McCarthy Unabridged

By: Ameer Forte

Being Human - Giknis

2016

• PLACEMENT: My excerpt will be inserted into McCarthy’s “The Road” on the very first page. Right before the very first paragraph.

• The passage below is what I have imagined was cut from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road before the final edition was released-

Creative Piece:

The unforgiving blows to the surface landed like that of an astrobleme sinking itself into the atmosphere. He would pray to God most nights. He would ask him to protect his family to keep them alive. And if that wasnt possible to at least let the child inside the womans womb live. The woman resented that the man did this. She believed that God was only a barmecide part of life humans made up to make the bad in the world easier to cope with. She said to him:

Why do you bother? There is no God.

Yes there is.

How do you know?

I just do.

What God would let this happen to us? I’ll curse his name and die before I ask him for anything.

Dont say that.

What has he done for us?

Hes given us faith. Hope.

In what?

He gave me that child. That child is a gift from God. That is how I know. That child is my hope. My faith.

When the man was sure the bombs had stopped falling he opened the cellar door to find that the remains of his house were just rubble. When he opened the door he was climbing outside for the first time in so long he had forgotten what the sunlight looked like only to find color had been vacuumed from the sky. When the woman made her way out of the bunker the man saw the darkness in the world corrupting her. Dimming her fire. But when he looked at her stomach he saw the light. He almost thought he saw God himself.

• Below is a rationale explaining the choices I made and why regarding this excerpt-

The Rationale:

My scene is meant to be placed on the very first page, right before the opening paragraph. It is set in the past as an opening prologue to the current timeline of the story. I chose this placement because I think that a small backstory on how The Road came to be should be in the beginning of the novel. I also chose to leave out apostrophes and commas at areas they would typically belong because I think Coric McCarthy would have written it this way, in his unique style.

I chose to create this scene in The Road because it includes two very important themes that also stay consistent throughout the novel. God. Is there one? Does it matter? And the light vs. the darkness. Throughout my excerpt the man and the woman grapple with their views of God. God is an important motif in the novel which is another reason I incorporated this theme in my excerpt. I chose to make the man a believer of God, although throughout the novel I don’t think that that is so clear. But I chose to do this because I do think that the man views the boy as holy and I interpret that as him viewing the boy as a gift from God. All through the novel he believes that God entrusted him to protect the boy. “He knew that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” (Pg. 5) Here is just one example of that.

This holy view of the boy the man has is also the reason I included the latter part of my scene, where the man looks at the woman's stomach (which is bearing the boy) and sees the light. As opposed to him looking at the woman and seeing the darkness. I believe the purpose of the light in this novel is to show hope within someone. When that hope is lost they become corrupted by darkness. The scene in the novel where the woman left the man and the boy to, we speculate, kill herself, is a scene where I feel the woman lost her hope. I chose to show a little of that beginning in my scene with the man seeing darkness.

The essential questions I addressed are, what is the role of God? What happened before this world? And what made it occur? The first question I answered when I brought out in my scene that the role God to the important characters in my scene (those being the man, the woman, and the boy) is the light and the provider of hope in a world otherwise dark and hopeless. The second and third questions I answered in my first sentence, which was describing a nuclear war going on. That’s what was happening before the current timeline and what caused The Road to come about.

Worked Cited:

"The Taming of the Shrew." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2015. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taming_of_the_Shrew>.

"American Wedding." IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2015. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0328828/>.

Analytical Essay:

In today's world, everything is constantly changing. Money is becoming of lesser value, gas prices are going up, new laws are being made and unemployment rates rising. As the world changes, people change too. It’s the natural order of things, humans do what they can to fend for themselves. In the book, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’brien, a message of the changing world and the self is conveyed through experiences by a group of characters in the army. In this book there are cases in which the world continues to change in different ways, and as it does it shifts and develops human thinking to survive and adapt for the self along with it.

