Blog Portfolio

This is my blog portfolio. I've really enjoyed the unit of dystopian (and apocalyptic) fiction, and hope that everybody has enjoyed my blog posts. Thanks

Coverage:
http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/10/should-be-seen-and-not-heard.html
http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/11/plastic-infestation.html
http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/11/myth-legend-or-tale.html
http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/11/commentary-outline.html
http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/11/omniscient-narrators.html
http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/11/long-and-winding-road.html

Depth:
http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/11/myth-legend-or-tale.html

Interaction:
http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/11/myth-legend-or-tale.html

Discussion:
http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/11/plastic-infestation.html

Xenoblogging:
http://alexibhlenglishyr1.blogspot.com/2010/11/perceptions-of-beauty.html

Wildcard:
http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/12/openning-to-novel-im-working-on.html

Opening to the novel I'm working on

            National Novel Writing Month Story

I awoke that morning, sweating. It took me a while to remember that the war was over, along with the horrors that it bought with it. The terrors of thinking I would end up speared on a bayonet or stabbed with a cavalry-men’s sabre. My friends, my brothers, all dead in the Revolution. However, these horrors weren’t what awoke me. I was remembering the week I spent in Lawnshire. Those 8 days will stay with me for the rest of my life. And even if my superiors didn’t believe me, those things happened. The men of my small unit, and me, have the scars to prove it. This is the story of those days.

I had always been fascinated with the supernatural. Witches, vampires, ghosts; my parents, back in Philadelphia had read my stories about them, and I had gobbled them up. I especially loved to read about the Salem Witch Trials, and to learn about all the hatred and piety that was churned up in that small town in Massachusetts. My family was never very religious, in that I wasn’t sheltered from the so-called ‘black arts’. I was allowed to investigate ‘satanic rituals’ and my family never told me not to. They never worked. I got them all from a book that my father bought me, titled ‘The Black Arts and You’, which at the time appeared to be a legitimate book, but now looking back at it, it was simply a scam by a con artist to part my father from his hard earned guineas.

I grew up in the small town of Georgetown, just outside Philadelphia. It’s not there anymore; the British razed it during the war. It had about forty people living in it, all of whom were farmers or tradesmen. My father was a blacksmith, which is where I got the knowledge I had for my time in Lawnshire. My mother was a schoolteacher. No help there. I was never good with my letters or my numbers. Never thought they were useful. Still, I learned them, and that’s how I was able to ascend to my position of sergeant in the Revolutionary Army. The leaders would preach, ‘no point having a man that can’t read orders giving orders.’

When I first joined the Revolutionary Army, it was during a recruitment drive. A man named John Smith came into the village one day, accompanied by two men, who I later learned were named Jeremiah and Russell. This was about when I was 16. I had finished my schooling, surprisingly, and I now was working with my father in his smithy. I understood the affect that the British had on the American people, but I didn’t really care. I just wanted to support my family. My father had come down with a sickness that had blinded him, and while he was still able to direct me and the other workers in his smithy, he was no longer able to work, and therefore out of a job. I needed to get a job, and the Revolutionary Army said that we would all be given land after we ousted the British from the Colonies. I couldn’t not take the chance. I signed up, despite my parents protests, and became an officer in the Revolutionary Army. I left the town the next day, with my new brothers. Two others from the town had signed up as well, my childhood friend, Thomas and his brother, Samuel. Both siblings signed up to be patriotic, and were both proud Christians. Thomas and Samuel didn’t know about my studies of the black arts and what tied the three of us together were our adventures as young men. We all loved to hunt, and would take muskets out to kill animals, not for food, but for fun. That was how I became such a crack shot.  

It turned out that I had signed up to be a simple infantry man in the Revolutionary Army, something that didn’t satisfy me. I believed that somebody of my calibre, with the skills that I had, should be placed into a higher rank. We followed John back to a small camp where about another twenty men waited. The three of us newcomers were introduced to the unit, who we found out were known as the Revolutionary Raiders. John was their captain, and he ventured into the town with left and right hand man to recruit replacements, for they had lost men in a British attack about a week before. They had only just reached civilization again, after this attack. The raiders had been running support on an Army raid on a British base. The Army needed supplies, and what better way than to take them from your enemies? It was a successful raid, but at a cost. Men died in the attack, and therefore the army needed new recruits.

