Once again, Foster has shown me that in literature, everything is not what it may seem. Chapter 11 explores the deeper meaning behind violence. With violence so heavily present in today's culture, people grow so accustomed to shooting and stabbing and big explosions that when we read, it is hard to realize that sometimes these acts of violence are actually more than just acts of violence.
For anyone that does not know, I am an avid Criminal Minds fan. Now on every episode of Criminal Minds, a different person get kidnapped or killed or hurt, and the Behavioral Analysis Unit has to figure out how to save the victims and stop the unsub (or unknown subject). The show continues on and a variety of different kinds of violence and crazy scenarios come up for the B.A.U. to solve, but all of that doesn't hold any weight. In this show and other shows and books of the crime/mystery genre, these reoccurring acts of violence don't mean anything. Foster explains that in this genre, the violence is just necessary for the plot to build and continue, but not symbolic of another meaning. Cold-blood real life violence is different from literary violence in that literary violence usually represents a bigger idea.
In literature, violence can be used symbolically or metaphorically, it can be historical or biblical, or thematic. There can be different interpretations to the significance behind a particular act of violence, like there can be different interpretations of symbols. While reading this chapter, I began to wonder if I had overlooked violence in some of the books I have read and not taken the time to explore if any of it had a deeper meaning to me. I quickly thought of the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which to this day is one of my favorite books. There are a couple violent scenes in this book but the one that stood out to me the most was the final scene. For those who haven't read Gatsby, at the very end on the last day of summer in West Egg, Jay Gatsby, our main man, is shot in the back of the head and falls into his swimming pool and his shooter, George Wilson then proceeds to shoot himself. There are a couple of different ways I thought about this famous ending. Set in the middle of the roaring twenties, this book heavily revolves around the idea of the American dream. Jay Gatsby was a character that epitomized the American dream, but he was never fully satisfied. He couldn't be happy until he had Daisy back, and even when the two lovers reunited, Gatsby wanted Daisy to tell her husband Tom that she never loved him and leave him for Gatsby. When Gatsby dies, I think it was a way of Fitzgerald to show unattainable and unrealistic the American dream really is. Gatsby always needed bigger and better everything to win Daisy back, and even when he did, that still wasn't enough for him. In this I think the author was trying to show how living a life in constant obsession with materialism and an insatiable need for more will never produce a happy ending. In addition, while Gatsby led a lavish and rich lifestyle, George Wilson's was quite the opposite. He literally lived in a place called "The Valley of Ashes" which was a place of filth, poverty, and depression. George's murdering Gatsby could have also represented the social tension and disparity between the two very different lifestyles seen in this book. Now primarily, yes, George Wilson did kill Gatsby because he thought Gatsby was responsible for the death of his wife, but I think there was definitely a huge socioeconomic gap between Gatsby and his companions and people living in the Valley that caused a lot of resentment. Through both Gatsby and George's deaths I think Fitzgerald also could have been highlighting the tension that lies among social classes in America. There are probably even more underlying meanings in the events that happen in the last scene of this book that I haven't thought of yet.
Maybe these ideas only make sense to me but the great thing about literature is that it can be interpreted and analyzed in so many different ways that thousands of people could read one book and have different thoughts about the meaning behind something. Foster's writing continues to challenge me to think more critically and look past the surface level. I am interested to read more of this book and discover new concepts and ideas in literature.
http://journals.library.wisc.edu/index.php/wej/article/viewFile/390/419
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