The Little Green Monster-10/24/08.

"That won't do you any good, I thought to it.  You can look all you want, but you can't say a thing.  You can't do a thing.  Your existence is over, finished, done.  Soon the eyes dissolved into emptiness, and the room filled with the darkness of night."

The little green monster represents the female protagonist herself.  This symbol is established in the beginning of the story when she spends the entire day looking out the window, and finds herself unable to do anything else.  The same goes for the monster he can see but he can't do much else.  The reader can also assume the monster represents the protagonist in that many lines suggest the monster coming from "inside" from "deep deep down."  The symbol is used by Murakami to portray his view on females.  Perhaps the story is an attempt to show understanding for the woman's plight, or maybe the story is a direct criticism on woman's failure to "do," but either way it shows that Murakami feels that woman does little else but watch.  

This idea is supported by the last part of the quote which is also the last line of the story.  "Soon the eyes dissolved into emptiness, and the room filled with the darkness of night."

This line is paradoxical because it claims the room was filled with darkness of night.  Darkness of night is no tangible thing.  In fact, darkness is often used to represent emptiness, or an absence of light.  By saying the room was filled with an absence of light, Murakami creates a paradox.  The idea of filling something with emptiness can be applied to this woman.  She is chock full of nothing.  The lady does nothing all day, but by default she has to be filled with something, so that something is nothing... does that make sense?  

Another thing the author uses is point of view.  Once again a male Murakami chooses to write as a woman.  The peculiarity of this choice shows an ulterior motive.  So, I choose to believe that he does so to expose something of his view on women.  Plus in the beginning of the book, he writes how she finds herself with nothing to do after her husband has left.  Besides this in the quote above when she starts speaking sentences that begin with the word, "you," a deeper meaning is revealed.  The point of view is a bit strange here because though she is in first person, she is also talking, or rather, thinking to a green monster.  The way she talks to the monster by thinking thoughts in her own head automatically makes the reader wonder if these lines apply to her.  The lines that begin with you in the above quote, I feel, start by apparently being directed towards the monster, but something changes that makes me think she is talking about herself.  It's sad.  Maybe it's the syntax of placing "finished" after "over", and "done" after "finished"; "over, finished, done."  It sounds like a resignation, a gradual realization.  Like "hey monster you're over... we're finished... I'm done, aren't I."

The Fall of the Roman Empire The 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, and The Realm of Raging Winds- 10/17/08.

"So until the hot pot was ready, I decided to pull together a few brief notes on the day's events so I could write them up in my diary next week.  This is what I jotted down:

~Fall of Roman Empire

~1881 Indian Uprising

~Hitler's Invasion of Poland

Just this, and even next week I'd be able to reconstruct what went on today.  Precisely because of this meticulous system of mine, I have managed to keep a diary for twenty-two years without missing a day.  To every meaningful act, its own system.  Whether the wind blows or not, that's the way I live."

The author uses syntax to characterize the protagonist of this short story.  The bullet points show a very organized and almost anal character and this is supported by diction like "meticulous," "system," and "precisely" that suggest organization or attention to detail.  The use of numbers could also go under the author's measured diction.  Throughout the story the protagonist is always using numbers most frequently to tell time.  The use of numbers is another way to portray the protagonist's need to record things as well as a motif when it is used to tell time. 

The reader can gather that time is a motif because of the frequency with which it is mentioned, as well as the presence of clocks, a logged journal, and the mention of various historic events. I think that time holds a role in this story similar to the one in Murakami's other short story, "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women".  It symbolizes the limited span of human life.  Maybe it is because the protagonist knows this that he lives this way and continues "to keep a diary for twenty-two years" "whether the wind blows or not."  He wants everything recorded the way the mentioned historic events had been recorded.  These events are in chronological order; they support the time motif, and they also add the idea of our present becoming our past.  The title of this story is the list of historic events mentioned followed by "and the realm of raging winds."  Murakami adds this last event to suggest that this holds just as much significance as the other events do to his protagonist, it is symbolic of the protagonist's life becoming history through the protagonist's journal entries. 