While Thomas and Samuel were talking to their new brothers-in-arms, but I had more pressing matters to attend to. My weapons. I couldn’t be a soldier and not have weapons. I approached John, politely mind you, and told him this. He scoffed, the bastard, and told me that they didn’t have a leftover gun to give me. Of course, I became angry, and began to shout. How could they be offering soldiering positions to men, and not have guns to give them? Did they want to be throwing lives away? This didn’t seem to fluster John; apparently he’d seen this before. He waited for me to stop yelling, and pointed me over to a nearby tent. He said that I could find a sabre in there, which would at least help me defend myself until we were able to scavenge up a rifle.

We camped out in this place for three nights, the Raiders recuperating after their loss of men. We moved out on a Sunday, something that made Thomas and Samuel quite angry. They didn’t like that we moved out on ‘the Sabbath Day’, something that both bothered me and pissed off John. He told them that although God was on their side, they had to fight for independence, and the British weren’t going to wait for Monday to come before fighting again. John told me that it was annoying how pious some people are, believing that God would fight all their battles for them. I nodded, but didn’t reveal my anti-Christian sentiments, in case Thomas and Samuel heard me.

A day after we set out, we came upon a small British band, their men wounded, some of whom had large chunks of their flesh ripped out. One man was standing against a tree, his red coat covering one of the men on the floor, stemming the flow of blood from the ripped arteries in his arm. John told us to get down, and made all of the men with muskets get ready to fire on the wounded Redcoats. He whispered to me to go down to the Redcoats and see what attacked them. I nodded, stood and began to walk down to the men. They had rifles, and on seeing me they raised them. What surprised me was the fact that they were shaking while sighting down the rifles. I had heard tales of these men being merciless and cold killers. I yelled out to them to lower their weapons, and that we had men ready to fire on them. I asked what attacked them, and they said it was a group of savage men. Apparently they had attacked the British with no weapons, simply teeth and claw. They had been easily dispatched; rifle shots through the head, or sabres being rammed into their skulls. However, the majority of the band hand gone down. I told the man that we would take their weapons and in return would allow them to take care of their wounded, if they would stay as our prisoners, otherwise they would be killed. The man thought about it briefly, and then nodded. He handed his rifle to me, and I remember how he told me how some of his men were too far gone, and to let his unwounded me carry them to the nearby British town. There wasn’t a garrison there, so we would have been free to take the prisoners as soon as they had buried their men. Little did we know what was awaiting us in that town.

The Long and Winding Road

I loved this novel.

This type of novel is the sort of novel that I love. I really enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction. My book collection is a good example of this. Albeit my novels are typically related to the zombie apocalypse, I really do enjoy the whole trope of having to survive, and returning to basics.

One of my favourite video games is a good throwback to this trope. I really enjoy a game called Fallout 3, which is set after a nuclear apocalypse, is a good example of this trope. It talks about the need to survive in the barren Wasteland. What I personally enjoy is how all branches of humanity can be shown. The worst and best reaches of the human soul can be shown in this type of science-fiction. In The Road, as the prime example, the pure evil of people, who have descended to killing, cooking, and eating people and even infants. However, in the complete other side of the spectrum is the father and son. These two are the complete different, they want to help people and refuse to descend to the level of eating people, even though that is the most readily available food source. They are more willing to take hardship to the betterment of other people than they are to have food that would help you survive.

Omniscient Narrators

In this chapter of How Fiction Works, the author has an interesting discussion about how narrators can seem Omniscient, and not actually be all that omniscient. He mentions that because we are drawn into the narrators mindset, it can seem as if they are all-knowing. I can see what he is saying. When you are completly enveloped in a person's opinions, their ideals and their beliefs, how can it not seem as if they are all knowing?  The Road is interesting way to look at this. You never see any other characters in the novel, and that completly removes any outside opinion, therefore making the father's opinion the only one we know.

This relates to another article we read, 'Forest of Civilzation'. In this article, we discussed how knowledge is affected by religion. The main point is that humans were oblivious to knowledge, and therefore everything they knew was correct. This is the same in The Road, while what the father belives might be wrong, we know no better from the point of view, and therefore he is all knowing. It all goes back to the old argument of 'Does a tree falling the forest with nobody around make a sound?'. I believe that it does, and by beliveing in it, it is the truth. That makes it correct knowledge. If nobody can refute the claim that something is correct, then it is. In extension, if there is only one opinion, it must be the correct opinion, further supporting the view that the narrator is omniscient.

