Bridle Path - Why is it my favorite chapter?

Out of all 13 chapters in Black Swan Green, "Bridle Path" is my favorite. Each chapter in the novel share the characteristic that they stand alone and tell a coming-of-age story together. I really enjoy this chapter because it captures an almost fantasy hero's journey like story that Jason goes through all in just one chapter.

In "Bridle Path," Jason sets out alone for a walk without a clear plan or destination. Almost right away, things go wrong when he is chased by dobermans and then scolded harshly by their owner. He pushes on and eventually encounters a group of classmates, including Grant Burch and Ross Wilcox. He gets caught in a tense face-off that erupts into a real fight, ending with Burch breaking his wrist. After that, he runs into Dawn Madden, his crush, who treats him coldly. To escape, Jason climbs a tree and from there witnesses Tom Yew, home from the Navy, in a private moment with Debby Crombie that Jason was clearly not meant to see.

He starts as a quiet boy wandering outside, but soon the world throws one obstacle after another at him. It feels like a fairy tale gone wrong, where the protagonist steps out the front door and everything turns hostile and strange. Still, Jason keeps moving forward, which is quietly heroic for a thirteen-year-old boy who often tries to stay invisible. In one afternoon, he shifts from an ordinary walk to accidentally witnessing violence, desire, and the complicated lives of those around him. This chapter feels somewhat separate from the others, but that just makes it all the more special to me.

This detachment gives "Bridle Path" its unique strength. While most chapters are closely connected to Jason's home life, his parents' troubled marriage, and school politics, this one exists in its own space. It is simply about a boy, a trail, and the challenges the world presents him that day. In this sense, it captures something true about childhood that the other chapters sometimes overlook: how a single afternoon can feel like a lifetime of experiences and how the most memorable days are often the unplanned ones.

Fun Home - Why didn't we talk about Helen more?

    When our class discussed Fun Home, the focus almost always lands on Alison Bechdel and her father, Bruce. Whether it was their parallels, their distance, or their shared queerness expressed in radically different ways. It's totally understandable why our class focused so much on the two, but I want to focus on Helen Bechdel, who was not discussed about a lot in class. Helen is not a very loud person in the novel; she's almost never the center of any scenes and she doesn't deliver any emotional dialogue of any sorts. Her diminished role is likely because Alison Bechdel has another graphic novel focused on her mom and this one is dedicated more so to her experiences with her father. However, despite her restrained and often distanced presence, she's depicted as a very intellectual and quiet person.

    From what we see, Helen seems to have entered the marriage with Bruce while already sensing something was off. She’s a trained actress, someone who understands performance, and her entire marriage begins to resemble one. Bruce is deeply invested in appearances: the house, the furniture, the image of a perfect family. Helen, meanwhile, appears to go along with this performance, but not because she believes in it. Instead, it feels more like she’s chosen to endure it. There are hints throughout the graphic novel that Helen knew about Bruce’s relationships with men long before Alison did. The calmness in her tone when she confirmed to Alison the affairs Bruce had and her distance and tense interactions with Bruce at the beginning of the novel suggests that she might've known earlier. If that’s the case, her emotional world becomes even heavier.   

    Imagine living in a small town, tied to a man whose desires and secrets you understand but cannot openly confront, not without unraveling everything: the family, the social standing, the fragile structure of daily life. Her restraint begins to look less like coldness and more like containment. The difference between a picture-perfect family on the outside and a shattered and incoherent family was whether Helen chose to confront Bruce's secret. 

    What’s striking is how Helen channels her feelings. Instead of direct confrontation, she pours herself into literature and theater, using them as outlets for emotions she cannot safely express in her daily life. She communicates through books, through roles, and through carefully controlled forms of expression that allow her to maintain composure while still engaging with deeper truths. Where Bruce aestheticizes his life through objects and restoration, Helen intellectualizes hers, turning inward and relying on analysis and interpretation as a way to cope. Both are forms of distance, but hers feels quieter and less outwardly destructive, even though it remains deeply isolating and emotionally taxing over time.

    In the end, Helen’s role in Fun Home highlights a different kind of emotional experience, one defined not by revelation or transformation, but by endurance and restraint. While Alison seeks understanding and Bruce struggles with repression, Helen exists in the space between, quietly managing the realities of her life without ever fully expressing them. Her story reminds us that not all struggles are visible or resolved, and that sometimes the most powerful presence in a narrative comes from what remains unspoken.

Daddy -- What is it about?

    "Daddy" is one of the poems that Sylvia Plath wrote while finishing The Bell Jar.  My class period was barely able to discuss about "Lady Lazarus" so I thought I would take a look at this interesting poem with an interesting title. I can tell you just after first reading the poem that it's quite intense. For some reason, although this poem is about father-daughter relationships and trauma, Sylvia Plath uses Nazism and the Holocaust as imagery, something she also did in "Lady Lazarus". For context, this poem was written a month after Plath was separated from her husband Ted Hughes and just 4 months before Plath passed away. The poem is considered confessional poetry, a 1950s–1960s American literary movement characterized by intense and autobiographical exploration of controversial topics. 

