Section 12

Parallel - pg. 259 "He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one."

Very early in the book, the father says the son is the only thing he is living for. This brought up again, except the son says it himself, showing the son is exactly how the man imagined him to be.

Contrast - pg. 259 "The man squatted and looked at him. I'm scared, he said. Do you understand? I'm scared."

For really the first time, the father is taking off this tough persona of his towards his son and expressing how he truly feels. Earlier throughout the book he constantly urges his son to keep going, when he himself has doubts of their survival and sometimes just wants it all to end. This is a contrast to that and instead he is finally honest with his son.

Questions:

1. Does the son think his dad was lying about being the "good guys", based on what he says on the top of pg. 268?

2. Does the father die of an illness other than his infected wound, as on pg. 272, McCarthy writes, "He spat into the road a bloody phlegm." I would assume a serious leg injury, even if infected, would not cause you to cough up bloody phlegm, so does he have some kind of other problems?

Section 11

Parallel - pg. 234 "They went on in the perfect blackness, sightless as the blind.... I know. Pray for lightning."

It's a bit of a stretch but I connected this to the bible when Jesus healed the blind man and allowed him to see again. Here the man and son are as good as blind, like the old man in the bible. Both involve Jesus or some kind of divine intervention, and need a light source to see.

Contrast - pg. 241
"I'd like to see it.
 You mean shoot it?
 Yes.
 We can shoot it.
 For real?
 Sure.
 In the dark?
 Yes. In the dark."

Before the son was very frightened by the gun, but here he seems a bit joyful in being able to fire it. Granted it isn't the pistol, but its still a gun able to kill someone.

Questions:

1. Why is the son almost joyful at the chance of firing the flaregun, even though it can kill someone the same as the pistol, which he was scared of holding?

2. On pg. 245, the father tells the son "We don't work on your lessons any more." This is after he asks him to write the alphabet. I'm wondering, could the boy have been home schooled by the father before the apocalypse in the story occurred?

Section 10

Parallel - pg. 219 "He remembered waking once on such a night to the clatter of crabs in the pan where he'd left the steak bones from the night before."
Paralleling the current time to a past experience, pre apocalypse.

Contrast - pg. 217
"Can I go swimming?
 Swimming?
 Yes.
 You'll freeze your tokus off.
 I know."
A fairly light hearted and even comical conversation between the man and his son, something that contrasts to their normal conversations, which are very grave and sometimes depressing.

Questions:

1. Why was the boy crying on pg. 218?

2. Is "her" on pg. 219 the man's wife?

Section 9

Parallel - pg. 185 "He tried to look like any common migratory killer but his heart was hammering and he knew he was going to start coughing."
Its the same as with his son. He never is truly honest with his thoughts, as he can't be. To help them to survive, he cannot tell his son that he has doubts of their survival or else mentally, he would go insane. He cannot be soft towards strangers, or they may take advantage of him and his son.

Contrast - pg. 209 "They ate slowly out of china bowls."
No sense of urgency, which is a contrast to when they were in the bunker, where they were scarfing down the food that they found.

Questions:

1. On pg. 185, does the son mean he needs to believe his father to survive, or could it be to keep some kind of mental sanity, thinking that his father knows what he's doing?

2. Why did the father bite his lip while watching his son running on pg. 201?

Section 8:

Parallel - "Perhaps he'd turn into a god and they to trees."
Its a parallel to God and the Garden of Eden in the bible.

Contrast - pg. 171 "There's not any people. What are you talking about?"
Its a contrast to what he has been telling his son. To him, there isn't anyone anymore, in the lawless hell that he and his son must survive in, but he keeps telling his son that they are the good guys.

Questions:

1. Has his son gained some power now in their relationship? From 162 to 163 he starts conversations with the father and even orders him around a bit, something the father would do in his stead.

2. Is the old man's name a reference to the biblical character, Elijah?

Section 7:

Parallel - pg. 137 "Okay. This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up."
A repetition of the moral boost the man has to constantly give to his son.