Commentary Outline

This is an interesting extract, and is quite fun to deconstruct, because the author brings across a large variety of different opinions throughout the piece, sometimes even contadictory ones. Throughout the piece, of which the theme is Love, she talks about it from a variety of points of views. She speaks about it from the the point of view of a woman, and also she tries to interperet Love from the male point of view. The theme of this piece is easily summed up as the way that Love twists Truth. To start off the interpretation, Offrred, the speaker, talks about how men made light of Love, in this case the Commander. The speaker is hurt that he believes that Love is a triviality, or whim. She talks about how it is central to a beings existence.

The most interesting piece to deconstruct is the last couple of paragraphs. In this extract, Offred talks about how hard Love is to find, and when the man she tried to love was difficult to, (which I belive is an allusion to her feelings for the Commander), the more Love exists. She talks about how this love is hard to remember, and when it is remembered it brings pain. I belive that this is an allusion to her lost husband, Luke and the daughter that is never named. Another allusion to the theme is when Offred speaks about how she sees a man who is darker and has a more cavernous face at night, when he is asleep than during the day. It is as if the love that she, or the other women she is talking about, has perverted the man, so that all she thinks about the man is the love she has for him, which she doesn't see when he is asleep, because his personality isn't there. This also leads onto the final quote of the extract, 'What if he doesn't love me?'. This one quote puts a lot of emphasis on the theme, and also the message that Offred is talking about in this extract.  Offred mentions how the more difficult it is to love the man, the easier it is to belive in Love. If you don't know if a man loves you, it must be difficult to love him, and therefore, the belief in Love is heightened. This approach to Love, and the relationship it has with difficulty relates hand-in-hand to Hope, which is another imporant part of both this extract and the story itself.

Myth, Legend, or Tale?

First of all, I'd like to tell everybody about an interesting fact. The United States spends more money on pornogrophy than the entire sum of Sub-Saharan Africa's national debt. Stating this fact shows nothing apart from the fact that a lot of men watch or read pornography. However, in this article, titled the Beauty Myth, the authour uses pornogrophy as a way of saying that women are being debased in this pornogrophy.  As the authour states, the media industry making the most money at this point in time is porn. This is interesting, as it seems to be rising as do women's rights. I believe it is simply because of the ease with which it becomes accessible. Five years ago, we did not have as good internet as we do now. This means that, as internet becomes more and more accessible, we are able to access things such as porn more easily. I belive that the author is connecting two un-related facts. She is doing the same thing as newspapers, who will take something such as Ice-cream sales rising, and shark attacks rising as being related. When it is infact an outside force, such as it being summer, that affects the results of the statistic.

She talks about how how women are feeling worse about their appearance than their grandmothers did, despite all the moving forward for the feminist movement in others. I believe that again there is an explanation for this in advancing technology. Women in the 1800's, while having to worry about their experience, didn't have as much of an incentive, as their image, when recorded, could be modified easily, as it was predominantly done using portraits that're painted. Any photographs that were taken were in black and white and therefore the colouration of the women didn't matter. Nowadays, any pictures taken will persist for ages, and are in colour. Anybody can see today's photographs, as social media sites such as Facebook and Flickr! come along. These sites are enabling people to easily comment on each others appearances, and nobody wants to have bad comments on their appearances, leading women to caring about their appearances a lot more.

In one of Alex Millers posts, he talks about how the beauty myth gives women an image to strive for. 'One can go through pictures of supermodels and understand why society and you would consider them attractive. If there wasn't an accepted form of beauty than women would not have an image to pursue.'  I agree with Alex, as without these outside influences, women (and men, who also have influences) would have no image to strive for. This would have many different effects. Number one, it would be difficult to tell who you think is attractive, because what is attractiveness but a benchmark against the accepted appearance. Number two, thousands of companies, and people, would be out of buisness, because they make their money off people buying their clothes to get closer to the beauty myth. Because of this, I believe that the reason the beauty myth was created was exactly for the reason that women would buy items from the purveyors of the myth.

