When you look at the character list on the first page of the play you notice that Ibsen used the possessive word his to identify who two of the characters were. Instead of identifying Miss Julianne Tesman  as George Tesman’s aunt, she is identified as his aunt and Hedda Tesman is his wife. The possesive use of the word his is interesting because the play is titled Hedda Gabler who is George Tesman’s wife. Why not identify George as her husband? It is also interesting to note that in the script the character’s names are changed from Miss. Julianne Tesman  to Miss Tesman and George Tesman to Tesman and Hedda Tesman is simply Hedda. Although Hedda is married to George Tesman she doesn’t take his last name. On pg. 811 in an attempt to stop Lovborg from informally addressing her in an endeared tone she reveals to him that she doesn’t love George. She is not stopping him from informally addressing her out of respect for her husband, but rather because she doesn’t want to belong to anyone.  She plays with the men in her life. These men include Lovburg, Judge Brack and Tesman. Her relationship with Brack is open, she is forthcoming about herself. She isn’t careful about her words with him. She shamelessly tells him how she purposely insulted Aunt Julie when she “unknowingly” called Aunt Julie’s hat distasteful and old. She doesn’t seem to have any small feelings of love to help humanize her. Hedda needs to feel in control, that is why she doesn’t take George’s last name or lets Lovborg informally address her. She draws people to her by using her beauty, confidence and through the use of manipulation.  Thea spills her guts to her even though Hedda was mean to her as a school girl, George and Aunt Julie spend all their savings to please Hedda, she enjoys Lovborgs’ attention because it causes Thea pain and gets Brack to suddenly sell the house to her. When she commands someone they obey. She commands George to write a letter right away on pg 792. She commands Thea many times throughout the play either with words or by force on pgs. 793, 813 and 817. She shows how persistent she is in controlling the outcomes by getting Lovburg to leave Thea alone with her by manipulating him into leaving on pg 814 after he first declined to leave.

The characters in this play love to make implications, they rarely state outright what they are thinking. It’s all carefully worded. For example on pg 785 Miss Tessman (Aunt Julie) and Tessman ( George Tessman) have the following conversation:

On the house George and Hedda recently moved into

Tessman: It’s splendid! Only I can’t think of what we’ll do with those two empty rooms between the back parlor and Hedda’s bedroom.

Miss Tessman: [ Lightly laughing ] My dear George-when the time comes, you’ll think of what to do with them.

Tessman: Oh, of course-as I add to my library, hm?

Miss Tessman: That’s right, my boy-of course I was thinking about your library.

From observing the dashes I can tell that these are awkward pauses used to hide what Miss Tessman actually meant. She was suggesting that the rooms would be used for the children that the Tessman’s would be having one day. It would seem that George does not see children in his future. Which is strange because on pg 788 George joyfully describes Hedda as “filled out” which either means that she is pregnant or  has gotten rounder because he is able to provide for her.  I believe she either doesn’t care for kids or isn’t impressed by him. She later reveals to Judge Brack that she married George because he offered to give her everything, but his everything isn’t enough for her since he comes from a lower middle class as opposed to her coming from an upper middle class life.

The following is another instance of implication on the top of pg 785 when Aunt Julie suggests that he may be having an affair. When she asks about prospects she doesn’t mean job prospects but rather another woman. Dashes are used here again to show that she is carefully implicating something without actually saying it.

Miss Tesman: … George-isn’t there something-something extra you want to tell me?

Tesman: About the trip?

Miss Tesman: Yes.

Tesman: No-I can’t think of anything I didn’t mention in my letters. I was given my doctorate-but I told you that yesterday.

Miss Tesman : So you did. But I mean-whether you might have any-any kind of-prospects-?

Tesman: Prospects?

Miss Tesman: Good Lord, George-I’m your old aunt.

Tesman: Well of course I have prospects.

Miss Tesman: Aha!

Tesman: I have excellent prospects of becoming a professor one of these days but Aunt Julie dear, you already knew that.

Miss Tesman: [With a little laugh] Your right I do. [Changing the subject]…

Although Ibsen describes the Tesman characters as simple and kind they’re behavior around Hedda shows the opposite. Aunt Julie spends all her savings to help keep up appearances for George even though her sister Rina is ill. Aunt Julie and George put up with Hedda because she is a symbol of accomplishment. She is of value because he was able to win her over all the other suitors. She is essentially a trophy wife. Aunt Julie and George use the word beautiful a lot to describe Hedda. It especially becomes apparent that George doesn’t truly value her when he calls Hedda the most beautiful thing of all. I believe that he doesn’t have any confidence in himself and marries Hedda to boost his ego. It would also explain why he is threatened by Lovburg’s success. Without the handsomely payed position he wouldn’t be able to provide for his wife and would eventually loose her. He does not believe that he can compete with him for the same job position so he asks him to withdraw from the competition.

