This week's reading is Haruki Murakami's short story, Sleep
Click here to read the story
For your assignment, I would like you to tell me whether or not you believe her losing her sleep was for the better or for the worse. In short, was it a good thing or a bad thing? Give examples and justify for your reasoning. Due Friday.
Monday, July 27, 2009
6 comments:
Hey guys, this is the place for you to post your beautiful writing. Make sure to use upper- and lower-case letters and to break paragraphs.
Like this, I am now using a new paragraph.
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ASSIGNMENT: SLEEP
ReplyDeleteIn the novel SLEEP, the writer Haruki Murakami describes the situation of a woman thirty years old, since her youth, when she was in college, began having trouble sleeping. She was not just sleeping, it was a deeper problem that kept her awake.
The novel begins with the main protagonist of the sentence: "This is my seventeenth consecutive days without sleep". In a monologue with herself, she refuses to see a doctor because she knows that he will tell that she has insomnia and her own intuition to know that is not it. Nor does she want to let her parents and brothers know about the problem she has been having.
This situation of lack of sleep stunned as disconnected with reality that surrounds her because her brain doesn't rest.
But what the writer describes throughout the novel is not only insomnia, or waking state that where a person is neither awake nor asleep. The writer describes psycho-social causes of gender and some people suffer in today's society, which results in loneliness and routine.
When the protagonist lived with her parents and brothers were asked, how could they not realize that she could not sleep- they lived in the same house? This situation can occur in many homes where parents work outside the home, the brothers studied, and there is no communication between them, then the family members live their own loneliness.
When she married, had a home, a husband, and a son, here the writer describes the next circle of the spiral of life that some people experience, especially women, see that your life becomes a routine.
She feels like they just love, just the passion, feel that your life is empty. Her life is a routine which is repeated every day: making breakfast, lunch and dinner. In the evening take a towel, a bathing suit, get in the car, and go shopping at the market and half an hour swim at the gym, alone. Every morning she dismisses her husband and her son with the same phrases and hand signs.
In her loneliness and insomnia she watches her husband and son sleep, feeling that they are unknown to her. She begins to wonder how she could marry this man, with all is flaws that he has.
She feels that lack of sleep does not affect her, because her mind is clear, she is physically normal, her appetite is good, and she is not tired.
What affects her is the solitude and the routine, which ultimately makes her turn in on herself, crying her own fate, to bear the blows that life gives, when she can´t escape. This was described at the end of Haruki Murakami´s novel when the protagonist is trapped in the car park at the sea, as menacing shadows try to topple her car.
She had suffered from insomnia several times during her life. It was a problem but she didn´t want to accept it because she was scared, especially when she got married and got that wakefulness again. At first she thought it wasn´t going to last long but as the days went by she started looking for information about her problem. When she found a book where the author said that “sleep is only a way to escape from certain fixed idiosyncratic drives both in their thought processes and in their physical movement and that a person can´t diverge from sleep”, she thought that she didn´t need to sleep anymore because it was only a waste of time, so she decided to stay awake as much as she could but she wouldn´t say a word because she didn´t trust anybody.
ReplyDeleteShe didn´t feel tired and was enjoying all that extra time. It was actually time that she would spend doing pleasant things for her, things that she wouldn´t had done when her family was awake like drinking, reading, and eating chocolate.
I think she was bored of her life and at some point she was desperate. She needed a change and when she got the insomnia again, it was liberating for her and even though she knew it was going to bring problems later she didn´t care.
I think she made a bad decision because she stayed too much time awake and her senses were slowly decreasing.
She was living in the darkness and when these two guys attacked her and she needed to react in the real life she couldn´t. She was too weak and disconnected from reality.
In the history Sleep the woman who can not sleep spent 17 days without sleep. I think that she wanted to do things like eat chocolate and read a lot, but when she got married and had a child she quit doing that stuff. Maybe that is why she decided to be waked up that long time, also a way to get out from the problems.
ReplyDeleteI think that it was not the better decision to be awake for 17 days even at that moment she felt good and never tired, but at the end she was hurting herself and she did not care about her family in the future.
SLEEP
ReplyDeleteI think that at the beginning when she stopped sleeping was good because she started to realize that her life had fallen in a routine and that she had stopped doing the things that she liked and did before she married. After she began to living with her husband and had her son she only passed day after day doing the housework; washing the dishes, making the breakfast, lunch, dinner, cleaning the house, saying the same phrases to her husband and her son and seeing the same hand signs of them. And she just took around hour every day for herself when she went to swim and shopping.