Jimmy cross, a character in the book, The Things They Carried, is a lieutenant with a lot of responsibility on his hands. He is in charge of a group of army men in a division called Alpha Company. Cross had good intentions from the start when it came to his men but became unsure how to truly lead them after suffering through the loss of two members of his team. Ted Lavender and Kiowa. A passage from the book reads, “Jimmy cross remembered the kids face but not the name. That happened sometimes. He tried to treat his men as individuals but sometimes the names just escaped him.”(Pg. 172) Jimmy Cross, before coming to the army could have lived an average life, but has went through the torment of losing the men he was assigned to lead and protect. He thus has been altered by the changing world and now has a lot of things under his belt which in turn has changed the way he treats people. His men may have started off as Individual people to him, but through that experience it seems names have become less important to him, his thinking on his men has thus changed. He sees them now as only that, men in the army. This hardened attitude is his way of adapting to the change, his way of not having to experience the pain of losing “his men” anymore. Losing his men changed the way he thought of the remaining of his men in the army.

Bob “Rat” Kiley, the platoons medic, is much respected by Tim O’Brien for the way he handles his job as a medic. Rat is usually a level headed and kind man, but over time the war took its toll on him. One day while Rat and another medic assigned with him on an assignment, Mark Fossie, were waiting for Fossie’s girlfriend to answer the door. Rat expressed his distrust for the girl. “Rat shook his head. He said to Fossie, “Your decision. I was you, though, no way i’d mess around with any greenie types, not for nothing.”” (Pg. 108) Rat begins to let the weight and stress of the war weigh down on him. His trust in people begins to waiver and it shows in this quote. He notices that he needs to adapt to protect himself as he shifts along with the changing world and that doesn’t leave much room for anyone else. He brings out to Mark that he wouldn’t “mess around” with any greenie, knowing that Mary Anne is marks beloved girlfriend. Rat it appears, though, has let the world shape his thinking in that he has lost trust for certain people, and she is one of them. He let the changing world impact his thought process with this girl developing his human thinking.

Mary Anne Belle, Mark Fossie’s high school sweetheart, although Mary appears to arrive to vietnam in total innocence, she develops a respect for death and the darkness of the jungle. According to legend she retreats and disappears there. Unlike Martha, who is just a fantasy for Jimmy Cross, Mary is very real for Mark and her change is one that shatters his world and hers both. Mark and Rat were waiting for Mary Anne to come out when, “.. She stepped out of the shadows. At least for a moment she seemed to be the same pretty young girl who had arrived a few weeks earlier.” (Pg. 110) Mary Anne has it hinted about her in this quote that she has changed as a person since her arrival at the military base in Vietnam. She, as the quote brings out, was at a time a pretty young girl but it can be inferred that she has changed and is no longer that person she was because of the words "at least for a moment" implying change. Mary Anne's heart hardened due to the truth of war, and this result changed not only her but in effect made Mark Fossie a sader soul as well. This is another case of the world around a person changing their way of thinking and thus changing, ultimately, the person themselves.

Tim O’brien, the main character narrator and protagonist of the novel, is also the author of the book. In an interview with Sawyer Scott about his output on his book The Things They Carried he says, "Imagination is important in a couple of ways. One way is as a psychological means of escape. If you can lose yourself in a fantasy, then you're no longer trapped in the horror of, say, Vietnam. You're back home with your girlfriend, eating a nice dinner at the Ritz instead of C-rations."(Interview 2) Imagination is important, it is the brains way of escaping reality, helping humans dream the impossible. After all, imagination is thinking and that positive thinking or imagination can be changed if the world around you changes in a negative way before your very eyes and vise versa. Trapped in the horror of Vietnam, is how Tim felt until the world around him changed, and he was able to clear his mind and focus better on other things. This again shows when the world around us is changing, as humans we must change our thinking to change with the world.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

"Tim O'brien Interview." N.p., n.d. Web.

"The Things They Carried." By Tim O'Brien. 1998 N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.

"Robot Check." Robot Check. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.

Narrative Essay:

One hundred bucks is crazy money in my book. One hundred bucks can’t even afford some jeans out there, though, to put it in hindsight, and I use to wonder why money was such an important material to people. It’s pretty obvious now, money is power. And power changes people. I think back to an experience of a close cousin of mine. He and I were pretty close growing up, he is a few years older than me and lived in North Carolina but we made it work. Every year, three times a year,  my intermediate family and I would take the trip down to NC to see him and our other relatives.

