"The Invisible Man"

Now, I haven't red the entire book of "The Invisible Man" but I can tell you from what I have read of it and from what we've talked about in class, it's a book about racial problems and how certain black men were able to overcome them and show the white men their equality in society. It was very well written and showed the blacks' side of the story extremely well: what they thought about the white men, how they acted around them.  It's a great piece of literature that we can really tie our history too and I very much enjoyed it.

"A Box" from Gertrude Stein's "Tender Buttons"

To me, this piece of Gertrude Stein's famous writing "Tender Buttons" is saying a few things. First look at the first line: "Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question..."  If this is your first time reading something from "Tender Buttons," as it was mine, this can be hard to grasp.  You just have to step back and get the whole picture.  For instance, "out of rudeness comes rapid same question" can mean any number of this by itself, but taken as a whole with the rest of the line, it is more likely to have a meaning.  This meaning can very from person to person but it is my personal belief that Stein is telling how kindness can lead to something negative if it isn't honest.  We see in the next line "...out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle," that Stein is telling how we learn by what we see or take in with our eyes.  The second part of this however, is a bit harder to understand.  My personal belief is that Stein is saying we should treat each other alike, as equals.  If we make "selections" it causes pain.  The last line reads "So then the order is that white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analyzed and see a fine substance strangely, it is earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again."  This doesn't exactly do a great job of tying the piece down.  It just leaves more unanswered questions.  We can only assume what certain things mean.  The only reoccurring themes in the piece are a variety of colors: red, white, and green.  Perhaps Stein is trying to use these colors to make a point about moods which I find well done when she uses "redness" to describe what I picture as something negative.  It could also just be a way to add color to this picture Stein paints in our minds.  Everything I've described about the piece holds water in some small way, but I believe when we try to analyze a piece like this, and it leads nowhere, there's only one of two possibilities of why we don't understand it.  One, we can't find the deeper meaning the author is trying to convey.  Or two, the author isn't conveying a point at all.  I believe that's what's happening here.  Stein is simply paining a picture with words as we read and is not trying to convey to us a deep meaning.  Though we all may intemperate a different meaning, this is the result of our own knowledge, not that of Stein, brilliantly put into jumbled up words.