Response to Quote--February 13th

By Wendesday Feb.13 post a response to your blog regarding the following quote. Actually spend sometime thinking about your response.

“In seasons of pestilence some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease--a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.”

In your response include what this statement means, how it applies to Heart of Darkness, and at least one other book you have read for in Senior Social or A.P. Lit and Comp.

Well, I think that this quote means that when so many are overcome with a disease, they are more willing to die right away than to suffer from it and likewise, watch others they know and love suffer from it. It is appealing to some because by dying early, it would eliminate the suffering, personally and socially, within a group of people. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow tells us how Mr. Kurtz realizes all he’s done to the natives, while first setting out to do good “carrying” “the white man’s burden”. He means to do well and civilize this tribe of people. However, this goes astray when he starts getting ivory and becomes a figure with much power in the Congo. This leads him down a spiral of greed, exposing what truly lies in his heart; evil desires. As he has his last breaths, he says, “the horror, the horror”, showing he actually found what he was doing wrong. Instead of civilizing the natives, he corrupted them for his own personal gain, and I believe this was his realization at what he, as a human, was capable of doing.

In a more literal sense, Ralph Ellison’s novel The Invisible Man tells of how a colored man struggles to find his place within society, and joins a group that he wants to believe in and speak for. He finds out that the group is corrupt when he starts mentioning his more proactive agenda in his speeches. When Clifton, another “brother” working for the group gets pushed into the street into oncoming traffic, it creates an uproar. However, he was found to be in contempt of the group’s policies, but dies before we know much. The narrator (whose name is never mentioned) tells himself that Clifton’s “bad luck” could have been his own, and says it was almost better for Clifton to die before anything major happened. Towards the end of the book, when Clifton had already passed, all chaos breaks loose as the Brotherhood looks for the narrator, who has separated from them and gone to preach his own beliefs. The narrator always says how it was almost best that Clifton died when he did because he didn’t know the fullest extent of the Brotherhood’s expectations and beliefs, and the “season of pestilence” would be the Brotherhood’s obscure beliefs that eventually turned on the colored members, advocating to eliminate those who are against their views. The narrator, at one point, wishes that he could have or at least wonders what would have happened if he escaped the Brotherhood, to avoid the violence and cowardice that staying alive has made him resort to. So, in a sense, he has taken the hard road and wishes, at times, to have just left when it was easier than to bear the pain.