End of Native Speaker.

At the end of Native Speaker I want to talk about where Henry wears the monster mask while he is teaching kids speech. In class we all weren’t sure if the mask was real or if the the mask was hypothetical. But indeed it was real, but regardless wouldn’t have made a difference. Henry had the mask on all throughout the book, he wanted to hide his Korean looks from the American world and he tried so hard. He perfected his speech in order to not sound Korean, although Lelia could still tell. He felt bad for his son that he gave his looks to, and felt even worse that he couldn’t mask it from the world.

But now at the end of the book, he is helping other people with the things that he struggled with, and things that he battled with. Lelia and Henry are speech thereapists and helping kids with the same problem that Henry had with speech. At the speech class he wears the mask, but he work the mask all through his life.

Native Speaker

Native Speaker was a tough book to get into, but once I got past the first few chapters I started to almost enjoy reading it. Henry had a lot of points that he made that I really had to think about to fully understand, and I like that in a book. Something that makes you think instead of just reading to get it over with.

Throughout the book, Henry kept making references that seemed like he didn’t want to be asian. Which connected to alot of the other canonical books with identity. It was also very interesting to see how Lelia’s character reacted to her son’s death, and Henry. Lelia was a characted that added so much to the book with being awkward. I found her to be an awkward character because she led Henry on when they first met in making him think that she was very interested in him, and didn’t mind that he was asian. But when Lelia left Henry, she handed him a list, and on the list was basically things she didn’t like about him and sure enough, something about his ethnicity was on it.

Mitt’s death was an interesting turning point for the book. It showed a lot about both pf the characters, and what they are really like. Henry was sorry that he was half asian, and Lelia was sorry that she wasn’t watching him and that he died. Both the characters felt as if it was their fault and that they could have done something about it, but it had nothing to do with either of them doing something wrong, it was accidental. I actually really liked this book, and it sort of had alot of lessons in it.

End of Sula.

The end of Sula was very weird. I didn’t quite understand why Nel decided to forgive Sula. What I think was that she knew that since Sula was dying, she would never have another chance to make things right between two friends. So by going to talk to Sula after Sula getting sick showed that their friendship was strong even though they hadn’t talked for a very long time. Nel wasn’t going to let a man, who meant nothing to Sula get between them. When Nel went to Sula’s funeral she was the only black person that showed that she was brave, and not ashamed of her friends.

When Sula died people saw of it as a good thing. But she wasn’t all that bad to the people in the bottom. They just did things differently. Sula was raised with different values then most young girls. And the saying “that apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree” is a very true statement. She was raised thinking certain things were okay to do, so naturally she is going to grow up and live up to those expectations. If Sula was raised differently, she wouldn’t have grown up differently.

Sula!

Sula has started off as a very interesting book. Good interesting or bad interesting I can’t decide. The book “Sula” seems to be made up of a bunch of women who all are from the same family. All the characters differ and have very few similarities for all being connected in some way. Nel and Sula are good friends, but are radically different. Nel is quite and Sula is outgoing, two very different personalities.  Sula is very tough. I think it was so out of character for a young girl to cut the tip of her finger off, because of Irish boys bullying her and Nel, but she did it to show them what she is capapble of. Sula is different then most young girls, she is smart, knows that she has to make a point to give people something to be afraid of because she is a small black girl, by doing that she shows no tolerance, and a certain edginess that will deter the bullies away from them. This was at the very beginning of the book which shows that we should know that Sula is going to be a different type of character then all the others.