Contrast - pg. 154 "Some part of him always wished it to be over."
Its a contrast to how he acts towards his son. He keeps telling his son to persevere and keep going for both of their survival, even though he himself doubts their chances.

Questions:

1. Who is "they" that the father is talking about on pg. 148?

2. Bottom of 154 to 155, could that mean the whole concept of god, is an alien one, as he considers himself an alien to his son, but he himself is a Christian?

Section 6:

Parallel - pg. 122 "He swept the boards clean and knelt and hooked his fingers in the ring and lifted the trap door and swung it open."
pg. 110 "Then he raised the hatch door and swung it over and let it down on the floor behind."
He does the same thing to enter both shelters, a basic parallel.

Contrast - pg. 122 "Down there in the darkness was a cistern filled with water so sweet that he could smell it."
pg. 110 "On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous."
Basic contrast to the smell of the man's rotting flesh, to the smell of the water.

Questions:

1. Why did the father aim the pistol at their reflection in the mirror?

2. Why did he take the packets of plant seeds, even though he did not know what to with them himself?

The Road Journal

Theme: God:  McCarthy uses this theme in different ways so far in the novel. On pg. 5 he writes, "If he is not the word of God God never spoke" Here the author is showing how the father is laying down the law that he is the leader and will decide what actions him and his son will take from now on. He is the "Godly" figure of the group, in my opinion, he is in complete control of what they do. On pg. 12 McCarthy writes, "Oh God, he whispered Oh God." Here the writer shows the frustration of the father. He feels betrayed by God that he and his son are put in the situation they are in. This also shows that the father is religious as he is talking to what he thinks, is God. On pg. 55 and 58 are commonly used manners of speech "Why in God's name......For the love of God..." They are used, in my opinion, to add a certain gravity to their conversation and decision making by bringing God into it, as the father's wife wants them all to commit suicide. From 60-62 the father whispers "Oh God." Here the word is used as a cause for worry as he is whispering it to himself and then afterwards flees from the scene. Again it is commonly used in the world, when something bad happens people say things such as: "Oh God.....Damn it......What just happened?.." In my opinion its the mind trying to realize the events that occurred just recently, and whether they are good or bad is the reason for the corresponding response. 

Section 1:

-Contrast: pg.12 "Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh god, he whispered Oh God."

pg.4."Barren, silent, godless" Firstly the the God and godless have a difference in capitalization. This, in my opinion, shows abandonment as godless is not capitalized while God is. He is talking to God on pg.12, while saying God isn't there on pg.4.

-Parallel: pg.5 "If he is not the word of God God never spoke."

pg. 12 "Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered Oh God."

Both times God is capitalized and what I find a bit funny is he may be talking about himself in a subliminal way, connecting the two. The first is he says he is this godly being that conveys God's messages, but then criticizes God, and in a sense himself, for being in the situation that he is in.

Questions: 

1. Why is godless not capitalized, in your opinion?

2. Why is it a cart that they are using to carry their things?

Section 2:

-Parallel: pg. 33 "The boy stood beside him. Where he'd stood once with his own father in a winter long ago."

Paralleling him and his son with himself as a kid standing with his own father.

-Contrast: pg.39: "The river sucking over the rim and fell straight down into the pool below, the entire river."

"they followed the flats along the upper river among huge dead trees. A rich southern wood that once held mayapple and pipissewa." 

I really like this contrast and find it interesting. McCarthy shows how in this new, hell of a world that is now Earth, water has found a new life and is flowing strongly. Nature on land however is different. It is past its prime and is mentioned in the past tense, possibly foreshadowing death. Its a bit of a stretch I guess, but McCarthy is writing of life on land in the past tense, but the life of flowing water in present tense. 

Questions:

1. Why did they go into the river, even though it was stated the water was freezing? 

2. The past tense language describing the plants, could it foreshadow death of the father and son?

Section 3:

-Parallel: pg.60 "God, he whispered." Talking to God again, as in the past sections, showing deep religious faith in Christianity.

-Contrast: pg.61 "Its all right, he said. We have to run . Don't look back. Come on."

I also found this interesting because in the beginning of the novel the father constantly glanced in the mirrors of the cart to look behind him, but here he urges his son not to look back, like he did.

