Guest Blogger: Mark J.

Over the weekend, I toured FermiLab with the AP Physics group. While it was fun, the most useful accomplishment I did was adding “Big Bang Theory” to my list of least favorite tv shows ever, right down there with the star wars holiday special and anything that plays on the disney channel.
It was the Chicago trip, however, that gave me a solid grip on an idea that’s been bouncing around my head for a while; specifically, it was triggered by our dear physics teacher expressing his amazement at the fact that Chicago exists. He was talking about how, having grown up in place very unlike Chicago, he was always dumbstruck by the sheer scale of larger cities. (in Psych, we recently learned about how our past experiences affect our current perceptions – pure tangent there). I thought it strange that, while so many people are awed by places like Chicago, most Chicago-landers hardly ever give it a second thought. Now, to start making connections to in-class stuff. Faulkner, from what I understand, never saw anything like modern Chicago in his life. Indeed, I can’t imagine him even imagining what today’s Chicago would be like. For that matter, he probably never saw anything like Rochester, either. Logically then, if Faulkner had no idea what life was like for ‘ordinary’ people living in Rochester (us), it would follow that ‘ordinary’ people who have lived in Rochester for most of our lives (we) have little to no idea of what life was like for him (or his characters). Now, that’s not entirely true, but it does help to illustrate the difficulty we have with seeing things from Faulkner’s (or his characters’) perspective; more so than when we read, well, pretty much anything else. Unfortunately, his ability to reduce narrative distance to zero (which makes for very uncooperative reading) seems to be one of his strong points.
More simply stated: he wrote the parts well, but we have zero exposure to anything like it, so it’s hard for us to comprehend; it would likewise be hard for him to understand much of what we write about (that is, if we wrote stream of consciousness accounts of our daily lives). So don’t beat yourself up because Faulkner makes no sense.

Now, about point of view…
Let’s say you have lunch fourth hour, and you actually care about being on time to AP Lang. However, you left your copy of AILD in your locker, down the hallway in front of the offices. Not wanting to be late, you hurry very quickly along the catwalk towards senior corner; Mr. Banks is standing there, watching people get from class to class with ‘zero standing’ as usual. Trying to save time, you take the corner from the catwalk hallway to the office hallway very sharply and quickly and right as you round the corner – BAM, you walk right into Mr. Limberg.
So What?
Mr. Banks had been watching down both hallways at the same time, and easily perceived that you and the principal were going to collide; whether he would do anything is beyond the scope of this blog – the important piece is that he knew what would happen because of his Point Of View – and that’s what the American Novel is all about, right? The story above is from your point of view, but another author might have chosen Mr. Limberg’s point of view, or Mr. Banks, or all three of you, or maybe just two, or none of you; it could have been the PoV of a custodian, or a fly, or a bee, or a freshman. That’s the idea behind the point of view consideration.

Sorry if this seems rather ramshackle and random – life moves very quickly.