The Black Automaton Repsonse

In Douglas Kearney’s text, the Black Automaton, there is a clear relevance of the title to the poems within. In analysis of the title, it would seem that the title is referring to the manner in which African Americans prior to the civil rights movement were viewed as: automatons. They weren’t viewed as real people, just meat machines walking the streets alongside you. In the poem Radio, this worldview comes crashing down when the world is exposed to African American use of the radio. This is evident in the very first line of the poem:

“the first black you met was on the radio.

this is true even if you lived with blacks.”

With the use of the radio, blacks became more than mere automatons. And they became a real threat to a white dominated society, hence the comparisons between blood and the radio, which would catalyze race riots and increased civil rights movements.

The word radio also doesn’t have to be taken literally, as it could mean mass communication among blacks as a whole. “the first blacks to realize they were blacks became radios”. This line could be interpreted as that African Americans didn’t understand their status of being oppressed and how they could move beyond it until they organized together as a whole, with mass communication and so forth. This is why there is the word “blacks” in standard font and the word “blacks” in italics; it is representative of their chance from automaton to a “real person”, and they became real people when the rest of society acknowledged their presence by way of mass communications and mass movements.

This poem could also be representative of how jazz was able to influence the civil rights movement. The lines of that poem that read, “singing something that could never be English” and “the snow filling its voice” have musical connotations. It would make sense that the first instance for African Americans to gain a foothold on the radio scene would be through jazz music, which was popular at the time.

“the first black to speak the word radio

knew it meant the same as blood.”

This line suggests that jazz music was simply a method for blacks to incite a reaction in the oppressed populous. The line, “claimed radio meant love, to better lure you” suggests that Jazz music was a deceptive method to assert African American equality and the civil rights movement. The "blacks" were said "not to speak English: even if they did radios cannot speak", which further distances the African American race from this racist narrator, as they do not speak the same language, and continues the theme of the deceptive nature of blacks: their music was incomprehensible to people like the narrator and was used a method to covertly inform and inspire blacks as a whole. Jazz music would appear to symbolize “love” and other emotions, but in reality was a method to inspire the rest of the African American race to act upon their oppressors. 

"Juice" Response

Possible philosophical theme of “Juice”: Staying in the same place and going on forever have the same end: you never end up anywhere.

When I began reading Juice the second thing that puzzled me, with the title being the first, was the quote at the beginning referencing how time has lost its temporality in modern literature and that nothing gets done anymore. After reading the novel in its entirety I find that this quote is a good comment on the philosophical nature of the novel in regards to time. In the first story of the novel, “Proportion Surviving”, the narrator is stuck in the past. Nothing is getting done in their life. They are inert in the passage of time and subsequently the events that they could be acting on. They have the opportunity to venture over the mountain and possibly find life, but they choose to stay where they are at. They are also fixated on the time it has been since the exodus of the people, emphasizing there fixation on past time. In the last story of the novel, “Sleep”, something similar but also opposite occurs. The narrator does seem fixated on time, but not on the past, the future. The narrator comments on how quickly time has passed and comments looks constantly toward the future. However, just like the first narrative, it does not seem like much is getting done by the narrator. The passage is very disjointed. Ideas in the paragraphs abruptly change, following no apparent structure or logic. This limits the story’s coherence and the reliability of the narrator, as the narrator seems very disconnected from the passage of time. They seem to be going through the motions of life, but not experiencing it.  The two stories in between the first and the final show a progression of time. In the first story time is stuck in the present and is fixated in the past. In the second story, the narrator is fixated on the past, although events in the narrator’s life still seem to occur at a relatively normal pace, in the third story the train metaphor suggests that the narrator is passing life by, though the passage of time is still discernible, and finally the fourth story shows a very disjointed passage of time with a focus on the future. The philosophical result I garnered from this analysis and one that can be applied to literature, is that time doesn’t influence the perception of the course of events. Time stood still in the first story of “Juice”, yet there was not much progression in terms of plot advancement, and when time was speeding by in the last story it was going so fast that comprehension of the story’s plot was difficult, making it appear that no progress in the story was being made.

Fiction Packet Response (The longer stories)

I thought that the intern was incredibly ironic, and the manner in which the elements of irony are discovered makes the conclusion of the short story all the more impactful and shocking. The intern comes across as a very sane and intelligence scholar. These scholarly characteristics come across in the way that the short story is written and through the voice of the scholar. The entire short story is divided by headings relating to the content of each individual passage. It is very easy to understand, organized, every detail is written down, and is in a logical progression. The narrator himself speaks, mostly, coherently and with a sophisticated vocabulary representative of his initially supposed education within psychology.

However, this presentation of the narrator collapses on itself as the ends of the short story comes near. The narrator becomes paranoid if whether he is actually being observed as well and that he is an experiment conducted by either Doctor Rauch or Kagen. He evaluates himself that he is physically and mentally sound, although it is clear at the end that his psyche is far from a state of complete sanity: he is disheveled, surviving on a strict diet of chowder, hasn’t left his room for an extended period of time, and is severely lacking sleep. It becomes clear that there was no experiment. He was observing himself and that this delusion he is in is a form of self-induced therapy. This makes sense why Rauch’s and Kagen’s brother had no physical description given, as they were actually the Intern. The intern begins to lose himself as story comes to a close. His sentences become fragmented as he runs out of paper which is necessary for his self-induced therapy to be conducted. The realization is not made towards the end until all of the evidence builds up which eventually leads one to assume that the Intern is really a schizophrenic or has some sort of psychological disorder. This realization comes with a strong sense of irony, as he is initially made out to be a practicing psychology student observing individuals with psychological disorders, but it is he himself who is suffering from said disorders.

