Review Of Steve Kuisto's 'Planet Of The Blind'

Suddenly losing his eyesight at a young age and having to deal with living in a whole new world, Marcus Engel tells his story of how he coped with losing his eyesight. Marcus Engel described his hardships and struggles after he became blind in his book, After This…An Inspirational Journey for All the Wrong Reasons. The book begins with Engel mentioning his college life and how he was excited to be going back home for vacation. While he was with his friends he got into a bad car accident that left him blind. The rest of the book tells his emotional life changing story of how he learned to accept his blindness and to do daily tasks. In his stay at the hospital he made a goal to get back to college.

In Chaim Potok’s book, The Chosen, blindness is a recurring theme. Although there are some instances of physical blindness, such as Billy in the hospital, most of the situations in this book are of the figurative sense. In these circumstances, the person has good physical vision, however, due to their previous experiences, they are not able to see the true situation.

Carver is well known for his short stories and poetries. Among his works, “Cathedral” is considered one of the best, favorite, and most optimistic and the most developed. Carver’s story revolves around the theme of seeing and looking. Most people believed they could not live without cathedrals which brought them closer to their God. Similarly, people place so much importance to the physical eyesight and tend to think they can hardly live without it. Robert, a blind man, is invited to the narrator’s home and the narrator is shown troubled by Roberts’s disability. Later on, the narrator is amazed to see the blind smoking despite having even thought of helping him with his drink earlier on (Carver 516- 524). The latter brought to attention that as much as natural looking is essential, more essential is the ability to see or to visualize things. The writer explains that it might be tougher to be without eyesight; however, it is possible to live without it and make the best of what else one has, more so the brain. Visualizing brings out a better view of the significance of life and things surrounding us.

Every english class includes dreaded assigned reading, and students get used to the treacherous act of mandatory reading and analysis. However, there eventually comes a novel that pushes the limits of commitment and causes students to question why they took the advanced placement course, such as William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. More often than not, a student’s motivation to read assigned reading is quite low, but Faulkner’s writing creates a whole new level of desperation to avoid the novel. The complicated sentences and common themes Faulkner uses create a difficult reading for anyone, especially unmotivated students.

299). This shows that the narrator doesn’t know too much about the blind and is very stereotypical of them. The blind man and the narrator soon get together in which the narrator is asked to draw a cathedral with his eyes shut. Not only does he close his eyes, he keeps them closed after finishing the drawing. “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything” (Anthology pg.311). This line said by narrator makes the reader believe that he may take things for granted and may just go about his day without noticing much.

Many people make an assumption they are not blind to life itself whether ignorance plays a part or pride. In Cathedral by Raymond Carver, it describes a few myths that society has portrayed and opinions of the visual impaired. The main focus is getting to know the person before drawing a conclusion. Its not fair to anyone to be neglected whether you are visual impaired or have the functionality of what is considered to be a normal human being.

People who are blind face many different problems in accomplishing everyday activities and becoming an independent individual. Some are able to overcome this issue while others struggle through it in their lives. In “Helen Keller’s Address before the New York Association for the Blind, January 15, 1907” she makes an appeal to the audience that the blind should be helped and made independent so that they can stand up and support themselves. She uses pathos or emotionally packed words, examples and anecdotes and cites from a prominent source to convince her audience that the blind are not helpless, but they are in need of guidance from people who can see in order to live and thrive independently.

“The world of Deaf art encompasses a multiplicity of media, philosophies, and expressions, as well as a unique way of experiencing the world.” (Holcomb, pg 171). A very well known component of Deaf art is De’VIA, (Deaf View Image Art). De’VIA explores Deaf experience on a personal cultural or physical level using formal art elements. Proposed in 1989, the concept of De’VIA aimed to increase the visibility and focus on the uniqueness of works by Deaf artists.

By saying that his idea of blind people came from the movies shows that he probably has not had any real life encounters with a person who is blind, therefore the only idea he has of blind people are the kind that are portrayed in movies. However, by saying that blind people “never laugh” and “move slowly” makes them seem dysfunctional as human beings. Blind people cannot see, but that does not correlate to how quickly they move. By saying that blind people move slowly, that indicates that they are “disabled” and not able to keep up at the same pace as others. Not only is the fact that the narrators perception of those who are blind awkward, but it makes it seem as if the blind have their own stereotypes—which is the foundation of discrimination and prejudice.

Likewise, Pottles uses the innocence of a childhood memory, a camping trip, to explain an interesting perspective on disability. Disability is shown through a young child who is not able to hear fully. Nonetheless, the mother does not take this to be a limiting disability ‘“That’s how you hear it. That’s your way.’” (14), she is able to show support and does not see her child, to be limited by their hearing. Through the support she offers, the child is comforted and feels at peace. This peace is an important part of any childhood in order to feel like they belong and are loved. This concept challenges what society considers normal, in the first stanza of “Hearing Test”, the line, “Since I couldn’t read their lips, it was all mumbling to me” (Pottle 4), shows us the first clue that this child is not able to hear fully. With hearing being a big part of daily life, this is considered to

How To Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading to Between the Lines is a book that showed me many elements of a book previously unbeknownst to me. Some of these concepts were almost perfectly illustrated in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. This novel provided perfect illustrations of not only a classic piece of American literature, but of the value of the quest, the importance and variety of symbolism, and the literary value of violence, both in the plot and to the characters, and their very relevant applications within literature of past and present. Foster’s text laid out the framework for the concept of a quest. He stated, “They go because of the stated task, mistakenly believing it is their real mission...

In the novel, Paradise of the Blind, written by Duong Thu Huong originally in Vietnamese and translated into English by Phan Huy Duong and Nina Mcpherson, the author constructs characters Aunt Tam and Uncle Chinh as analogs of conflicting political ideologies of 20th century Vietnam in order to display her opinions on its effectiveness in attaining proclaimed paradise. The characters are constructed to differently express the author’s voice towards extremist ideologies, Uncle Chinh

The story “Cathedral” demonstrates that lack of sight does not necessarily prevent one from perceiving things as they are, or live their life to the fullest. In the story, a middle-age blind man, who is a friend to the narrator’s wife, and used to be her boss at one point, visits the narrator and his wife. The narrator has never interacted with blind people before, and all he knew about blind people was what he had seen on television. Blind people are stereotypically portrayed on television as slow moving, dull people, who never laugh. Based on this perception, the narrator was reluctant to meet the blind man and doubted whether they were going to connect. This is evident when the narrator states, “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me” (Carver 1).

Ritsos admires the ability to find beauty in suffering as a smile on the lips will defeat it. He sees that the strength of hope is a gun in the hands of the people. If the poet has conquered blindness, however, it is only because he asks us to imagine what the world has never offered us: absolute freedom, justice, and equality - not oppression, injustice, and violence. This is why we must always, at every moment, invent the world a new, in all our blindness, in the midst of a life that is always touched by death. We must invent a world instead of being subjected to one or dreaming of another. we must recognize a world where blind statues see and act responsibly toward one another, where the mute sing. His preoccupation with poetry as the weapon

A person is not just characterized by those particular circumstances that they find themselves in, but by how they respond to those moments. The phenomenal novel, Blindness, written by Jose Saramago, showcases the storyline of a country that encounters a widespread disease that leads to several people catching a type of blindness where they can only see white. The unfortunate people who have received the terribly contagious disease spreading around are to be isolated in an abandoned mental hospital to avoid the spreading of the blindness. Existentialism is the philosophy that one can be influenced tremendously from the external factors surrounding them. This is portrayed