She had forgotten her favorite hobbies. She had forgotten herself to be mother and wife. But when she lost her sleep, she remembered that she loved reading and eating chocolates when she was singled and young. So she really enjoyed her nights without sleep because she passed doing the things that she like; she served to herself a glass of brandy, opened her book "Anna Karenina" and ate chocolates. She had already suffered insomnia when she was in the college but she felt that what she was suffering now was not the same, it was not insomnia. That was the reason because she didn´t check with a doctor, she thought that the doctor would tell her she had insomnia but she knew that it was not insomnia; it was something deeper that she couldn’t understand. And she neither wanted to say to her family that what she was feeling and passing because she thought that they wouldn’t understand her. She loved them but she felt that they were as unknown for her. For this reason she began to notice their flaws like that her husband was a really ugly man and her son was very similar to her husband's family, and she didn't like this. And she really felt that these flaws annoyed her. That was logical because she felt alone and empty as if she didn't have anybody with whom to trust or to count on and she felt that hadn’t achieved anything in her life.
But finally her nights without sleep were bad for her because without noticing she fell in a double routine, the first one in the morning and afternoon when she made the housework and the second in the night when she felt that she was owner of her life and she felt really alive. So she went to the sofa, she served a glass of brandy to herself, she opened her book and she ate chocolates night after night because she wanted to escape from her sad and routine reality. But she didn’t get it and although her mind was perfect her body was feeling the effects of her loss of sleep because she felt that her mind separated her body. She felt more alone and locked as if she could die in any moment.
I think that to stop sleeping is not the way to solve any problem in the life. On the contrary the people need to sleep to be in good physical and mental state and in this way to be able to think with clarity to solve the current troubles to have a new life.
SLEEP
ReplyDeleteI think that at the beginning when she stopped sleeping was good because she started to realize that her life had fallen in a routine and that she had stopped doing the things that she liked and did before she married. After she began to living with her husband and had her son she only passed day after day doing the housework; washing the dishes, making the breakfast, lunch, dinner, cleaning the house, saying the same phrases to her husband and her son and seeing the same hand signs of them. And she just took around hour every day for herself when she went to swim and shopping.
She had forgotten her favorite hobbies. She had forgotten herself to be mother and wife. But when she lost her sleep, she remembered that she loved reading and eating chocolates when she was singled and young. So she really enjoyed her nights without sleep because she passed doing the things that she like; she served to herself a glass of brandy, opened her book "Anna Karenina" and ate chocolates. She had already suffered insomnia when she was in the college but she felt that what she was suffering now was not the same, it was not insomnia. That was the reason because she didn´t check with a doctor, she thought that the doctor would tell her she had insomnia but she knew that it was not insomnia; it was something deeper that she couldn’t understand. And she neither wanted to say to her family that what she was feeling and passing because she thought that they wouldn’t understand her. She loved them but she felt that they were as unknown for her. For this reason she began to notice their flaws like that her husband was a really ugly man and her son was very similar to her husband's family, and she didn't like this. And she really felt that these flaws annoyed her. That was logical because she felt alone and empty as if she didn't have anybody with whom to trust or to count on and she felt that hadn’t achieved anything in her life.
But finally her nights without sleep were bad for her because without noticing she fell in a double routine, the first one in the morning and afternoon when she made the housework and the second in the night when she felt that she was owner of her life and she felt really alive. So she went to the sofa, she served a glass of brandy to herself, she opened her book and she ate chocolates night after night because she wanted to escape from her sad and routine reality. But she didn’t get it and although her mind was perfect her body was feeling the effects of her loss of sleep because she felt that her mind separated her body. She felt more alone and locked as if she could die in any moment.
I think that to stop sleeping is not the way to solve any problem in the life. On the contrary the people need to sleep to be in good physical and mental state and in this way to be able to think with clarity to solve the current troubles to have a new life.
Well, in the novel "sleep" talks about a woman who can not sleep and began a lively nightlife. Do things that could not be married.
ReplyDeleteSleep chronicles the life of a woman thirty years of age who has suffered from "sleep" during his entire life but never liked talking about it for fear of being seen as the crazy one.
she tries to return to his former life in which she could sleep, but was gradually getting used to this lifestyle, she begins with distrayendose novel Anna Karenina and apparently figured out how many days remain awake without feeling or a bit of sleep.
she speaks of her husband and son who apparently are almost equal.
since she can not sleep because she feels that lives much more than regular people.