After reading act I.  You find out Juliana and Berta are visiting George and Hedda after they honeymoon.  George is Juliana’s nephew.  Juliana and her sister took care of him awhile he was growing up; as Geoge’s father passed away.  Berta is Goerge’s and Hedda’s housekeeper now.  You can tell she is not happy with Hedda as she has already rules set up around the house.  The newly couple are sleeping when They arrive, Goerge comes down and happy to see his aunt as later Hedda comes as well.  They aunt wants to everything about their trip and plans you get the feeling that Hedda doesn’t like her and can’t wait for her to leave.  When Juliana leaves and George are saying good-bye to each other outside she goes in and can’t stand their talk in (789).

Hedda has a way of making people feel bad about themselves as she picks on them.  A former classmate Mrs. Elvsted shows up at their house to talk to George about her marriage.  She turns out that used to go to school together with Hedda and Hedda used to make fun of her and her clothes.

As Goerge write a letter for Mrs Elvsted to send to her husband; Hedda keeps her company by asking her all these question about her marriage.  She makes her feel awful by being married to an old man who has over twenty years apart and top of that she takes care of his kids with his previous marriage.

Hedda  is a character who seems to be very self centered and manipulative. She has had a different effect on each character and it all seems negatively influenced. It doesn’t seem as though she is genuine about her husband George Tessman and she has no respect for his aunt. For instance in act 1 (page 788) she states ” that maid won’t last she her old hat laying on the chair” , given she didn’t know that it was Miss Tessman’s hat she was very tactless for the statement. In this scene it felt as though she considered herself above George and Miss Tessman, George seemed to have continually remind her that she was part of the family now but she didn’t seem to care.

Another scene that shows her character would be the scene with Ms. Elvsted, before Mrs. Elvsted came to the house Hedda had an attitude because she sent flowers and was George’s ex which you would find understandable for any wife to feel. After Mrs. Elvsted tells her troubles, Hedda fakes concern to get information from her. She coaxes Mrs. Elster saying they were good friends in school even though she actually used to attack her and she didn’t even know here correct name. On page 795 during her sit down with Thea (Mrs. Elvsted) she starts to dig into the relationship between Thea and Eilert which I find interesting because she shows a lot of concern about him and I’m unsure whether its good or bad.

Hedda seems like the antagonist of the play it because she seems like she keeps everyone walking on pins and needles. She is hard to please and someone that makes it hard for you to want to please them. Its an interesting play so far I can’t wait to see how it turns out in act 3 and 4.

Ghalib mainly wrote all his poems about his emotions through his aspect of life, love Romance and his desire to be isolated from the rest the world. unlike a lot of traditional men, Ghalib was quite an emotional writer, maybe mainly due to the death of his family members and the seven kids that he had with his wife. The tragic death of his family has definitely changed his aspect towards to people and as well as his definition of life. Ghalib wrote “I’ve Made My Home Next Door to You,” “It Was Essential,” and “My Tongue Begs for the Power of Speech” and other poetry through the form of ghazal, Also known as a short lyrics form of writing that contains a series of couplets with rhyme-and-repetition pattern between the lines.which appeared in his poems “It was essential” and “I’ve made my home next door to you”. Ghalib used The Sentence “for a new more days.”(line 6) repeatedly, to show how unwilling of him to let him go and how sad he felt after Arif’s death “ his adopted son”. Unique form of writing like ghazal often enhance the emotional effects in the his poems to the reader. Similar to Emily dickinson’s writing, ghalib used long dash lines to stop readers from reading at certain points of the poem. both of Their works are mostly composed in lyrics form, also they writes about loneliness in life and their unattainable love but Ghalib was simply a much more religious and emotional man compare to Emily dickinson.

In “My tongue begs for the power of speech”, it wasn’t hard to tell that ghalib was a religious man and he had a “close relationship” with god but that did not stop him from criticizing god and his religion through the lines “ Devotion is the veil,that keeps our hubris hidden, held in check; the brow that scrapes the ground,the square prayer mat, are your gift to us.” line(31-36) God held human in check and set so many rules for them, human are relying on god to solve all their problems in life too much, human lost their Self-confidence or the courage to face the problems that they have and stand up for themselves.

Another interesting thing about Ghalib’s style of writing was that he address a “ you” in almost all of his poems, for example in the poem “ it was essential” “ it was essential that you wait for me, for a few more days”(line 1-3). the word “ you” showed up quite often, because of that all his poems feels like A story from his first-person perspective and they are slightly like a conversation between him and the person he was referring to in the poem. sometimes it was his lover, sometimes it was his adopted son, or even god but no matter who it is, Ghalib is deeply emotionally attached to the people in his life, that was what makes him  an exceptional Romantic poem writer. Love plays a significant role in his life. the feeling of love not only changed the way he writes, but also it made him who he is as a writer. In “ Couplets”

Pulling that image

from my memory –

of your finger

imprinted with designs in henna –

was exactly like pulling a fingernail

from my flesh. (10)

he expressed his strong feelings for love in this poem.The image of love is all over his head and to the point where it drives him crazy. all these Painful memories of love that he experienced were more like a tattoo to him, unforgettable and most importantly it left Unerasable marks deep inside his heart.

