Kiran's 20th Century English Novel Blog

  Brett's relationship with Pedro starts with Jake taking the whole group to the bullfights, and the coincidence of both parties staying at the Montoya Hotel. Brett appears to fall in love at first sight, completely ignoring the feelings of both Cohn and Jake, although Jake appears to not care about the relationship, even willingly introducing the two. Brett proceeds to spend a lot of time with Pedro, with their relationship progressing fast, to the point of Pedro giving his "trophies" from the bulls to Brett. Just based on the two relationships of Brett's that start during the book, Brett seems to get into relationships extremely fast, with the only relationship she takes any amount of care with seeming to be Jake, although neither seems to think they can be together.  With both relationships mentioned earlier (Brett and Cohn, and Brett and Pedro), once getting somewhat far into the relationship Brett gets out as fast as she can, often asking Jake for some help. In t...

  Brett and Jake have an extremely complicated relationship. Jake is in love with Brett, often asking to go on dates or to move in together. He seems pretty clingy, being extremely mad at Cohn for even showing the slightest interest in Brett. Brett on the other hand treats their relationship very flippant about their relationship almost treating the whole thing as a joke. She ignores his advances and avoids his important questions about their relationship. She even forgets about their date and just glances over it next time they talk. Then she goes and spends time out with Cohn despite both being engaged and being in a relationship with Jake. She even just doesn't tell Jake, because she seemingly doesn't want to hurt his feelings, which perhaps means she does have some feelings for Jake.  The biggest reason for this complicated relationship is likely because of Jake's injury, which is implied to mean Jake cannot have sex. It seems like Jake is holding onto Brett because he ...

 The relationship between Peter and Richard is a very strange and complicated one. It seems like there would be some fatal flaw in their relationship, with them both being in love with the same woman, even though Peter insists that he is no longer in love with Clarissa. However, they seem to both have very good views of each other, and seem to be very good friends. It seems strange to think that they both respect and enjoy each other's company with no feelings of contempt. This could make sense for Richard since one could say that he already won and married Clarissa but for Peter, it almost seems weird for him to hold no negative emotions towards Richard.  First, we need to look at Richard's section about Peter. He was told Peter had come during his lunch with Lady Bruton and instead of being worried or angry about Peter going to meet Clarissa alone, he seems not worried and even fond of him. In fact, it just makes him think that he should go home after lunch and tell Clarissa...

 The relationships in Mrs. Dalloway  are the focus of the novel with most of the novel we have read so far focussing on Mrs. Dalloway herself and her relationships. So far we have mostly seen the relationships between Mrs. Dalloway and Sally, Mrs. Dalloway and Peter, and a little between Mrs. Dalloway and Richard Dalloway through the eyes of Peter. Mrs. Dallowa and Sally's relationship seems to be one of mutual love or close friendship. Sally is a kind of free spirit that is feeding Mrs. Dalloway's own adventurous and rebellious spirit. This causes them to have probably one of the closest relationships we've seen in the book so far  Mrs. Dalloway and Peter's relationship has many things it could be from the views we've seen it from. It could either be one of mutual love, or Mrs. Dalloway just enjoyed Peter's company very much, and the love was one-sided. I think it could be either, but I am personally of the belief that they had a short mutual love, but Mrs. Dal...

  One of the most interesting things that Howie talks about in The Mezzanine is what he calls the "Clean background trick". This is a trick, in which one can place anything against a clean white background, and then it will seem to be beautiful. Howie describes this technique on page 38 of The Mezzanine , "Right when I suddenly had more blue sky in front of me than green truck, I remembered that when I was little I used to be very interested in the fact that anything, no matter how rough, rusted, dirty, or otherwise discredited it was, looked good if you set it down on a stretch of white cloth. or any kind of clean background . . . . This clean-background trick, which I had come upon when I was eight or so, applied not only to things I owned, such as a group of fossil brachiopods I set against a white shirt cardboard, but also to things in museums: curators arranged geodes, early American eyeglasses, and boot scrapers against black or gray velvet backgrounds because anyt...