The added "realm of raging winds" as well as the dominating presence of wind in the story intimates that wind is also an important motif.  Wind is most definitely a symbol, but I can't be sure what it is symbolic of.  Maybe it symbolizes time passing in a physical kind of sense, or maybe it is there to draw a connection in the events in the title, as wind is a constant in all of them as well as in all of the rest of history.  The same winds have been blowing around the same world forever.  This is realized when the protagonist is talking to his girlfriend, she guesses that the wind will soon stop at his house because it has stopped at her house not too far away. 

Sleep- 10/10/08.

"I chose Anna Karenina.  I was in the mood for a long Russian novel, and I had read Anna Karenina only one, long ago, probably in high school.  I remembered just a few things about it: the first line, 'All happy families resemble one another, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,'  and the heroine's throwing herself under a train at the end.  And that early on there was a hint of the final suicide.  Wasn't there a scene at a racetrack? Or was that in another novel?"

The strangest part of this short story titled "Sleep" was the fact that the main character was a woman.  All of Murakami's previous stories featured male protagonists and this seemed logical to me as Murakami himself was a man.  The voice of the narrator just felt wrong to me.  I figured there had to be something in his female protagonist, and he was trying to reveal something specifically about women in this story.

The novel Anna Karenina features a female heroine as well, and is written by Leo Tolstoy, a man.  Anna has a son and a husband that she had loved or respected until she meets Vronsky. Then her love for her child and her respect for her husband die a little.  This resembles what happens to Murakami's protagonist with her son and husband after she stops sleeping.  These similarities led me to believe that Murakami alluded to Anna Karenina because he wanted it to be almost like a macrocosm, or a larger, lengthier, and already established story symbolizing Murakami's own story.  The reappearance of a female protagonist only supported the idea that Murakami purposely chose to write as a woman this time.

I just want to mention that I am currently in the middle of Anna Karenina, and Murakami just spoiled the dramatic ending for me. booooo.

Besides serving as a symbol of Murakami's own story, Anna Karenina also serves as a marker, or a constant that, through its unchanging state, reveals the protagonist's own changing state.  The protagonist had read the story once before when she hadn't been afflicted by "something like insomnia," and she is reading it once more during her changed state.  By using the book as a constant, Murakami allows the reader to accurately juxtapose the two versions of the protagonist, and see what exactly changed. The reader notices the protagonist's heightened awareness.  Her first reading of the novel left her with blurry uncertain recollections like the racetrack that may have been from another novel, but during her second reading the reader can see the profound effect the book has on her in the way she frequently recalls scenes from the book throughout her day.

The Kangaroo Communique- 09/26/08.

"Maybe that strikes you as odd.  You ask yourself, Why should looking at kangaroos make me want to send you a letter?  And just what is the connection between these kangaroos and me?  Well, you can stop thinking those thoughts right now.  Makes no nevermind.  Kangaroos are kangaroos, you are you.

In other words, it's like that:

Thirty-six intricate procedural steps, followed one by one in just the right order, led me from the kangaroos to you--that's it.  To attempt to explain each and every one of these steps would surely try your powers of comprehension, but more than that, I doubt I can even remember them all."

This passage is located toward the beginning of the book.  It sets up relationships the relationship between the main character and the person he is writing to in an unorthodox way.  First, Murakami uses informal diction and the second person point of view when writing this short story.  This makes the reader feel as if she or he is that person he writes to.  Though this allows for a connection with the narrator, it also leaves us a little confused because as this other person, the reader supposedly knows everything.  In this way, the reader starts out incredibly confused in the beginning of the story and slowly accumulates information indirectly.  The association Murakami sets up between this other person and kangaroos is one example of the gap in our knowledge.  For some reason, Murakami chooses to set this association then tells us to forget about it.  It is difficult to understand why Murakami piques our interest through the use of rhetorical questions, "Why should looking at kangaroos make me want to send you a letter?  And just what is the connection between these kangaroos and me?" and then completely tells us to abandon the idea.  Then, Murakami aggravates the reader further by repeating this structure.  He tells the reader he arrived at his connection through 36 specific steps and then refuses to reveal these steps claiming they "would surely try your powers of comprehension."  These little irritating things are syntactically compiled to bring about the most irritation in the reader.  Murakami begins a thought, drops it, begins another, drops this one, and then tells the reader she or he simply would not understand.  I think Murakami does this to stimulate as much interest as he can from the reader.  By purposely and obviously with holding information, he causes the reader to eagerly wait on the rest of the story hoping he'll throw a few more scraps of information our way.