Plastic Infestation

A Barbie doll. Who hasn't heard of one? Essentially a plastic doll, this figurine has infested itself into Western-culture. One example of how it has infested culture is the recent Toy Story 3. The first two movies contained typical childrens toys, like a cowboy and a spaceman. This most recent movie shows Barbie AND her male counter-part Ken as toys that have been thrown away, linking them to nostalgia and the yesteryear. Now, I never owned a Barbie, but I can understand the effect that they have on a girl's memory. I can imagine how seeing one reminds them of games they used to play. In fact, I can relate this to my own experiences with videogames.

I started gaming when I was about 8, and that was on my parents computer. I played a game called Rogue Squadron 3D, and if I play it now, it still reminds me of when I was young. My father has the same reaction when we watch an older TV show, like Black Books or the original Star Trek. Just the other day, we watched Batman 1966, which was both amazing for him, to go back to when he first saw it, and for me, having never seen it.

On the other side, the way that Barbie has essentially 'milked' the success of its brand is, to me, disgusting. The producers of Barbie, who I believe are Hasbro, have churned out version after version of the doll, some of which are frankly inappropriate and disgusting for children. The anatomically correct barbie, with sex toys, is just not needed in a kids toy. I can understand the point that Hasbro are making, as why stop making a toy that sells. Its like stopping releasing movies or books. And although I said it was disgusting earlier, I throughly love the 'milking' of the Star Wars francise, which is the same ploy. Star Wars Episode IV has alone made over $4 billion dollars, which is a lot of money, quite frankly.

Should be seen and not heard?

This article talks about the old school style of how children should be seen and not heard. The author talks about how this is very prominent in southern black culture, and I can say that I know that it used to be very prevalant in the United Kingdom as well, especially for female children, as the author states. She talks about how women dominated the black household, in a bad context. She talks about how children were smothered and not allowed to speak up. She makes a good point about how she had to break the rules set by her mother about how she shouldn't speak, just to learn how to talk. She goes on to state how she was smothered as a child because there was 'no calling for talking girls'.

When comparing this blog to The Handmaid's Tale, it is interesting to note the similarities. The women in The Handmaid's Tale, while adult are not allowed to express themselves. They are made to wear plain dresses and are not allowed to write, or even read, as it is shown as un feminine. This is similar to the blog, were the writer talks about how she had to hide writings under her bed, in pillowcases and amongst her underwear. The pressure on women to give birth is another throw back to earlier in the century. A good example of this is Nazi Germany, where women were made to leave work and work at home, and were paid depending on the amount of children in their familes. 

Blog Portfolio

Coverage: There is a blog for every topic
Depth: http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/09/immersion-in-world.html
Interaction: http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/09/truth.html#
Discussion: http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/08/forests-shadows-of-civilization.html
Xeno-blogging: http://saumya22.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/i-am-as-you-desire-me/#comments
Wildcard: http://iyagovos.blogspot.com/2010/08/some-shared-reading.html

Truth

During our discussion last English class, we discusses a lot of interesting items, such as fractals, the fact that places can or cannot exists, and the fact that all truths are subjective. I talked about how a die will always show a number. This was an interesting topic to discuss with the rest of the class, especially when somebody stated that a die could be a cube with different colours on each side. I was able to rebut to this by saying that by removing the numbers from the die it is reduced to being a simple cube. Another interesting discussion was the one about the only objective truth being that all truths are subjective. I didn't get a chance to talk about this in the lesson, but I belive it would be a fun topic to discuss now. By saying that the only objective truth is that all truths are subjective, you create a pardox. It is akin to saying 'everything I say is a lie'. By saying that you are lying, which means that you can say some true things, meaning that what you just said was a lie. By saying that all truths are subjective, you are saying that they only apply at a certain time, meaning that there are no truths. By saying this, you are able to remove the fact that all truths are subjective from the equation, making it false.

Truth however, is never constant, as is demonstrated in We. People are able to modify the truth to talk about what they want to be shown. This is evident by O'brian being able to make the main character, Winston, believe that 2+2=5, even though it doesn't.

