The Man Who Was Thursday, Final Paper Assignment

Hello everyone! I owe this blog a post. It is now Holy Week...we are days away from Easter! Yay!

Yesterday I finally finished my last assignment for G. K. Chesterton's short novel, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. It took me a really long time to figure out my paper topic, and now that it is complete, I'm very proud of it and wanted to share it with you. Enjoy!

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3/26/13

Literature Qtr 3 Week 7 Paper

G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, is the story of seven anarchists who are not really anarchists. The driving force behind the action, terror, mystery and drama of the story is the giant, mysterious gentleman called Sunday. However, we never really know what or who Sunday is. We know he is the leader of the famed and feared Seven Days Council and gathers the heroic detectives who represent the days of the week, making them believe each of the others is a murderous anarchist. At the same time, Sunday is the wise and kind “man in the dark” who called each of the detectives into the police force. Because Sunday is the one thing we never have answers about but the thing we desire most to understand, I believe that Chesterton means what he says in subtitling the story A Nightmare, and that Sunday’s role lies in his possession of the truly nightmarish essence of the tale.

At the end of The Man Who Was Thursday, all seven men are gathered together and dressed in beautiful robes that represent the day of Creation they stand for. Sunday is the Sabbath, the day God rested. He tells the detectives that he is “the peace of God that surpasses all understanding.” When his back is turned, he seems terrifying, and evil. Face to face, he is still terrifying because of his massiveness, but there is something about his face that makes all of the detectives think of the good. Because Sunday seems to mirror the incomprehensible vastness of God, many people believed that his role in the story is that of a Deity. But Chesterton, in an article published in the Illustrated London News, explained that this was not the truth. “It was a very melodramatic sort of moonshine, but it had a kind of notion in it; and the point is that it described, first a band of the last champions of order fighting against what appeared to be a world of anarchy, and then the discovery that the mysterious master both of the anarchy and the order was the same sort of elemental elf who had appeared to be rather too like a pantomime ogre.  This line of logic, or lunacy, led many to infer that this equivocal being was meant for a serious description of the Deity; and my work even enjoyed a temporary respect among those who like the Deity to be so described. But this error was entirely due to the fact that they had read the book but had not read the title page. The book was called The Man Who Was Thursday:  A Nightmare.”

That is not to say that the story has no meaning, though Chesterton wrote it to have the discordance and confusion of a nightmare. Throughout The Man Who Was Thursday, the main characters are repeatedly faced with what at first seems to be true evil. But every time, they find there is just a clever trick or a simple misunderstanding that reveals that what they thought was evil is really good. Many people might believe that, by this, Chesterton means to say that evil does not exist; it is only a mask that good sometimes wears. But this is not the case. What Chesterton illustrates in this is that the power of evil means nothing. It would not matter if all but a few good men were left in the world; the greatest power of evil is weaker than the weakest power of good. This partially explains the role of Sunday; he’s supposed to scare us, confuse us, surprise us, and then leave us guessing. Although he could manipulate the detectives, we see that he had no power to harm them. Evil is real, and it can be corruptive and harmful, but evil has no power over us until we welcome it.

In conclusion, The Man Who Was Thursday only makes sense when we look at it as a nightmare. It is a fantastic and funny tale, with heroism and courage and wonderful characters. But Chesterton did not write it to be a funny mystery story. The story is not a good dream; it is a nightmare. Chesterton said of this perplexing masterpiece of his, “It was not intended to describe the real world as it was, or as I thought it was, even when my thoughts were considerably less settled than they are now. It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date; with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt, which even the pessimists felt in some fitful fashion.” Sunday is, therefore, the embodiment of this ‘wild doubt and despair’ with ‘just a gleam of hope’, the vehicle for Chesterton’s intentions in writing such an imaginative story.

History Qtr 2 Week 5 Paper

FANFARE OF TRUMPETS, PLEASE!

Alright. I don't usually post a lot of my school papers on here, and ESPECIALLY not the history papers. But I have been working on this sucker for over a week. I could absolutely not come up with a single thing to say about my topic. I even wrote the NEXT assigned paper before this one. As such, I am extremely proud of it now that it is finished, and I just thought I'd share it with you.

          The French played a pivotal role in helping the American Colonies win their independence from the British government in 1783. A few short years later, the French decided they wanted their freedom, too. This is not at all surprising that the passion for liberty spread to Europe, especially in France, where the social system had been corrupt and unjust for years. The First and Second Estates had all the wealth and power while the Third Estate struggled and starved. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was the official response of the people of France to oppression and tyranny, and it was approved by the National Assembly of France in 1789.
            Unlike the Declaration of Independence, which sought to reach a diplomatic decision and held war as a last resort, The Declaration of the Rights of Man was a document written to declare the people’s desire for freedom and equality, even if it meant overthrowing the government. It consists of 17 articles that make definitive statements about the rights all men ought to have an equal share in. In America, the biggest issue that led the people to war was the fact that they were not being given a voice overseas in England, where all their laws and liberties were being controlled. In France, the issue was not that none of the people had any say, but that some of the people had all the say. There was major class discrimination, and the lowest class did all the work and bore all the suffering. The 1^st Article of the Declaration states, “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.”

