"Can we panic nooooow?"

"He lay for a moment, blinking in owlish incomprehension at the light; then suddenly remembered--everything.

"'Oh, my God, my God!' He covered his eyes with his hand." - p. 259

Sooooo....

....

Did he kill Lenina? Bryan, you can't answer because... I already know. What you think. Is a fragment. But still. It would explain his otherwise rather overreaction-y dismay at remembering "everything." Otherwise, "everything" is just... soma. And stuff. There you go. There's a theme: Everything is just soma and stuff. That's what the civilized people think.

I just became surprised and kind of sad about the Lenina business. But I have to go watch Chamber of Secrets some more. Harry doesn't die, and I knooow it because... straightforward is good.

Single malt whiskey

6. Analyze the story's final paragraph in detail. How does it help to elucidate the theme?

The theme I gleaned from this story was that suspicion only breeds more reason for suspicion. When the narrator wakes up in the night, her suspicion of ne'er do wells turns out to be rash and unfounded. In fact, since she lives above a mine, it could be argued that waking up and causing a ruckus actually causes more danger for her.

Similarly, each time the dream sequence characters took action to prevent vandalism or other breaches of security, the attempts to invade their property grew more severe. The final paragraph illustrates the severe injury or possibly death--it's sort of ambiguous--of the story's stock adorable little kid. If the family had shown a little more compassion for the intruders, the tragedy could have been avoided.

The family was really sheltered, too, I think. The mom means well--she wants to help the people, but she doesn't know how. Also, she wants to shield her son from even the worry that his cat might be impaled upon their newly purchased spiraling stabby fence adornment of doom. This could be a call to the audience to just really think through actions before they are taken.

Ambiguity?

As it turns out, I rather like this poetry. I remember writing my Famous American Day report on Emily Dickinson back in third grade and really wanting to like her poetry. I didn't, though. I also really hated the costume.

Since I'm apparently talking about Emily Dickinson, I'll go ahead and make this post about "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain."

Worth noting is the seemingly random capitalization; actually, she seems to have aimed for nouns, which is oddly German of her. In any case, her perspective, arguably, could be from the casket, or "Box," in question. If one takes that stance, then the funeral is her own. Although I feel that is the most satisfactory interpretation, this site says that she felt traumatized by several deaths which were not her own, which I suppose she might have had trouble removing from her brain.

This ambiguity receives no clarification from the abrupt end. Dickinson seems to either lose her mind or die, mid-thought. The cynic in me also includes the possibility that she merely grew bored or frustrated in the writing of that particular poem and tossed her pen aside. More likely, though, she lost her mind from the mourning for the funeral in her brain--a funeral which was likely a metaphor for the mourning itself rather than a literal funeral, as funerals aren't things to be "felt [in the] brain." If in fact the funeral she imagined was her own, she was already dead, and she can't be expected to die in the writing of this poem. At the same time, though, if she's dead, can we expect her to be watching her own funeral anyway? Well... maybe.