Immersion in a World

This chapter, entitled The Psychology of the Novel mentions suspension of disbelief, a topic that he uses to explain why some students like Kafka's Metamorphosis, and why some students don't. The students that don't like the story are the ones that are unable to immerse themselves into the fantasy of a man transforming into a cockroach. This is because they were unable to understand what was going on, which distanced them from the characters, and therefore the story. The people that were able to immerse themselves in the story therefore enjoyed it more. On a personal level, this act of suspending disbelief appeals to me, as a Dungeons and Dragons gamer. In reading a novel, and more so in acting out a character in a completly different world, it is important to use suspension of belief. To talk about the D&D game a little bit further, it is a game where the players are placed in danger. If the players are not immersed in the world, then they don't feel the danger, which removes the risk from the game. This results in a lack of fun, because where is fun without the risk or danger. While this doesn't extend to suspension of disbelief in novels, it is still important from a gaming point of view. In novels, suspension of disbelief is a little less important. Because the reader doesn't have anything invested in the novel, apart from the money the spent on it, the book needs to draw them in. This results in the characters needing to be easier to understand. They do this by making sure that the story makes sense and that there are no plotholes.

Forests: The Shadows Of Civilization

In this chapter of Forests: The Shadows Of Civilization, Robert Harrison talks about how forests have affected humanity, from the time of their creation till our modern lifestyle now. To start off with, he talks about how the ancient city of Rome was always depicted as having an origin in forests. He uses an example of a poem which states that men moved into the forests of where Rome was to be founded, and chases mythological creatures, (such as fawns and satyrs) away from them. He then goes on to talk about Giambattista Vico, who was an Italian theroist from Naples, living in the 18th centurary.

Vico uses the story of Noah to talk about humanity's origin. The floods that caused Noah to build the great Arc resulted in massive forests growing, and covering the earth. The descendents of Noah spread across the earth and became solitary creatures that converted into animals, essentially. They were abanded as babies by their mothers, had no families or conciousness and fed on fruits and water. They had no laws, and became incestuous and brutal. He talks about how the giants were at peace, even thought they were brutal to one another.

However, one day the giants decided to investigate what was causing storms in the sky. They cut down the trees and saw lightning and heard thunder, but saw no cause. So, understandably, they created an origin. God. This caused them to begin to question their existence, and begin to create concepts such as family, law and science. These were created in an attempt to get closer to God, or Jove, as he is called in this excerpt.

In essence, this story is re-telling the meme of 'curiosity killed the cat', in saying that the investigation of things unknown leads to the destruction of known things.

And a poem, too.

Neurull’s Coming




Deep in the barren wastes of the Darkland,

A lake exists.

A lake so foul,

Even dragons fear it.

A layer of blackness, shrouding the shell of the lake;

Septic corpses of urgals and trolls rot within.

Deep in the murky, deadly sea,

A whirlpool sucks in the mangled bodies.

A whirlpool with teeth,

A whirlpool that is alive.



Rumbling, the lake trembles,

Creating waves of despair.

Black charred bones,

Disintegrated skulls,

Scraps of sinew and

Strings of flesh upon its shores.



The lake,

Damned by gods and people alike.

Elves, the most sensitive of all,

Are confounded by its taint.



Black magic,

Wreaths the lake in rot and corruption.

The lake, an abomination,

is named Zagan the mirror,

for it reveals death in life,

And life in death.



Many an adventurer laden with his fallen comrade,

Wishing to gaze upon his live face once more,

Arrives at Zagan

Only to be claimed.

Claimed by the waking evil,

Claimed by Neurull,

The god of death.



Tendrils of decaying flesh,

Fetid and rotting,

Writhe from the lake.

The adventurer is grabbed,

Pulled into the acidic waters.

Then he is thrown out,

Melting,

The hissing flesh of his face

Distorted into an eternal scream

Hungry for redemption.



They are the Deathly Wanderers,

For they travel the unsuspecting world,

Killing all in their path.

And the only thing in the way of the Wanderers,

Are the paladins,

Warriors for Heironius,

God of valour,

Who battle the wanderers wherever they traipse.

But Neurull peers at the paladins and plots,

The tortured demise of the paladins

So that he can come forth,

Forth from his unholy imprisonment

To wreak havoc upon the peaceful world of Faerûn

We prophesy Neurull’s waking!

Some shared reading

I wrote this two years ago in my English class. I thought perhaps it should be shared.

Enjoy.

The Chair




The marble chair stood in the middle of the room. No heat emanated from the cold, black stone. The armrests, ornately carved, end in slender, feminine hands. The back, carved comfortably, was an effigy of a fair maiden. The chair was so deep a black that your eyes would refuse to focus on that dark chair. It seemed as if the chair was looming at you, with the white figures outlined in the deep night of the chair.