My cousin, JeMario, was a good natured person, a very kind and thoughtful personality who happened to have a keen talent for music. He played the bass for as long as I can remember, and he was always pretty great at it but honestly I would have never thought he could get famous off of playing the bass. But he was talented, so much so, that one year while we were staying “down south”, as my mom referred to the trip to NC, his mother influenced him to join, a at the time popular musical career jump starting show, MTV’s Making A Band. He did and through the course of the show he survived every round up until it was just him and one other male in the finals. In the final round he did not get enough votes to win and lost to other guy, but it wasn’t a total loss he had been noticed by a lot of people for his talent on the bass instrument. A few weeks after he returned home he got a call from two big names in the media, Tyler Perry and Bruno Mars. Mr. Perry wanted my cousin to play bass for his plays, while Bruno wanted him to play bass for his live band. My cousin, being young and into Bruno Mars music, decided to go with the offer from Bruno. He left for California and began recording music and touring with Bruno. I was happy with his decision being a fan of Bruno Mars myself and I have been proud of my cousin ever since. But he isn’t the same person he was when he left that year, I believe being around the spotlight, something he was very uncommon to living in a small town in North Carolina, changed him thoroughly.

The summer after he left to go on tour, I remember hearing from my aunt JeMario was going to be in town when we went on our annual down south trip. I was overjoyed to hear this it had been a year. The first time I caught a sight of my star studded cousin back home I couldn’t tell if it was him or some clone that dressed better, sounded different, and acted different but looked exactly like him. I could hardly hear his southern accent anymore. I remember the first conversation we had when he came back, “Yo cuz! You're a big shot now huh?”

“Yeah little cousin out here making this money man.” He responded to me.

“Wow. All I know is.. That haircut is bad real bad Michael Jackson, should probably never get that again?” We both laughed.

“It’s whatever man. I got it cause’ it’s what everyone got.”

“Well, everyone else does not look good on you man.”

“Looking like everyone else is what makes you relatable and famous and paid. And that’s all that matters.”

“What man? Forget the money. Forget how you look, you got that suspect jacket on.. Wearing that is not worth all the money in the world” I laughed, “You're on tour with Bruno Mars... That must be like living a dream or something”

“Ain’t no dream unless I’m getting paid little cousin, you must not understand that money is all that matters in this business and whatever you gotta do to get it. I got the talent now I’m just looking to get much as I can man.”

JaMario wasn’t the same. I could feel it the moment I saw him, there was something off about him. His once pert and lively character had abandoned him. The glory lifestyle took it’s toll on him much sooner than anyone could have expected. JaMario had let the changes in the world around him affect his being, he went from being a kind content heart to a cold one endlessly searching for more.

I made 57 million dollars in six months. Yeah. More than most of you would make in five lifetimes. And It was absolutely perfect. I was a God. A british model wife having, 3 million dollar car speeding, 64 acer house living God. No i’m not royalty or an athlete or a movie star, I made it in ways you couldn't dream of actually happening. And i'm not talking about one of those shitty rich man jobs either, like a Nuclear engineer or something that will kill you at 50. No. I’m talking about the fast life ladies and gentlemen, Sales work. Now I know what you're thinking, how the hell does a plane old salesman make 57 million in a one freakin’ year. That’s just it though I wasn’t just any lame salesman, I was the best salesman. My trade was airplanes. I started my career small of course, my company would buy out full price planes and sell them for less than they were worth in a firm called Allbond Plane Investments Limited. But then I realized why be doing the job I love and make 15% of a sale while the jerkoffs on the other end who don’t really need any sweet deals are buying million dollar planes for “less than they're worth”. I was on the verge of genius and this small idea changed my life forever.

