(Unfortunately) visible man

When I first started writing this post I wanted to write about how confusing Beloved is as a character for the other characters in the book but also the readers. (As she just randomly appears and just assimilated with the family.) However, after today's reading, I'm even more confused than ever. I thought she was just going to be a kind of weird person in the family but she not only has a weird obsession with Sethe, but she also has some habits that I just don't know how to react to. First of all, just as a person, she just (to me at least) seems really manipulative. She has Denver completely under her thumb and it seems like Sethe listens to her pretty much all the time no matter what she says or does. But also she just seems to use people without thinking about them at all. She uses Denver to learn about Sethe even though it hurts Denver and she uses her as a kind of substitute when Sethe isn't around. She also uses Paul D for her affair thing (which also seems to rea...

In the poem "Thoughts in a Zoo" by Countee Cullen, Cullen talks about how much animals suffer in their enclosures in zoos. However, I felt that, despite the title and most of the content of the poem, Cullen is talking about experiences of people and particularly African-Americans. The imagery of the zoo seems to fit very well with the racial dynamic in America (especially at the time the poem was written, but still today). It is pretty obvious that the humans visiting the zoo represent white people. They are not only in an objectively better situation but they are the ones benefitting from the situation and also allowing it to continue. However, I'd say these are probably the more passively racist people as they don't really cause the problem and don't directly cause the animals' pain. White people are also represented by the people working at the zoo and I think that the people working at the zoo represent the aggressively racist white people. They control ...