The room containing that cold, foreboding chair was in was just as torturous, but in a subtler sense. The room was silent, so silent it would drive you insane. But one thing, just one thing made it unbearable. A metronome sitting on a stone desk is the corner, seemed not to break the silence, but to exaggerate the muted atmosphere of the murky room. From the ceiling hung a lantern, enclosed in black filters, which bathe the room in a sort of black light. One portal, a stone door, led away from the horrible place.

The man sitting in the chair looked calm. But at a closer look, you could see that his eyes were wild, akin to those of a badger. His knuckles, white from gripping the stone in his pale hands, shuddered in hysteria from the eternal silence and sparseness of the room. His face, unshaven and pale, looked as if daylight had forsaken him. Although he wasn’t bound by any physical means, he felt compelled to sit in that chair. Forever.

As the stone door slid open, a tall, terrible man entered the room. As he did so, a radiance of calm flew out of his being into the man in the chair. The new comer was clad regally, with purple jacket and burgundy trousers. A black steel blade was strapped to his waist, the jewel encrusted hilt showing from the black scabbard. But even though he was clothed in riches and his blade was made of a rare and invaluable material, his face was want completed his form. The man’s face was showed no emotion, it was cold and plain. The utter lack of feeling in the man’s face made the poor person in the chair feel ever more distressed. His face had been altered by his masters to have that very effect on the slovenly man in the chair. As the torturer entered the room, he knew, as he had always known, that this was the man who made his life a misery.

‘Ah, Mr. Thompson, I see you haven’t tried to escape again… hmmm? Well, its not as if you could get any further than last time. And to think of what you did to the guard. I’m still trying to get the stain of the wall. But, no worries, I think our new friend is going to help us out today.’ The man in purple turned to the door, and motioned forwards. Two surly looking men, carrying a ‘barrow of cages came through the door. They left the wooden transport in the middle of the room, and left. The man in purple took one of the cages in the ‘barrow and peered into it. Inside was a large rat, the size of a small dog. The man gave it to Mr. Thompson, and told him to hold it over his chest. Mr. Thompson looked blankly at the regal man, but complied. The man in purple took a brace of rope from his side and began tying down poor Mr. Thompson. Soon, his arms were completely bound, and his arms similarly so. Then, the regal man strode over to the metronome and struck a match on it.

As the match fizzled to life, the man in purple walked back to the terrified man, and then, subtly let the match catch a light on the wooden cage. The rat, terrified, began to burrow through the wood and into the poor man’s chest. The rat continued to burrow until he reached the man’s ribcage, and then the man in purple reached in and withdrew the gore-covered rodent. He dropped it to the floor, and with one fluid movement squashed the rat under the heel of his boot. He then looked towards the hardly breathing life in the chair, and nodded, cruelly. The man in purple began to leave the room, as he was done with that man for the day, and hoped he would get information off of him the next. As he left, two women, dressed in medical uniform came rushing into the room, and began to tend the quickly dying man. As the door slid shut, behind the leaving man, all they could hear was the ever so often squeak as the man’s bloody heels scraped the floor.

Comparing "Questions Of Conquest" And "Freedom and Democracy"

In reading both of these pieces, I can sense similarities in both the way that they write, and some obscure similarities in the points they are making.
In Questions, the author is trying to make a point about how Europeans come and destroyed millenia of South American culture. One example of this is in the quote, '...fastidiously catechized in the Indian villages by the extirpators of idolatries like Father Arriaga, to justify the devastations of idols, amulets, ornaments, handicrafts and tombs.' This quote is sentiment is echoed in F&D, where the author talks about the effect that emotions have on the human mind. The authour talks about how the restricitive environment of school effects the students mind, and eventually causes him to become the docile member of society that society wants them to be.

The styles of writing are very similar, as both write in the first person, and use very expression and high-level English to get across their points.

Language Style

The similarities in language style between WE and the language essay

In We, the language is similar to the language essay in a variety of ways. In my opinion, the language, in both cases is very formal and intelligent. Zanyatin writes as if he is speaking to people, or as if it is directly his thoughts coming down onto paper. This is especially evident in the essay about language, where he states that the essay is infact written from a lecture that he said to his college class. Both are written in lecture format, as if they are lessons to people, which is understandable from both pieces. WE is written from the P.O.V of somebody telling 'lesser' beings about his society, and On Language is written to tell people about language itself.