Emi's English Blog

           I wasn’t sure why the goddam room got so goddam hot all of a sudden. It was like someone had wrapped the whole stinking thing up in tinfoil and stuck it in an oven like a potato or something, it was that hot. My armpits started to work up this terrible sweat. Somewhere above, this rusty ceiling fan was spinning around and around . Slowest thing I ever saw. It kept on stirring that hot air up into even hotter air and all these guys in the bar kept loosening their collars and sneaking looks around as though they were checking to see if some random furnace had appeared or something. I had half a mind to take off my old jacket but this real nasty looking pack of girls over at the counter were sorta giving me eyes and I didn’t want to give them anything to look at. There really wasn’t much of a reason for me to keep sticking around, but I didn’t have anything better to do tonight. This nervous little guy over in the corner kept sneaking these nervou...

Portrait of a Young Artist has spoiled us. Joyce opens his very mind and allows us to step into the life of another person. Other novels sometimes seem to place a sort of video camera in front of the character, and that is the view we have of them. Sure, we get inside their minds a little, with statements like “Oh, he made Clara so furious!” and “Jack had never seen anything so heartbreaking before, and he thought of his own mother,” or whatever, but PYA makes it seem as though we are Stephen himself. I personally have never read anything like this book before. Of course, this quality of PYA is also what throws off a lot of readers, because it is incredibly intense to get to know another person-- deeply know them. We are deeply getting to know Stephen--his most shameful thoughts, his most innate tendencies (which even he himself might not realize exist). This process is overwhelming for us, and the reason for that is Stephen is absolutely insane. But it’s not his faul...