Questions:

1. Why does the father take the cart with him again? Is it a hindrance at all in his traveling?

2. What is the flake of obsidian on pg. 59?

Section 4:
-Parallel: pg.73 "His breath white in the glow of the firelight."
pg. 74 "He blew the flames to life....."
White is a color of meaning. It can mean purity, kind, clean, but here I believe it symbolizes life. It might be a stretch but white is often associated with God and angels, and as the Bible states, God created the universe and gave life to it. Here the father gives life to the fire, showing he is a man of faith in God.
-Contrast: pg. 88 "He tried to think of something to say, but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities."
pg. 83 "We're going to be okay, aren't we Papa?
            Yes. We are.
            And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
            That's right.
            Because we're carrying the fire.
            Yes. Because we're carrying the fire."
Total change in attitudes here from the father. It may show that even though he seems positive that they will survive on the outside, inside he feels vulnerable and that any time, his humanity, in fact his entire world will crumble underneath from him. Its an interesting difference between his outer and inner expressions.

Questions:
1. Is the father actually have that strong of a faith in God, or is it the only thing he can't forget like he says on pg. 89?
2. Why does the son care so much about they boy and the dog, even more than his survival as when the father declines helping them, the son tells the father that he wants to die?

Section V

Written:

Parallel: Pekar gets fired again because he horses around instead of doing his job properly, much like he did with all of his past jobs.

Contrast: After he was laid off from the brewery that he worked at, Pekar says,"I had a reaction then I had never had before. i got to feeling real dependant." Now that he had a girlfriend he did not feel alone and discouraged when he failed. In fact the next panel shows him proposing to what would be his wife.

Visual:

Contrast: After he starts working for the government, he starts reading comics. Since he hates the superhero ones, he decided to write his own instead, this being the first thing he does not quit unlike all of his past endeavors.

Parallel: Him getting fired from his job because he was making fun of his boss. This is a lot like his other firings in which he is shown doing something stupid or silly that leads to his firing.

2. Images: I like the pictures in which the shadows or the colors depict the mood. When there is a shadow, usually shown when he is smug after beating someone up, or depressed about something, there are shadows covering the majority of his body in the panel. They attract my attention because they sit his mood and how he feels about the situation, as it is a graphic novel. When he is happy or when the mood of the panel is good, it is often a light color with very few shadows. Close up shots are shown when the expression of the person is important in the panel. Pekar has a couple of panels where it just shows a facial expression of his to get his mood across to the reader through the picture. There are some low angle moments, after he beats people up, to show his authority. Distance shots are used when a large scale event is occurring, such as having a lot of people in his frame or when a lot of dialogue occurs in one frame, such as when he debates with someone about McCarthy.

Section II

Written:

Contrast: Played Sports in Middle School to keep his morale up, bit he then quit sports in high school because he was getting depressed by them.

Parallel: Constant obsession with things, whether it be his image, memorization of statistics, or his athleticism, he is obsessive compulsive over everything in his life.

Visual:

Parallel: The faces on the bottom panels of pgs. 32 and 33 show him wearing the same facial expression with his younger and older self.

Contrast: When he was little, he liked his parents' grocery store, but in High School it shows him covered by the shadow of the ceiling  as he thinks to himself about leaving the store for another job.

1. Frames: All the frames are, for the most part, rectangular. The average number of panels is about 4 to 5. Large panels usually show more wide scaled events are events of major importance that require the use of a large frame to visualize. Smaller frames are usually less important or just contain small dialogue, and/or thought rectangles at the top of the panel. Each page usually has one topic or event occurring on it. If Pekar has to explain a lot, he uses a bunch of small frames to express more words and dialogue, where if the drawing is all that is needed, like an all out brawl between him and other people he had to fight he will show very little if any dialogue accompanied with a thought at the top of the panel, and finally a very large picture. If I were to place chapters, I would do it after each time stage in his life: elementary, middle school, high school, college, etc....