The Second Bakery Attack-09/19/08.

"Whenever my wife expressed such an opinion (or thesis) back then, it reverberated in my ears with the authority of a revelation.  Maybe that's what happens with newlyweds, I don't know.  But when she said this to me, I began to think that this was a special hunger, not one that could be satisfied through the mere expedient of taking it to an all-night restaurant on the highway.  

A special kind of hunger.  And what might that be?

I can present it here in the form of a cinematic image.

One, I am in a little boat, floating on a quiet sea.  Two, I look down, and in the water I see the peak of a volcano thrusting up from the ocean floor.  Three, the peak seems pretty close to the water's surface, but just how close I cannot tell.  Four, this is because the hypertransparency of the water interferes with the perception of distance."

This passage establishes the relationship between husband and wife.  The reader understands that the wife is the higher authority of the two through Murakami's use of syntax and connotation.  Murakami's use of parentheses in the line segment, "an opinion (or thesis)" is so odd syntactically that it draws the reader's attention.  We notice that the first word "an opinion" has a rather neutral connotation while the word "thesis" has a more authoritative connotation.  In the way that the word is enveloped in parenthesis, it makes me think of a resigned concession.  It is almost as if he realizes the word, "opinion" does not accurately encapsulate her superiority and decides to throw the second word in there.  This is supported by a second use of this structure later on in the story.  

Next, we have the metaphor Murakami draws between hunger and the act of sitting in a boat and seeing a volcano whose distance cannot be determined due to the hypertransparency of the water.  I thought this was a ridiculous metaphor.  The two compared states seem to have no similarities whatsoever.  However this motif of sitting in a boat is constantly being brought up through references of "mermaids," "dead fish," and "waves."  It seemed improbable to me that such a frequently reoccurring motif and even the entire short story were really about something as trivial as hunger.  Instead I saw the metaphor as a representation of married life.  The volcano was a symbol of the couple's individual pasts unknown to each other.  The ominous presence of a volcano is similar to the way the protagonist's past (attacking a bakery) seems capable of harming the couple's relationship.  The possibility of this happening, however, is difficult to determine because of the state of being newlyweds.  The two do not yet know each other completely, and the protagonist is probably uncertain about how his wife will react.

However, trying to fit this metaphor around my idea was still a bit of a stretch.  I'm not really certain at all about what the man is trying to say to me.

p.s. Is my analysis too long? The directions say to write about 50-100 words, but I didn't know if this was absolute.

The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women.- 09/12/2008

Discussing time.

"At 5:30, the telephone rings twelve times; but I don't pick up the receiver.  After the ringing has died away, a lingering hollowness hovers about the dark room like drifting dust.  The clock atop the TV strikes an invisible panel of space with its brittle claws.  A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think.  Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me.  Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds."

This passage is important because it portrays the main character's view on time and life.  Life to him is like a wind-up toy.  It is something that keeps on going and going until it's predestined time runs out.  The main character seems to be obsessed with this idea. He is always either checking his watch or limiting himself to a certain amount of time to do something.

The first line of passage supports the theme of time.  Many paragraphs begin with the time at that moment to stress how everything is being clocked and how our time in this seemingly immortal world is finite.  The last line of the selected passage supports this idea.  The juxtaposition of the planets, the infinite, and the wind-up birds, the finite, highlights the discrepancy between one's world and one's life.