The most interesting part of the second short story “Point and Line” was the analogy made about the girl undergoing therapy sessions and Schrödinger’s cat.  Both the cat and the girl are described as being stuck in a box: the cat is in the airtight chamber and the girl in the therapist’s office. At the end of the therapy session results will be made by the therapist; it is mentioned that results will arise from the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment. Also, both the girl and Schrodinger’s cat seem to have two possible states of existence. The girl refers to herself in third person as the “girl”, so there is the actually narrator and the inner dialogue of the girl. The cat can be considered dead or alive. The analogy finally made sense to me when I truly processed the outer dialogue that breaks the margins of the text, consisting of the actually conversation between the narrator and the therapist. The actual dialogue has very little substance, not much at all is actually said between the two, whereas the rest of the text, within the margins, is very thorough and detailed. You could say that this dialogue is “alive” and the conversation between the therapist and the narrator in reality is “dead”, just like Schrodinger’s cat, which can be dead and alive at the same time. 

Short Story Fiction Packet Response #2

             A very interesting choice the writer made in the short story "Colonel", was the unemotional and monotonous tone created. The syntax found within "Colonel" is very terse and lacks a certain flow between every sentence. The writing comes across as very choppy. Every sentence is a bland statement describing some feature of the house or conversation that the narrator is involved in. This causes the short story to come across as very robotic and unemotional, as the syntax gives the impression that the narrator is very removed from the events going on. The syntax however changes during the last few sentences of the short story. The sentences are elongated. This causes the impact created by the Colonel's outburst to be much more impactful as in comparison, the rest of the short story is dull. 

I thought that the irony present in the short story “Wallet” was worth noting. The old man attempted to go to the department store in order to frustrate and interrupt the agenda of a criminal, yet the manner his plan is described makes him appear to be committing some crime of sorts. He has a getaway driver and the verb “case” has connotations of crime. He flees the scene when his deception is made known, although his intentions were altruistic. This irony adds a lighter tone to the short story, which is apparent in the way that the boy and old man reacted at the end: in a fit of laughter.

Lastly, I found the use of color to describe the woman in “But what was her name?” to be peculiar. The woman at the start is described as being the color blue when she was born, which is likely the cause of a cyanotic illness also causes heart issues. She is then described as having red feet when she is older, which is likely representative of her life as a stay-at-home wife filled with hard manual work. The ending is very peculiar. She is described as being white at birth when on her presumed death bed, as it says that her “past has taken hold of her—the heart’s last sleight”, which is referencing the heart issues that she has had since she was a child. She is speaking to her “father” at the end, which is assumed to be The Holy Father, God. Her death is considered a new birth into heaven. The color white is often associated with purity and holiness, so that is likely why the color white was described as her birth color at the end of the story. Overall, it is very interesting how the author used color’s to represent points in the woman’s life.  

Fiction stories packet response

I think that the perspective of the narrator in Survivors was shockingly insincere. I understand that a major part of the poem was to describe the prejudice and unfairness that same sex couples are put through, even at death, which makes the prejudice so much more powerful as you’d expect the family of the narrator’s lover to look past the nature of his homosexuality and sympathize with him, but they don’t. However, the narrator himself becomes so preoccupied with these coming attacks of prejudice he is portrayed as being blaringly selfish. He not once describes his grievances from his lover’s possible death. He is only concerned with what will happen to him, not the fate of his lover. The face value intention of the short story seems very counterproductive towards what you’d think the poem would be trying t to present: a pro-homosexual narrative.

               In Misdemeanors I think it is quite interesting the way that the Old Man is portrayed. He is a criminal, which typically is cause to look at a person with disdain. However, I feel slight pity for the Old Man. He wants to be regarded as a “tough ex-con”, but he is no more than a penny pinching old man. The manner in which his heist is described is pitiful: pockets sagging with pennies, wearing socks like gloves, and a passed out getaway driver. The fact that he was one sent away from being considered a felon is also significant. If the conditions of his crime were different, if he weren’t so pitiful, maybe I’d view him in another manner, but I do not. You could say I am one cent away from regarding him in a darker light, but right now he appears to me just as a sad and silly old man.

Morning News confused me a bit. I assume that the narrator was diagnosed with a terminal illness of some kind. The short story seems to be in opposition to religion? He directly mocks God at the end by him remarking that he and his wife buy the largest TV in the whole “God damn store”. He also seems to not have much fear of death, as he remarks, “Where is fear?”, whereas the puritan is fearful of damnation. It seems that a message to be interpreted could be the simple lifestyle that accompanies one who does not believe in a religion, particularly Abrahamic religions.  While everyone else wants to go make the last moments of their life fulfilling, as they are more so consumed with the end, the narrator and his wife simply go out and buy a nice flat screen television.