    In the first stanza, Plath describes and portrays her fathers as a very powerful and influential figure through the image of a black shoe in which she is the foot. The imagery here seems to portray that Plath felt restricted under her father like a foot trapped in a shoe. Not only that, this could also suggest that Plath's identity was perhaps shaped by her father like a foot being forced to conform to the shoe. In the same stanza, Plath mentions that her fathers suffocating influences has lasted for 30 years. Not only does this mean that the father's influence lasted well past Plath's childhood, combining with the fact that Plath's father passed away while she was just 8 years old, it also suggests that this influence could be coming from grief and/or trauma.

    The next stanza really shocked me as Plath then goes on to say that her father died before she could kill him and saying that he weighed heavy on her like marbles and "a bag full of God". Plath ends the stanza by describing her father as a statue with a toe that looks like the big and grey San Francisco seal. My shock from reading the first half of the stanza was sharply contrasted by my confusion in the second half as I have no clue why Plath described her father with a big black toe. The next stanza continues the imagery by saying that his head was located in the Atlantic Ocean near Nauset, MA and how Plath used to pray he would come back from the dead. The stanza ends with "Oh you" in German. 

    The next few stanzas are connected to the German that ended the previous one as Plath now imagines herself praying in German while being inside a Polish town with a name so common that there must be at least 12 of them. It's worth noting here that Plath says her "Polack friend" told her there must be at least 12 towns with this name and that "Polack" is a slur used against people of polish descent. The reason she used this slur here is unclear to me. She continues by saying that she could no longer find where her father was and thought that every German was her father before saying that she thought the German language was both offensive and disgusting. Plath goes so far as to say that the German language is like an engine to a train that carried her off like a Jew to a concentration camp. Next, she begins wondering if she was a jew herself. She expresses her dislike of Austria and begins listing things that might make her Jewish: her luck, her Romani descent, and her Tarot cards. 

    Plath next says that she has always been afraid of her father (referring to him as "you"). She compares him to the German air force and gobbledygoo (overcomplicated language that doesn't make sense). She denounces her father as a God and instead says he's the swastika and says thats every woman loves a Fascist. Recalling a photograph of her father, she calls him a devil.

    Plath then says that her father died when she was 10 (which is inconsistent with Plath's life) and that she tried to take her own life when she was 20. As Plath was forced in to recovery, she married a man like her father, and as she described, had a love of torture. Plath then calls her husband a vampire who has drank her blood for seven years.

    Finally, Plath imagines a wooden stake driven through her father's heart with villagers dancing around and stomping on his body and telling him thats she's finished.

    This poem is honestly quite complex as it features a lot of imagery and very out of the world storytelling. From the way it was written, it's not hard to tell why this poem was so controversial. The main themes that I've seen from the poem involve oppression based on gender. This was seen both through the father's oppression of the daughter and the husband's oppression of the wife. The poem is definitely not a super easy poem to understand and I had to do a lil research on some of the German words and locations. It's a shame that our class wasn't able to discuss this poem but hopefully you now know more about "Daddy".

 - Henry Guan

The Catcher in the Rye: What did Holden's "dream job" show about his inner thoughts and values?

    In the last few chapters of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden sneaks back home and wakes up Phoebe, his younger sister, to talk with her. During this conversation, we see that Phoebe gets very emotional after finding out her brother was kicked out of school again and says that he doesn't enjoy anything in life. Holden struggles to name a single thing he likes besides Allie and talking with Phoebe. Eventually, Holden claims that he would want to be some kind of "catcher in the rye" after misquoting a line from a Robert Hurts poem. Holden imagines that there are a bunch of kids playing in a rye field near a cliff, and his job is to make sure that he catches all these kids before they fall off. Although Holden lies a lot, I don't think he is just making stuff up here as not only do we know that Holden cares deeply about his sister, this is also pretty close to the "climax" of the novel and him lying here would make no sense. Either way, I think most people would agree with me here that Holden is being genuine about his dream job.

    Something that our class did not quite get into in our class discussions was the symbolism/meaning behind Holden's "dream job," and that feels like one of the most important parts of the book to me because its like an "aha" moment in the book when you finally see the title of the book inside a chapter. Seeing that this book is a coming-of-age novel, we can use this as a perspective to analyze Holden's dream job. Holden catching these kids running around in the rye field before they fall off seems to be symbolizing how Holden wants to protect kids from losing their childhood innocence and purity the way he lost it. Holden doesn't want to grow up, and this is evident in how Holden is not applying himself in school and how Holden really doesn't like adults. In his own words, the adult world is "full of phonies." In addition, Holden is seen admiring both Allie and Phoebe for their innocence and purity. Finally, Holden says in the museum scene to Phoebe that “Certain things, they should stay the way they are.” If he could, I'm sure Holden would be very happy to have everything stay the way it currently is forever. To him, he would rather freeze a perfect moment then live life to experience new things. 

    At some point in our lives, I'm sure that each of us have looked back in our life and think to ourselves, "I wish things could stay like that forever" or "I wish I could relive this moment again." In this way, we can all empathize with Holden not wanting to grow up. However, it is also true that all of us have made great memories past that time in our life that we really enjoyed, and I think what's special about life is that we get so many opportunities to make great memories. The real question to ask perhaps, is, are the uncertainties in life greater than the opportunities presented? Perhaps for Holden, the uncertainties outweighed the potential opportunities and that's why he doesn't want to grow up. There will definitely be times in our life when we don't feel like continuing and, like Holden, we just want to freeze our life at a perfect moment. However, when you look back at each great memory you made, don't forget that they were only possible because life didn't freeze at a single moment. 

- Henry Guan