’ wale and thus avoid his fate.
The red ‘A’ wale eats both Friday and Saturday.
Only Sunday is left alive, which has some theological implications, but it escapes me.
Sunday survives, builds a house with seven gables on it, retires from fishing for wales and opens a correspondence school for the illiterate. He becomes the father of blank verse as all the correspondence submitted to his correspondence school consisted of blank sheets of paper.
(It has been a day or two since I read this story, so maybe I have forgotten some of
the important parts, but this is the way I remember it, I think. There is a odd clanking that the red ‘A’ wale, may
have been a 1954 Chevy, but it remains vague.)