My Best Friend!

I hate playing favorites, but my best friend out of ALL my friends would have to be Julia! She has medium-length curly brown hair and brown eyes. When Julia doesn't know a person very well it's challenging for her to open up to them completely. She speaks spanish fluently and detests peanut butter because, in her opinion, it looks strange. She always has an aura of peacefulness and cheeriness surrounding her, so whenever I'm with her I can't help but be happy and relaxed just like her. One thing that I advise a person not to do is to mispronounce her name. Once you mispronounce it she says, "It's pronounced Hulia NOT Julia, gosh!" Also, she recently decided to become a vegetarian and stop eating meat; that ties in with her don't pollute and keep the earth clean motto.

At first you would perceive Julia as an introvert since she can keep to herself when she doesn't know you, however with time her personality morphs into more of an ambivert and she will begin to open up like a flower early in the morning. Once Julia opens up you see that she's intense and strong-willed; her will power won't let her give up easily. I'll admit she's a bit of a hippie; not a bad drug-user hippie, but one who cares about nature and others. She's very attentive to people's emotions and can sense when something is wrong. For her being an altruist comes naturaly; she doesn't have to force herself to care or worry about others in order to seem nice, in fact, it's like she has an extra sixth sense.

Early Memory

Imagine a sparkling, clean kitchen that was freshly cleaned. Two little girls are opening cupboards and pulling out various ingredients; what they are making is a mystery. Those two teeny siblings were my sister and me. I don't remember our ages, but I do remember the story in great detail. For some odd reason we decided not to use the table/counter to mix the dough and to flour the "cookies"; we used the floor instead. I'm not sure whether the floor was clean or not at the time, but we didn't care, obviously.

You know how most normal cookies are made with sugar, flour, eggs, milk, water, etc? Well mine and my sister's cookies were made with JUST water and flour. Now just imagine how horrid and icky that goopy cookie would be. To make the creation even worse we didn't bake the cookies; we just cut them out using a cookie cutter and gave them to my mom and dad to eat. That seems just evil to me now that I really think of it. I mean my mom and dad HAD to eat the cookies to seem nice since that's their role in being parents.

Another part of this memory is my parents emotions. When they saw the hugungous mess of flour and gloopy batter covering all the tile in the kitchen they were pretty mad. They didn't show it too much around us, but, really, who wouldn't be mad if their kitchen was completely covered in disgusting cookies? I'm pretty sure everyone would be frustrated at that point. Thankfully my cooking skills have improved since then, and I'm now perfectly capable of making cookies...as long as they're premade and ready to throw into the oven!

Far From the Madding Crowd: Tone

Hm why did the author use tone? Well, the author used the tone to help bring the characters to life and to help explain their stand point. For example, the main character Gabriel was, at one point, a good shepard with enough money to get by, but he still wasn't quite as high social wise as he could have been. Through the authors word choice you realize that he is actually a bit on the pathetic side, especially when it comes to his obsession with Bathsheba. The author continues to belittle Gabriel throughout the book by bringing in descriptive characters who continually size down his part and importance withink the novel. Basically the authors tone is patronizing since he's looking down on Gabriel and every small action he puts out. Also, most of the other characters that are introduced have more importance when it comes to social standings and importance, and if there is a character who is lower standing then Gabriel seems then, of course, Gabriel must somehow become involved with him or her. By using the tone as the dominant literary element you can begin to understand the characters emotions and how they feel towards to many events within Far From the Madding Crowd and towards one another.

Outside Reading!

The novel that I have chosen to explore is Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, and I'm not quite sure if I'm enjoying it or not yet. A part of me likes the novel, yet a different part of me dislikes it, mainly because I wonder if I will really finish it by October 12 since it's slow paced and one of the longer books on the list. For awhile I dreaded reading Far From the Madding Crowd since I'd heard it wasn't all that good, but after the first few chapters I began to really take hold of the plot and give understanding it a try. While just getting through this novel is a challenge, the even bigger feat is deciphering it. Since the diction is high ,and you constantly have to stop to find a definition of some unfamiliar word, but when you finish finding the word then usually you're out of your "reading zone" and don't feel like reading any longer, so you put the book down and think, "I'll come back in an hour." when really you don't come back at all. Also, while your reading you feel as if you've read for hours and have succeeded in reading a good portion of your book when you've only read maybe 30 pages or so; you're pretty dismal when you realize your slow progress and the amount of time that has passed.

The dominant literary element is a tough one to choose in this novel. There's quite a bit of imagery, however the tone is important also, so I'm still a bit between which to choose; I'm more towards the tone though. The imagery within Far From the Madding Crowd doesn't have much significance or meaning other than a description of a scene, person, or object, no symbolic meaning or relation to an important aspect of the novel. The tone seems to be deeper within the novel, but it is in fact there, hiding, waiting to be found.

In my opinion Thomas Hardy is using the tone to help compare the main character to later introduced characters, and show his social standing in comparison to theirs. Gabriel, the main character, comes off as a nobody and Hardy uses word choice to convey that message. Another thing is that the author seems a bit biased towards people who are lower in the social standings by implying that they aren't capable of keeping hold of what they have. The author wrote Gabriel as a character who is lower than all the other involved characters within the novel, and describes him as "just a shepard" and many variations of that. Gabriel is even lower than the women in the book and at the time that Far From the Madding Crowd is set men were believed to have more authority than the women. So far the tone has stayed the same and has not once shifted, but you never know when things within a book could change.