Monday, December 20, 2010
UNIVERSAL THEME #4: Power of the Community
Enriched by our reading experiences, sharing specific examples from the novel and the short stories provides the chance to internalize key themes. Dig deep. Provide an example from one work that reflects the theme listed. Establish the context of your example. Quotes are ecouraged. Be sure to read through the entire post; do not use the same examples as classmates.
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The power of the single person is limited, the power of the community it limitless. Throughout The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck puts The Joad family in teamwork situations. For example The Joads take a week long stop at the weed-patch camp. Here at this camp, the Joad family encounter times when they must group together to complete tasks; making dinner and fetching water. When everyone came together to help, it made the time go by faster, and the job go quicker. The same concept as 'There is no I in team'. These things are great, but the one thing that makes me thing the most about the power of the Community is this... After all the cleaning up was done from dinner, all of the families would gather around the campfire and the guitars and banjos would make their debut. When the music started playing, something strange happened. It wasn't 10 families working together to complete a task, but 1 family singing and playing guitar together. With this, It wasn't The power of the community, it was the power of the family.
ReplyDeleteIronically, it's that same national "community" that also chooses to "dis" the Oakies and bleed them dry through exploitation. Which other Ac Dec pieces address community? Do the other authors feel the same way about strength in working together as Steinbeck did? I recall in Faulkner's Barn Burning that "the boy", Colonel Sartoris Snopes, choose to exile himself from his family "community". Are some authors teaching us that community has a dark side?
ReplyDeleteCarl Sandburg in "The People, Yes," is a poem written exclusively about the power of the community. It is not a single name or a single person who "learns and blunders," it is the people, as a mass. They are not a weak, pushover group of people, they are "mammoth" and "cyclonic." ms even though they are "tricked and sold and again sold," they do not take these lumps lightly. The people keep "reaching" and "will yet win." The sheer numbers of the people are reinforced again, and re compared to a "polychrome, a spectrum and a prism." theassive movement that is the population not only knows their strength but knows thee numbers.
ReplyDeleteI think that Women in the Bread Lines also provides a powerful message to reflect the power of the community. Of course, the power of the community is not always a good thing. For example, the line the women wait in could be considered a community. This community holds little hope of a job for the women, yet this community is almost all that they have left. the aptly named Mrs Grey continues to put faith in her community of waiting, though she is on Death's doorstep. The lack of hope also drives some, like Ellen, to do things that are looked down upon just for the chance to have money, a need bred into people by the larger community, society.
ReplyDeleteThe power of the mind and the mindset that you have can have a profound impact and make all of the difference in any venture throughout your life. There is a type of mindset that appears when we as humans form groups. Some people feel compelled when in a group to prove themselves by doing a good job or coming up with good ideas. They have a feeling that they can’t let down their group members. I see this as a running theme in the vary basis of the poem “Let America Be America” by Langston Hughes. When Hughes speaks of America and how WE as a country has changed. He vacillates between talking about the people of America as one group and also breaks it down into its most basic part, the individual. By doing this he can talk about the problems of the individuals on a general sense while making a statement about America as a whole and that everyone (or at least most everyone) is in that same boat and has similar problems. These universal problems are shaping America as a whole to be changed from the America before.
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