Section I

Written:

Contrast: Minorities and treatment of each other; Jewish-Italians treated each other fairly while Pekar was bullied and attacked by Black kids after they moved into the same neighborhood as him.

Parallel: Started out in Jewish-Italian neighborhood, and then after the Blacks had moved into the area, Pekar moved back into a Jewish-Italian neighborhood.

Visual:

Parallel: Shadows drawn on Pekar when he is violent, secretive, deceptive, or just plain smug.

Contrast: Gets beaten in his old neighborhood, while he dishes out the beatings in his new one.

3. Words: Pekar uses a rectangular text box when he is narrating or showing a thought from a 3rd person perspective. When someone is talking he shows a round speech bubble with the tip pointing to the speaker. Sometimes when he is in thought it will show a speech bubble but have these round carvings on the edge of it. On pg.11 Pekar is talking to himself and is visually going back and forth and literally saying contradicting thoughts coming out of his head, as he says ,"but.......on the other hand.....but...."

Section IV

Visual:

Contrast: When Harvey first meets the teachers at the school he is working for during the summer, he looks happy. His face is drawn normally, as in it shows the same color all the way through. When he hears the summer boss lecturing about how they shouldn't be writing articles for jazz magazines, Pekar's face is covered by a shadow as he knows something fishy occurred.

Parallel: It looks like he's wearing the same jacket when he is giving a kid his basketball, as the one when he hitchhiked to New York City.

Written:

Contrast: Harvey thought school, especially geography was going to be easy for him. He was very happy and confident, but after getting a C+ on a test, he was so emotionally shattered that he quit college because he could not drop the class.

Parallel: When Harvey beats the guy up in the church parking lot, it is similar to his past days, even though now he considered himself to be an intellectual, there is still that past fighter in him and it never really went away.

4. So far Harvey thinks of himself as an intellectual and not a fighter anymore, like he was as a high school kid. He starts reading a lot of books and listening to jazz. He writes an article for a well known jazz magazine and works during the summer. Even though he seems like he has changed, when he cut off a driver with his car, he had a fight with him in a church parking lot. Harvey feels good about beating the guy up, just like how he enjoyed fighting when he was a high schooler. This is a reason to believe that while on the outside he may have seemed to change, deep down he is still the same kid. Harvey's identity is pretty spontaneous and up for grabs. Every section of reading he seems to change, from being a man beating jock, to a more calm and softer intellectual. I don't really believe in fate or that it shapes your identity, and Harvey's personality changes are spontaneous, but they shape according to his surroundings. When he was in high school, being the "tough" guy was considered cool and that is what he did. In the end his personality changed based on or had some change from his surroundings.

These pictures show the women that the male
protagonist of each film fell for. They both use their attractiveness to infatuate the two men. The
shots are very similar as both are staring directly at their faces. Both have blonde hair and lipstick. They are also both heavily clothed in the respective scenes. Also both shots are a first person perspective or how the male character sees them face to face. Its a close ranged shot with no angles involved.

Ssection III
Visual:

Contrast: Timid in front of girls in high school, but in college he goes on dates with a couple of women.

Parallel: The hug his mom gives him when he decides to go to college, and the same hug is shown when he tells her he's hitchhiking to New York, showing she loves him the same way, no matter what he does as long as he can enjoy doing it.

Written:

Contrast: He thinks he will fail college in the beginning, but when he actually goes to his college classes, he succeeds and becomes happier than before.

Parallel: The face he makes when he gets into trouble while working at the railway and when he thinks about failing science and math in college.

5. Fate vs Free Will:

Pekar is a huge endorsement of free will as whatever he does in the story, happens because of him and his actions. Whether it be falling in love with jazz or going to college, they were all decisions that Pekar had to make for them to happen. At the same time, every time he quits something, it is not fate, it is his own choice to quit it, whether it be sports or a high school math class, his choice was made by himself.
I think that he molds himself into the likes of his environment as he himself is pretty insecure so wants to do his best to fit in and get along with at least one group of people.