They say when you're poor you hate the rich and when you’re rich you hate the poor, well I hated the rich, more than I wanted to make money. At first I was just determined to ruin these guys lives, you know? Make them spend billions and get a crap share on a plane in return. And the plan was simple, I would find a couple of high buyers for a plane worth around 500,000 then let those hags bid it out, bid until they're freakin’ pockets broke and when they did, I’d cut their share in half in return for mine and while they’d think they're getting a new plane for 750,000 in actuality they could be spending something around 2 million dollars. The first time I did it I made half what I sold the plane for, so I made something around 900,000 dollars. And yeah it was kind of illegal but no one gave a shit the guys I was scamming were already rich anyway. And besides there money felt better in my pockets. After a while it turned into a huge thing at the firm, before I knew it everyone was selling faulty deals, it was like I set a new trend or something. And after maybe a month or two everyone at Allbond Plane Investments Limited was filthy freakin’ rich. I lost sight of my goal to make the rich miserable, I became kind of rich myself, so I started screwing over all kinds of people, rich, poor, middle class, I didn’t care, if you were willing to buy a share on a plane I was going to give you the share of a lifetime. Literally, most guys actually spent their lifetime earnings on our planes but as long as there money ended up in my pocket I was a very satisfied man. Life became lavish, and I tried to keep it under control I swear I did but it just kept getting bigger and bigger. It’s like a whole new side of me came out, I became greedy and always hungry for more money. So I decided to expand, why only sell planes? Then I thought why only sell vehicles? So I got the idea to buy out other companies, small companies and let people invest in their products and that, that’s when we really took off. The next couple of days, I have to admit, were pretty memorable. For one I married this british model I saw at an jewelry auction, the same day I met her I bought the 6th largest estate in america, the next day I bought a personal yacht named after my beautiful wife Alisa and toured to every freakin’ island I could think of a week later. While I was gone I heard it was so out of hand back at the firm that no one on the outside world knew what was going on half the time.

I started using these drugs called “Lubes” just to keep up with the days. And with the Lubes came this care free attitude, like the shit we were doing wasn’t illegal, like when you're rich everyone below you isn’t important, and they weren’t important. To me. If you weren’t on my level then you had no right to be in my presence.

We spent literally 11 months on that yacht, just me, Alisa and all our personal servants. It was hell. Turns out supermodels are really annoying. When I finally got back from my “personal” cruise, there was a little surprise at my door step. It’s like they timed it perfectly too, I swear as soon as someone gets ahead in this world there’s always that one asshole that has to bring you down. Mine was officer John, Officer Freakin’ John what kind of last name is John anyway, or “Marten Martelli John”, that’s what he calls himself. There he was, asking me if he could come in and ask a few questions and I knew that translated into “Hands behind your back you're coming with us” but I had just had a half a bag of Lubes and wasn’t really in a state to deal with anyone. Especially not the police. We were sitting on the couch and that’s when the lubes really started to kick in. It got so bad John moved to the kitchen to talk to Alisa instead of me, said I was excessively touching his face and then I fell asleep or something. When I woke up Alisa said the police told her I was going on trial for Money Laundering and Fraud and that I could spend up to 20 years in prison if I lost this case. She was packing a bag as she spoke to me, I asked where she thought she was going and closed the door. She called me a good for nothing criminal drug addict who she isn’t going to jail for. I was yelling by this point, I grabbed onto her and screamed “Of Course you leave me when I’m down, fucking slezz how could you do this to me, huh? How now!” Then I proceeded to call her names like slut, whore, hoe. She didn’t care though, she wanted out and nothing to do with me. So she tried to move me from in front of the door. Reflexively I jabbed her in the stomach, but before I could realize what I had done I ripped open my pillow case holding my secret stash of Lubes and took so many I don’t even remember the rest of that night. But I do remember her divorcing me a week later. Taking full custody of our kids and almost half my money. What ever money I had left I tried to stash away overseas in Switzerland before my trial, but that didn’t work. Turns out Switzerland has the same harboring laws as America. Eventually I had to face reality, I mean all the signs were there. I was denied bale twice, and I shit you not my million dollar Yacht freakin’ exploded, yeah exploded. Kitchen accident or something killed six people. Anyway I figured karma finally came around to bite me in the ass. And why not, money had turned me into more than a asshole I was a monster. A monster facing 20 long years in jail, so how am I talking to you all today and not doing my time. Well my good old friend officer John made me a proposal. He said I could do as little as 4 years and all I would have to do is turn in a couple of my old buddies at the firm. You know? Like the guys who helped me start the whole thing. They called it “Police Suspect Cooperation” or something. So I did it, spent four years in prison and seeked to turn my life around. My theory is all people with good money will eventually change in one way or another and those who make anything less than more will be envious of those richer. I started in the second category I envied the rich, when I became rich I changed very much so. Today I seek to find common ground between the two. I want to know if there is a gray area, you know? A middle ground. And that’s why I’m here today ladies and gentlemen, telling you my story. Because I truly believe you find the unknown in the past and through telling you this, you may not know it, but I have made you subconscious to how you will treat the next homeless man you see or that star on your favorite TV show you want to be so much. That’s one of the great wonders of the human mind though. So I leave you all with this thought, would you rather be rich or poor?

