Last Post

I must say that it has been a long year that has gone by very quickly. I am not sure if that actually makes any sense or not, but the ambiguity of the statement also represents the ambiguity of my feelings regarding the end of high school and the beginning of college. I am happy, ecstatic even, that high school is finally over and all of the tests and essays that helped me in the long run but were annoying at the time I took them will never be seen again. I am also excited to be able to have a new start in the intimidating entity we all call college where I will be able to meet new people and enjoy a new found freedom that will likely define my future. Yet, despite this eagerness and thrill I feel, I am also sad to certain extent to leave high school where I have made so many great people and have created unforgettable memories. This said, I guess it is time to get on with the last blog entry I will likely ever make and it involves an ambiguity that is prevalent in my life at this point in time.
The final exam overall was a lot easier than any real test we have taken in class, at least in terms of the multiple choice section. Usually in the multiple choice passages we take in class, I know the answer to about half and guess on the other half hoping to get them right. On the AP exam however, there were a lot more clear-cut answers that allowed for the elimination of many answers instead of seeing four possible answers to a question. I would normally think about skipping five or ten questions and this is what I expected to do coming in to the exam room, but after reading the questions and the answers, I actually answered all of the multiple choice questions. This being said, although I felt I did decent on the multiple choice, the essays are the things that have me a bit worried. I feel that I did okay on the poetry essay and talked about literary devices that actually made sense in the scope of the poem. The same goes with the prose passage which was easier to understand than the one on the practice test, but my answer may not have been very clear. The essay that does have me miffed is the open question essay because I kind of feel like it was hit or miss. The question was about exile and enrichment and the novel I used was Frankenstein. I talked about the isolation the monster had because it had no one to associate with but the enrichment aspect of exile may have been a reach. I said that the monster was enriched with the knowledge it gained about mankind and cruelty of society. I am not sure if this even counts as enrichment, so is thus the one thing that has me worried about the exam. Other than this, I felt well-prepared for the AP Literature Exam.

Penultimate Blog

The penultimate blog of the year has finally arrived and along with it, the end of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I must say, the end of the play was quite interesting to say the least, especially the views on death that were revealed by both Ros and Guil as well as the various Tragedians. I guess it really does revisit the theme of life being like a play where each one of us gets a chance to walk across the stage and perform, whether it be improvisational or set in stone. Also the tone of the entire third act of the play kind of makes Ros and Guil sympathetic characters to a certain extent. From the very beginning of the play, we know that the final fate of the two main characters will be death because it is mentioned in the title. Despite knowing this however, I really didn’t feel any sympathy at all for the two because of the joking behavior and complete obliviousness the two showed. This only continued in the second act when they have no idea what to do with their lives unless someone tells them what to do. This is plainly evident through the fact that Claudius told the two to capture Hamlet after he killed Polonius and the two blindly do it without thinking of their friends feelings. In the third act however, things take a turn towards the more serious and more philosophical. Instead of plotting capture or some other action ordered by others, the two discuss death in what can be seen as humorous, but is likely much deeper than that. This is shown by Guildenstern’s claim that death is really nothing more than the fulfillment of an inexplicable and unavoidable fate. The fact that we all live a life that leads towards some death that is unavoidable is a concept that is recurring and is presented again near the end of the play. Our lives are like plays in which our acts have been mapped out and written in stone such that there is always someone watching and giving orders. As the end scene continues, more complicated and interesting views on death are given by both the Tragedians and the two main characters. The Player states that death is common and that light vanishes with life. Guildenstern replies that real death is not theatrical but is simply the absence of anything, the state of not existing. It is as if when a person dies, he or she just disappears in time, which is a very interesting concept in the scope of the novel because Tom Stoppard never really shows us when and how Ros and Guil die. Stoppard is holding something from us because from the very beginning, we expect Ros and Guil to die because of the title of the novel. Then when it finally comes time for their deaths, we don’t witness it and instead learn of the deaths of Claudius, Hamlet, Laertes, and Gertrude. I know this response is rather convoluted and doesn’t really have a centralized theme, but it does sufficiently express my confusion at the events that occurred at the end of the novel. Let us just hope an in class discussion can shed some light on the situation.