            Because of the system of Estates (First Estate, Second Estate, and Third Estate), France was a top-heavy structure. The lowest estate had nothing, and the two higher estates had it all, which made it easy for corruption to spread throughout the nobility, and also the Church. Because of this corruption throughout all of France, even in the Church, the place that should have been an example of morality, very many rights were being denied to the poor and underprivileged. What kind of rights were the people asking for? Unfortunately, the rights within the 17 articles should never have been denied to them in the first place. Equality, religious freedom, and right to property are all included in The Declaration of the Rights of Man. The 13^th Article reiterates the unfairness of this class system: “A common contribution is essential for the maintenance of the public forces and for the cost of administration. This should be equitably distributed among all the citizens in proportion to their means.” It is interesting that the same people who stormed the Bastille prison in violence and chaos just a month before proceeded to call out in their declaration for nothing more fervently than balance and order.  

            In conclusion, the Third Estate of France was a veritable time bomb, and The Declaration of the Rights of Man was the fuse. It gave to the greedy and corrupt First and Second Estates fair warning of the people’s desperation to be free and treated with equality.  The Declaration can be summarized by the very true statement found within its 16^th Article: “A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.” Unfortunately, the nobility and religious leaders refused to listen to the reasonable voices of the Third Estate, and so they answered to outright violence. 

History Paper on the Economic Theories of Adam Smith

History Qtr 1 Week 6 Paper

            Adam Smith was a Scottish philosopher who, like many philosophers before him, noticed how philosophical concepts worked with the study of economics. He defined new theories to promote a healthier, more stable market environment, including the theories of division of labor, the role of money, natural price, market price, labor as every man’s property, and the invisible hand. These theories are still mandatory reading for students of economics today.

            First, Adam Smith came up with the theory of division of labor when he observed that when one person was assigned to manufacture a pin entirely by himself, it took him a great deal of time and effort. But when ten people were each given the job of completing a single step in the manufacturing process of a pin, they could all work very quickly and complete very many pins in a single day. By dividing up the labor to produce goods, people could work more harmoniously and efficiently.

            Second, Smith regarded labor very highly, and considered money to merely be a physical representation of the labor of a particular person. Since each kind of labor was worth a different amount according to difficulty and importance, it would be difficult to actually trade labor for labor. For instance, if a man plowed a field for a baker, it would take a lot of loaves of bread for the baker to match the worth of the plowman’s labor. Smith’s theory on the role of money was that it stood in as a dividable, physical representation of each person’s labor. Thus, every market transaction is really an exchange of labor between sellers and buyers.

            Third, Smith developed a theory about the natural price of everything, based on the average income of members in a community, and average wage for rent and goods. The natural price is in essence the ‘perfect price’; the price at which the buyers would purchase as much of the product as could possibly be supplied. When something is being sold at its natural price, the market is in perfect balance; there is no surplus and no shortage, and the demand and supply are even with each other. Hand in hand with Smith’s theory of the natural price is the theory of the actual price or market price. The market price is often above or below the natural price, because it constantly adjusts to the market conditions. If there is a great demand for pins but very few pins in supply, the price of pins rises above the natural price. If there is very little demand for pins, there becomes a surplus of pins, and the price drops below the natural price.

            Fourth, continuing with his great appreciation for labor, Smith invented the theory that every man’s labor is his property. When a man labors to produce a vegetable garden, that labor, and everything that labor brings about, belongs entirely to him. He is not required to share it with anyone. However, since a vegetable garden might produce more than one man and his family could ever eat, and people need more than just vegetables to live, the man can exchange his property (the fruit of his labor) with someone else’s labor to satisfy both of them.

            And finally, Adam Smith believed in a governing force over markets that he called an ‘invisible hand’. While Smith was alive from 1723 till 1790, the prevalent economic system in Europe was that of mercantilism, which meant the government had full control over the economy, and restricted import while pushing export.  Smith saw that free markets naturally settled into the best, most productive prices, imports, and exports. He called this process the Invisible Hand; man’s natural tendency in a market is to freely and fairly exchange labor, and when men are allowed to interact freely in a market, supply and demand even out and there is far more harmony than the discordant and ineffective system of mercantilism.