Ameer Forte            One Hundred Dollars

One hundred bucks is crazy money in my book, and on this very day last summer my mom had gave me a one hundred dollar bill for my 8th grade graduation. I’m in tenth grade now but I still remember doing everything with that dollar. It felt like I had that thing for forever too, I mean like I said I did everything with it, took it camping, to the beach, to the pool, to the park. This all of course was stupid, my mom did always tell me “keep it home Ameer, thats a lot of money.”

Yeah yeah I know it was a lot of money, but what good was one hundred bucks if I just had to leave it home all the time. I mean i’m not an idiot, I knew better than to go around showing it off like some 1st place trophy, I just wanted to, you know hold it in my wallet and feel that rich feeling of “I got one hundred dollars in my pocket”. So, over the summer I had taken it everywhere, to work, to the park, to grandma’s, I figured I had nothing to worry about except if someone would’ve mugged me or something but I had that covered. Every day I carried a three inch pocket blade in my sock and I swore if anyone stepped to me funny they would have a three inch deep slit in there eyeball. Fortunately that was never necessary, but when school started back up I became a paranoid animal.

I remember the first day of Highschool like it was yesterday. My best friend Tony, who had knew about the hundred dollars when I got it, met me at my house. School was like a block or two away so we just walked that day. I remember him saying something like, “Yo dogg it’s the first day of highschool. Ya mean playa, this day decides who's who and what's what, is you hype or naw.” And in my mind I’m just wondering why he sounds like a popular rap song from 2002. No I wasn’t hype, I was more anxious than anything. Plus there was a lot going through my mind that morning, like which pocket would be the safest to hold my wallet that was definitely more important to me than the stupid first day of school. I responded anyway though.

“No, I’m not hype. Why should I be it’s just the first day of school, and stop talking like that, you sound like Snoop Dogg.” After I said that he just talked even weirder to get on my nerves, I just remember ignoring him until he asked,

“Yo, you heard that?” I hadn’t heard anything except his big mouth that whole walk so I don’t know how he thought I could’ve heard anything else. I asked him what he was talking about, instinctively checked my back left pocket to see if my wallet was still there and, it wasn’t.

“Shit. Are you kidding me! Yo dude did you see a little black wallet anywhere around here while we been walking?”

“Nah man, don’t tell me you dropped it.”

Yup I had dropped it, and boy was I pissed. I texted my mom telling her I lost my wallet and she gave me the normal that’s what you get, I’m very disappointed crap. Whatever, I had just lost one hundred bucks I didn’t freakin’ care how disappointed she was. I just went to school mad. I went to class mad. I ate lunch mad, I even remember punching this short stubby fat kid with no shoulders in the mouth because he wouldn’t stop saying “Hotdogs”. And man do I feel bad about that, but were all good now I think I eventually bought him a hotdog or something. My mom had to come me up from school but didn’t seem all that upset during the ride I guess it was because she had an excuse to leave work early but that didn’t stop her from putting me on a three month punishment when we got home. So I sat there in my room just staring at the walls and I spotted a little green strip with 100 on the corners and I’m pretty sure the last thing I said that day was, “You’ve got to be kidding me!”.  

Ameer forte

“¿Como está?”

“What?”

“¿Como está?”

I looked at my great grandmother my eyes fixed on her strange words.

“What?”

She shook her head in disapproval but I was used to this. My great grandma and I have never been close, I mean she did live in new york but when she was here I felt more distant to her than ever. She was the only person in my family who only spoke spanish and I dreaded the days I would have to speak to her. She would only use simple spanish of course but I still felt intimidated at the age of twelve. I would wish my mom or dad or somebody would’ve taught me spanish. Why wouldn't they, it is my culture and I had as much right as any one of my brothers and sisters to learn. I’m the oldest of my two brothers and one sister and they are all being taught spanish with every passing breath whether it be at home or school but I was taught nothing not even the simplest verb, the easiest noun. I never understood why, perhaps I still don’t. Maybe it is because I was the first child, maybe I was the test subject the kid no one really knew what to do with.

