CR#3 Monster
Monster by Walter Dean Myers
“Downtown New York was almost empty on Sundays. The thousands of people who streamed trough the streets on weekdays were away in their homes. I was looking for Jerry. They didn’t allow kids in the visiting area, which was funny. It was funny because if I wasn’t locked up, I wouldn’t be allowed to come into the visiting room” (156).
This passage really speaks volumes for our society and for me this passage is a really scary thought. In a literary aspect I found that this particular quote is an anecdote within an allusion. An anecdote because it is a verbal account of our messed up judicial system of a frightening reality where a boy the age of 16 can be in jail awaiting a sentence of 25 years to life but otherwise would be considered too young and would not even be allowed to enter into said jail to visit someone. It gives us this crazy allusion between the connections of how adolescence is supposed to be treated to how adolescence is actually treated. Steven Harmon is a young boy who wouldn’t be allowed to visit a jail yet sits in one as a monster. We are brought to believe he is a monster for the heinous crimes he has committed but what real crime did this boy commit. Possibly being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And now he is a monster. Whether he did it or not he is a monster. He is no longer a boy that should be sheltered from jail but a monster that should rot in one for the rest of his life. It amazes me that we as a society can go from one extreme to the next without even a second thought.
Asiye Sinmazisik
I really like the passage you picked out here. I think it is a really startling irony that Myers by way of Harmon points out. I think your focusing on it gets at a lot of issues about what age is someone a kid (what’s the difference between Jerry and Steve?); about what other than time and growing older can make someone suddenly not a child; about the cognitive dissonance inherent in our legal/cultural understanding of child/adult that’s implied in this contradiction; and our sense of whatever emerges between that dissonance (which is like a lot of things and people) as being monstrous.
In your post (as it is right now) though I am not sure I understand how you are using the terms anecdote and allusion. First it kind of seems like you are talking about the same thing when you talk anecdote as a story the illustrates this contradiction but then allusion also illustrates the contradiction. So allusion is a very particular device. It’s when a text makes a nod to another text. So if a text alludes to something, you should be able to say what song, news article, celebrity catch phrase, dance move, sports play, etc it’s alluding to. If it’s calling our attention to the structures of our real life legal system, that’s not an allusion. It’s important; it’s just not an allusion. Similarly I think you have the right definition for anecdote, but the whole novel is the (fictional) anecdote, right? So it’s not a specific device being used in this scene.
I’m spending time on this point because I’m thinking about you writing your paper. You are in the right head space to wanting to identify specific literary devices in the text, but I want you to make sure you can articulate what you see the text doing without relying on the term. This way if the term you pick isn’t the best term, your reading will still be clear. It will also force you to talk about the device in terms of how it shapes this moment in the narrative and what the text is/can do and keep you from panning too far out and away from the text to society in general and abstract readers and trends not in the text (those things may always be underneath your argument, giving it a weight and importance and maybe even being part of your concluding discussion of the stakes, but they are not the central focus in a close reading literary paper–the text is.)