Minority Report Still Shot

• Long Shot
• Scene is when Laura comes to tell Burgess to rethink the killing of Tom. 
• There's no real angle to the shot, its looking straight forward at the characters and the surroundings.
• Room is filled with natural light, compared to previous scenes in the movie, where the locations were lit with artificial light.
• Burgess is wearing a black outfit, while Laura is wearing a lighter colored dress.
• Furniture is symmetrical. On each side of the couch in the middle, is a lamp facing upwards and two pictures/paintings hanging on the wall behind them.

DVD's Seen Over The Summer

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Both Parts)

2. The Dark Knight Rises

3. The Dark Knight

4. The Hangover Part II

5. Hitch

6. The Incredibles

7. Thor

8. The Avengers

9. X-Men First Class

10. Step Brothers

11. Semi-Pro

12. Talladega Nights

Movies Seen Over the Summer

1. Man of Steel

2. Fast and Furious Six

3. World War Z

Summer Questions

1.    I believe Oedipus is definitely responsible of his own fate. It is his curiosity which curses him in the end, as it starts with Oedipus wanting to find the murderer of Laius, and making their punishment as exile, which is what he begs for at the end of the play. His curiosity hits him again, when his wife Jocasta tells him Laius was to be killed by his son from the oracle of Delphi, but Laius' son was cast out of Thebes. Oedipus wants to hear more of the story and where Laius was murdered and is shocked to hear that he was murdered at a three way crossroad, as he says it is possible that he is the murderer of Laius. This leads to Oedipus sending for the only survivor of the attack, leading to the ultimate end of Oedipus.

2.    He is seen as a good king in the beginning. He seems to care for Thebes and its people and is sorrowful that they are going through a plague. He asks the oracle of Delphi for help and learns that the murderer of Laius is the source of the agony. Oedipus wants to rid the city of him, showing great care for his kingdom. However, he seems to be a bit short tempered when it comes to things he does not want to hear. An example of this is when Tiresias tells him he is the murderer of Laius. Oedipus banishes him from his sight and accuses Creon of treason and attempts to concoct a false story of the two trying to overthrow him as king.

3.    Its ultimately Oedipus's curiosity that leads to his downfall. By finding out more and more of his past, he starts digging himself into his own grave. In the beginning of the play he states that Laius's murderer shall suffer exile, and accuses Tiresias as blind, yet in the end of the play, he stabs his own eyes causing blindness, and begs for himself to be exiled from Thebes by Creon.

4.    I believe The Minority Report refutes the idea of having an inescapable destiny. In a scene where a worker is telling John about the precogs, he learns that one of them, Agatha can have a vision of the potential murderer not killing is victim. These thoughts are always discarded because it is the minority report. This shows that even if something may or may not occur, it doesn't because you ultimately prevented it. Another good scene is when John rolls a ball off a table of some sort, towards Mr Witwer. Witwer catches it and John explains that the ball could have dropped, but it ultimately did not because he chose to prevent the ball from falling. In other words, it is the person's choice of what their own fate is or even what the fate of other things are.
5. In the precogs, eyes represent their recognition of future events. While not being physically a big theme in the movie for the precogs, they have an inner sense of vision of possible future events, setting up the plot for the entire film. For John, eyes represent identity. He scans them every time he goes to work and enters the building and even in his job, when examining possible visions that Agatha has, he learns that someone replaced their eyes to bypass the eye scanner, making the man's identity an anonymous one. In the film culture, eyes can mean or represent many things. They can represent the feelings of the person, they can signify identity, like in The Minority Report. Eyes can also signify knowledge.
6. In the movie, technology is almost completely relied upon to convey the truth or
news. Nowadays, we are almost the exact same way with computers. Many rely on computers, ipads, or other electronics to get information about daily events. Although, the information gained in the movie is of greater significance at times, its still basically the same idea. The way modern day technology is going, I think it could end up some what similar to the movie, where houses contain lots of technological features. A lot of
things used in the movie are used in modern technology as well, such as voice recognition and commands and touch screen. There is reason to believe that in 44 years, technology could definitely be advanced to the level displayed in the film, as 10 years ago, touchscreen and the word iphone was looked at as unlikely or way ahead technologically, but here we are with these things viewed as a commonly used object.