All posts by s.leghari

Achebe’s Big Message in a Short Story

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“Chike’s School Days” by Chinua Achebe is one of the shortest stories Inhave ever read. Although, I enjoyed reading it, after my first read, I was clueless as to what the purpose of this story really is because there wasn’t exactly any conflict nor a climax of any sort. After reading it again with detail, I realized that this story does so much more than tell a story of one person. Achebe managed to give so much insight about his culture implicitly. Achebe used a boy named Chike to be the eyes of the readers.

Chike also has two other names, one of them being John. This is one of those examples where Achebe says so much with such little words. Chike also having a common American name, John, showed how modernized his family was. Achebe goes on forward with more detail about the marriage between Chike’s father and mother. They both came from different backgrounds, and although Achebe pointed out that society looked down upon such an action, he managed to give us a very positive feeling about this anecdote, secretly condoning such behavior.

One thing that really stood out to me in this story was the way Chike viewed the American culture, specifically the English language. Even though, he was nowhere near fluent in English “He liked particularly the sound of English Words, even when they conveyed no meaning at all” to him (Achebe 830). This fondness with American culture is something that I can relate to. Growing up in Pakistan, I was the same way. In fact, almost everyone in my grade put the English language on a pedestal. This may seem harmless, but what I came to realize is that worshipping another culture usually leads to looking down on your own. Just like how Woolf didn’t believe men were the cause of gender inequality, but still held them responsible for it because of their instinct for superiority, I believe the same applies when Chike started to fall in love with American culture, and slowly started losing his own cultural values.

The World is Too Much with Us by William Wordsworth

Reading Response,

With all the excessive advances in technology in the past decade, specifically in the social media like Facebook and Twitter, there have been a lot of concerns about us losing touch with the real world. Interestingly enough, even though “The World is too Much with Us” was published over two centuries ago, its theme is synonymous with the same idea of losing touch with nature. Right from the beginning the poet, William Wordsworth, is straightforward about his message. “The world is too much with us” he says “late and soon” (line 1). He points out that it is not just the problem of his time. With “late” he implies that this has happened before; adding on “soon” implicating that it will continue to happen in the future, and evidently, two hundred years later as we can see, he was right.

One way that Wordsworth portrays his sadness about how things are in the present and how they will be in the future is by consistently referencing the past. He uses his imagination and talks about the Greek gods Proteus rising from the sea and Triton blowing his shell horn. With these last two lines of the poem, Wordsworth accomplishes so many things. He draws an image of a simpler time where everyone was so in tuned with nature, such as, a god who controlled the sea and also the people that believed in that god. In doing so, Wordsworth himself is becoming one with nature as he looks across the sea.

Wordsworth does not ignore the fact that the theme of the poem, man versus nature, is probably very unpopular. In fact he acknowledges it. He easily says that he would “rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn” emphasizing how terrible the times are now (lines 9 and 10). Although, I agree with Wordsworth, it is after reading his poem that I’ve changed my mind on this issue. I used to think that technology is the reason why we have lost touch with nature, but as we can see from this poem, we have had this problem even before all of these new inventions and ideas. I think what Wordsworth is trying to say is that the cause of this problem is not any worldly thing, but “us” ourselves.