Homework 9/17

A piece of literature is not just a mess of ideas and words put on a page, but a carefully thought out idea in the form of fiction, non-fiction or poetry. These ideas that are the final product, or the finished version of the story or poem, are put together from many smaller ideas and then pieced together. Each piece of work or idea can be broken down to show how one would get the final product or finished story. Each piece of literature can be broken down into the ingredients, the process, or how the ingredients are connected, and then the made thing, which shows how what the ingredients conneceted to the process make. This may sound like a way of making food, but it is actually a great way to understand how a piece of literature came to be its final product.
In John Updike's "A & P," there are many ingredients. There is the convienence market that is the A&P. There is also the people working in the store, the people who come into the store to purchase items and also the person who is the manager of the store. Next, we get to the process of putting all these ingredients together. We have all of the people in the store acting like every person in the store before them. We have all the store employees following the orders of the boss, except for Sammy who decides to not obey his boss in the end and quit. So, basically the process is showing how every person, except for Sammy in the end, is a sheep and just follows everyone else. In the made product, there is Sammy standing tall and proud, thinking that he is some hero to these girls, who were shopping and then scolded by the manager for skimpy attire. But some may view Sammy as a hero in a way for going up against the grain and standing up to his boss and not acting like another sheep.
In Sharon Olds' "Rites of Passage," there is a similar made product to that of "A & P" but the way in which the author gets there is completely different. This time for ingredients there are: boys being mentioned as men, as small bankers, as generals, discussing who can beat who up, talking about killing a 2 year old, a cake and a host speaking out. The process takes the boys and uses a parallel structure of them as children to them as different types of men such as generals or bankers. All the boys are being connected to each other through the use of conversation. In the end, or made product, there is the host of the party who decides to act like a man by speaking out and saying that everyone could agree that they could all kill a 2 year old. The boys then have a sense of everyone at least being equal in the fact that they could all kill a 2 year old. This not only shows the boy being somewhat of a hero to his mother for saving his birthday party and saving his mother what would most likely end up as her having to make phone calls to parents because some children beat each other up, but also he acted like a very mature man. This boy also went against the grain by not telling the other children he could probably beat them up. He was not being a sheep, similar to how Sammy was not being a sheep.
In Sharon Olds' "The Only Girl At The Boys Party," Olds describes a girl who, as the title suggests, is the only one at the boys' party, but this girl does not seem to mind. The ingredients in this poem are more intersting than those in the last two works of literature. The poem contains: boys in bathing suits, one girl in a bathing suit, a bathing suit being able to be folded and curves of sexes. The process shows that the description of the girl and watch she is wearing and perhaps how she is thinking is more vivid. The poem almost seems to start with the girl at a very young age, too early to notice that boys and girls have different body parts, and seems to end with her not only starting to notice but almost relishing the fact that she is the only girl here in a pool full of boys. The made product seems to show a parent dropping their child of at the pool, for the reader does not know if this is a father or mother narrating. The poem then shows the narrator going through numbers perhaps signifying that the child is growing up in front of their eyes because at the end of the poem, the narrator notices the boys all staring at the daughter like a piece of meat and her staring and the boys, almost happy in a way because she knows she is the only girl at the pool and she can choose the boy of her liking. The girl is kind of a hero herself, brave enough to be the only one of her sex at the pool. She is definitely going against the grain.
Each piece of Literature has different characters, settings and events that take place in them, but they all three come out with almost the same basic message and that is do not be a sheep. It is amazing how works of literature can be so different, but in the end be so similar. The most interesting work to me, though, was "The Only Girl at the Boys Party." I liked it the most because it did not just discuss a normal, boring topic, but sex. Not literally sex of course, but things having to do with sexual nature. There is a parents' worst fear of having their child finally old enough to realize the sexual differences between men and women. A parent of a daughter is going to be especially concerned because girls, or daughters, are looked at with particular innocence. When this innocence is broken, however, that is when a parents' daughter is transformed into a boy's lover, her innocence gone. She is still the parents' daughter, but no longer the child or baby she once was. To have a poem that really describes what that is like, in only a few lines even, is amazing and interesting to me at the same time.