If you choose to revise your essay, the requirements are as follows:

• Due in-class Thursday, October 29 OR Tuesday, November 3, the latter only if you provide evidence of visiting office hours or the writing center
• Must be accompanied by a cover letter explaining what revisions you made, and why (in letter format); 1-2 paragraphs in length
• Re-writes must be submitted in hard copy in class, WITH the original marked up paper
  • No late revisions will be accepted
• To receive a higher grade, re-writes must show significant revision, not simply correction

This story starts with the author shows that the underground man is depressed and antisocial. The underground man showed that he inferior to his co-workers because he thought that he was smarter than everyone else. The author is attempting to show that the underground man feels that he is better than everyone else by stating that the underground man is “cultured” (659) However the author is trying to show that because the underground man thought he was better than everyone else, he felt that he was isolated from the rest of the world by stating that the underground man thought of himself as a “coward and a slave.” (659)

In the middle of the story, the underground man goes to dinner with his old classmates. During the dinner, his classmates are introduced to the reader. The way that the underground man portrays his feelings for his classmates the reader that he disliked Zverokov by stating “I’d hated the shrill confident tone of his voice,” (669) This interpretation shows that the underground man is jealous of his classmates and that he is insecure about himself. During the dinner, the narrator describes how awkward the dinner was because he was given the wrong time to go to the restaurant and how his classmates were having a good time while he was sitting at the able drinking alcohol. After the dinner, the underground man goes to a brothel where he wakes up next to a prostitute names Liza. During Liza’s visit to the underground man’s home, he stated “I wanted to reduce you to tears, humiliation, hysteria” even though Liza knew that he was unhappy and wanted to help him. This quote shows that the underground man needed to exert power over someone weaker intellectually in order to be happy and that he was not able to understand that Liza is trying to help him.

The writing style that the author uses in this story was perfect. It felt like the reader was in the view of the underground man and knew his feeling at several key moments. The author used several quotes that were said directly to several characters while going back to the reasoning. After reading this story, I felt that the author was trying to show how education because most of the story indicates how complicated he seems to make each situation by being overly paranoid.

We return to the Underground Man and find out that he is practically the same man, depressed and having self-confidence issues. However, does he really?

He starts off Part II introducing the first other people in this world, his co-workers. The description of the first is a being with “repulsive pock-marked face” (658) and the second being one with “a foul smell emanating from him” (658). Right away, we get this feeling of superiority that our Underground Man feels towards his co-workers. In addition, he lets us know of his “unlimited vanity and the great demands [his] accordingly made on [him]self” (658). He thinks his face is repulsive, just like his co-worker, but for a different reason. It is not because he is ugly but is not up to his standards of perfection where it displays the qualities of “noble, expressive, and above all, extremely intelligent” (658). Our Underground Man gives off an aura of a person who is super good looking but calls himself ugly. That’s quite a bit of self-confidence.

Furthermore, since part one, he has always had this obsession of looking smart and superior to the normal person. He acknowledges this when he says “no one was like me, and I wasn’t like anyone else” (659). He is our special snowflake that is unique and is just too smart for anyone else understand.

Thirdly, he justifies his feeling of inferiority to his co-workers by thinking that he was so cultured that it was not only alright to sometimes feel inferior, but rather a “law of nature for all decent men on earth” (659). At first, he did not understand why he would by unable to look at them in the eye or walk confidently in front of them. So he just makes something up and makes himself believe that being a coward is a sign of how cultured he is and how much better he is over everyone else.

Maybe the Underground Man is eccentric, contradictory, and awkward but he never lacks the confidence of believing in himself. Except when he does…then he just makes something up and calls it “the law of nature”.

The fiction all starts with the narrator constantly contradicting himself. Him being sick but never goes to a doctor; in fact, he is superstitious that he believes in medicine but he is well educated not to be superstitious. Him telling forty years is entire lifetime and no one should live past forty but claiming he intends to live till sixty, seventy and eighty. All of these ambiguous decisions he was making in his life made no sense.  He seems mad, lazy and self- inflicting until chapter five.

However, he starts an argument against rationalist and utopian thinkers from then on. Utopian thinkers believed that society would be perfect where everything is systemized and well calculated. There would be nothing a man should worry so that society would be peaceful and people would be happy. In contrast, Dostoyevsky argued people actually would be suffering in that kind of perfect life. Because human nature doesn’t allow us live solely following rule. Men wish to have his own way. In addition; we wish good in life as much as we unconsciously wish for bad. Histories of civil wars all around the world was perfect illustration of this idea. People found peace through civilization; simultaneously, civilization was found through terrible bloodshed wars. He now becomes intelligible, genuine and lover of freedom.

I was fascinated with his writing style. It was almost felt like I was talking to him directly. He constantly raises interesting questions and answers them accordingly. It was much more relaxed than Enlightenment and Romantics literature. He jokes and comments on his own ideas. Most of the time he starts with asking questions and illustrates taking examples. Plus, he never forgets to remind the reader what was question and what was his response in regard.