“Mom, why didn’t you let dad teach me spanish.”

I’d ask that question over and over again and she would just say, “Ameer we just weren't prepared to put you or us through that besides it worked out fine right?”

But she was wrong it wasn’t fine I couldn’t have a reasonable conversation with my great grandmother because of them. I repeatedly found myself blaming my parents for everything that had to do with spanish and when I had no reason I found a reason. In the sixth grade, I had my first spanish course and I purposely came home with a D to prove that it would be different if they would have taught me themselves. This must have went on for a couple years and then when I was in 8th grade my mom picked me up from school early which was a rare notion so when this happened I figured something had to be wrong. She told me my great grandmother was in the hospital and may not have very much time left. My heart stopped. I was pretty sure she was going to have to put me in the hospital right there with my great grandmother but somehow I pulled it together and tried to stay as strong as possible.

“It’s going to be ok Ameer, hey, she is in a happier place now right?” My mom tried to comfort me as best as she could but I remember being pretty silent the whole ride. My mom wasn’t very close to my great grandma because she was my dads mother not my moms and my mom faced the same language barrier I did at the time she also didn’t know spanish very well, but she did understand how much she meant to everyone. My mom ended up picking up on some spanish after living with my dad but she didn’t need to speak the language to see how great a person my great grandma was. I interviewed my mom and dad now and asked them the same question I used to ask them when I was younger, “So why was I never taught spanish?” This was my dad’s response,

“Well it would be easy to say we didn’t know what we were doing yet, I mean it had all happened so fast. But that wouldn’t explain why we didn’t teach you while you were growing up. So honestly I don’t know why we decided not to teach you how to speak both maybe we thought it was too much work at the time, I don’t know, but looking back now I really wish we did.” This was my mom’s answer,

“Ameer I think it was really because we just didn’t really know how to work that in, now that were older we are able to teach your siblings because we learned and we didn’t want to make the mistake if not teaching them like we did with you.” I had an understanding response to both answers. I started to realize that I was the rough draft for my parents which was why they didn’t teach spanish. This thought made me feel very uncomfortable, I couldn’t understand why I was being treated so unfairly. None of it made sense.

Soon after that I started changing the way I viewed hispanic people, I started to feel like I couldn’t talk to them, something like the Key and Peele skit we watched in class. Both men acted different around eachother, thats how I acted around hispanics, I would change completely when in their presence.The language barrier I felt with my own family had widely expanded and hispanic people became like an unknown species in my life. I ignored them every time possible, made no effort to learn spanish in school, I completely abandoned spanish. I was tired of spanish. I hated spanish and the people that bore its fruit.

After what seems like such a long time I slowly started to change. There still isn’t a moment where I don’t feel uncomfortable when in the presence of a spanish speaking person. But now I just don’t really think too much of it. As the years passed by I like to believe there was a bigger reason as to why they never taught me spanish. I think it’s because my mom and dad didn’t see the importance of me having to learn at the time. They figured I would either grow into it or wouldn’t need it at all but they admit that that was wrong. I also changed my view because of being reminded of my great grandmothers death. The day she passed I was upset and confused, now years later I look at it as an opportunity to make her proud and learn the language she always wanted me too. Thats what keeps me from giving up on spanish.  

Works Cited

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzprLDmdRlc

En el jardín, está mucho árbols y flores. Las flores son amarillo, morado, rosa, rojo, y azul. Los árbols son verde oscuro y verde claro. El jardín tiene piscina así Señorita Jonas puede nada. En la balcón, yo puede viendo el jardín. Está las mesas y las sillas.

La casa de Señorita Jonas es perfecto para ella. Señorita tiene un montón de divertida en la casa. Ella es vida en de lujo!

enero-january

febrero-february

marzo-march

abril-april

mayo-may

junio-june

julio-july

agosto-august

septiembre-september

octubre-october

noviembre-november

diciembre- december