Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” illustrates Freud’s idea of family in his “Family Romance.” In “Barn Burning,” Abner Snopes clearly emphasizes the importance of family loyalty as he yells at Sartoris to stay loyal to blood late night in the forest. “You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you,” (Faulkner, 3) Mr. Snopes tells Sarty. Sarty has a hard time deciding whether to stay loyal to his family when he knows what his father does is wrong and unlawful. Freud suggests in his short piece that a young child only has their parents to learn from in the early ages. But soon they grow and start to wish they could replace their parents. “Indeed the whole effort at replacing the real father by a superior one is only an expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women” (Freud, 2). In Faulkner’s story, Sartoris wishes his father would correct his ways and stop burning barns out of revenge and anger. After a struggle with his own family, Sartoris frees himself and warns Major de Spain. This eventually gets his own father killed. Reflecting on this, we see Sartoris grief for a while but continues to walk on without looking back. He is completely independent now that he chose to be loyal to the law instead of loyal to his family.

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Hitting the snooze button on her phone, Teena refuses to get out of bed. It is 6:30AM and it would be cold outside of the blankets. As the alarm rings again, she tells herself she has to get up. After getting ready, she heads to the living room where breakfast has already been prepared for her. Her dad wakes up earlier to make sure she has the most important meal of the day. Teena sits down and enjoys her sandwich with an egg sunny-side up, just how she likes it. Thank you, dad! Finally ready to leave, she puts on her shoes and rushes out to catch the train. Speed walking down two blocks, she gets to the train station just as a 6 train closes its doors and speeds away. The next one is in five minutes. That’s not too bad. As she waits, she observes the people making her way out of the train station. Isn’t she cold wearing that? So many unfamiliar faces walking past. She hears the rumbling of a train coming as it slowly comes to a stop at the station. As she steps into the train, she realizes a strong pungent smell in the train. A woman runs out to the next cart just making it before the doors closed. Teena switches carts at the next stop. The train pulls to a stop at 23rd Street. Teena exits along with a crowd of people, mostly containing Baruch students. She bumps into a friend, Lucy. Lucy, having known Teena since high school, smiles when she sees Teena. Lucy is surprised to see her so early in the morning. However, she notes how tired Teena looks. She has always recalled Teena with a friendly personality. Not having see each other for a while, they catch up with each other as they make their way to Baruch.

Salamishah Tillet’s “How ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Silences Black Women,” an editorial from the New York Times about the new film Birth of a Nation, helps us see the role of women, particularly women of color, in Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.” Right from the beginning of the autobiography, Douglass tells us he believes his father is his master and that he never saw his mother, who was a slave, more than four or five times in his lifetime. Women slaves played a role of just producing more property for the slaveowners.“The children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable” (3). He explains that slaveowners often rape and impregnate female slaves for profit as it increases their number of slaves. Douglass also recalls waking up in the middle of the night to the loud shrieks of his Aunt Hester, who was violently whipped by the master. She would be “tie(d) up to a joist, and whip(ped) upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood” (5) if she ever disobeyed his orders or absent when the master desired her company. From Douglass’s narrative, we can see that women slaves had no voice and was raped and whipped whenever the master desired. Similarly, in Tillet’s editorial, women are “doubly marginalized.” “First, they are silenced by the violations against their bodies and then sidelined to the plot of Turner’s realization of his own manhood in the horror of slavery.” In Mr. Parker’s film, a slave named Esther who was raped played a silent role, communicating her emotions with just her facial expressions. This is a powerful statement as women slaves, like Douglass mentions in his narrative, did not have a voice.

The creature created by Frankenstein is more like Blake’s Lamb. Right after it’s creation, it is born like a baby that needs to be taken care of and taught. However, Frankenstein, horrified by what he had just created, runs away and leaves the creature to ponder around on its own. Without knowing anything, the creature just walking around and exploring realize that people are afraid of him. When the creature watched over the humans in the cottage, it was touched by their gentle manners and longed to join them. “This trait of kindness moved me sensibly. I had been accustomed, during the night, to steal a part of their store for my own consumption; but when I found that in doing this I inflicted pain on the cottages, I abstained, and satisfied myself with berries, nuts, and roots, which I gathered from a neighbouring wood” (63). The creature is understanding and has a soft heart. As in Blake’s “The Lamb,” the lamb is gentle and like a child. The creature is gentle in nature like a lamb and also like a child that needs to be loved, taken care of and taught the right things. The creature is not evil, but only makes mistakes because of its circumstances. One being the time he is attacked and chased away when the villagers see him. The creature looks like a monster; “his yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion, and straight black lips” (30) as described by Frankenstein. Naturally, humans who see the creature gets afraid and either run away from it or choose to attack it. After being treated like a monster, the creature is simply angry and lost its way. Even after enduring everything, it tells Frankenstein it just wants a female version of him so that he can be happy too and that he will leave once he has her. The creature was born with a heart like Blake’s lamb.

Hasif Amini brings up an interesting pattern in human behavior in his short story “Words Without Borders.” He states that we often find or create a story for anything that is unknown to us. Amini’s use of the stars as an example is perfect because these stars are just spots of light to us. However, humans find a way to connect the dots, give them shape, name them, and create stories for each creation. Wether it be the stars in the sky as Amini gives as an example, or on how the world was created, we, as humans, are naturally born with the instinct to think. Just as Descartes’s “Cogito Ergo Sum” suggests, we think, therefore we are. Humans are constantly looking for answers and solving anything that’s unknown. The unknown is a “confusing” idea and humans want to make sense of it to the best of their ability. We do this by creating stories for the things happening around us everyday.

Fiction is an important form of knowledge because it allows us to think, create, and use our imagination. It allows us to experience everything happening in stories vividly in our minds. While it may be unlikely for it to happen to us, we are able to learn through the experience of others. We might never have seen the dragon mentioned in a fiction book, but we end up being able to imagine it in our minds. Reading fiction opens up a new world and opens up our minds to all possibilities. It gives us an opportunity to gain knowledge we are unable to find in nonfiction.

The Enlightenment period was a time when many thinkers began to question everything they are told and everything they believed in. People realized that they have the ability to think for themselves and not just to accept everything they are told. Descartes was one of these philosophers. He suggested the idea of “cogito ergo sum,” which translates to “I think therefore, I am.” This idea reminds all of us that we all exist in this world today because we have the ability to think. His idea stemmed after he realized that we all act on opinions we are uncertain believing in them unquestionably. That is when he decided to doubt everything around him; to treat everything as false. He pretended that all the ideas in his mind so far were all illusions from his dreams. He strongly believes and persuades the reader of the existence of God, who he describes as the most perfect being and that everything in us comes from him. Descartes’ idea of “cogito ergo sum” is important as it is important for all of us to constantly be critically thinking and questioning the things happening around us  because we are able to. Because we think, we exist in this world.