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Brandon's Best Blog

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  I wanted take this opportunity to expand more on my thoughts about the relations between Septimus and Clarissa Dalloway  and how the reflect each other's characters in this book. This might be a slightly more sad and serioud blog, so bear with me please. On one hand, Septimus's trauma is visible through his emotional outbreaks and hallucinations. His trauma is easier to comprehend because of how clear it is that he has PTSD. On the other hand, Clarissa struggels on the inside with her stressful thoughts and insecurities about how she is portrayed by others. Both have different characteristics of struggle that are equally as important, but yet society refuses to acknowledge these two examples and focus on the surface of these character or the tip of the iceberg.  These two people could not be any more different from each other when looking at it from an outsider perspective. Clarissa is a middle-high class hostess married to Richard Dalloway. She seems to have a refined ...

Brandon Baller Brand Blog

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       The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker is a fiction novel that takes place during the lunch break of an office worker named Howie. This book highlights the microscopic details of simple daily life activities like riding up an escalator. Personally, I strongly dislike this book. Maybe this is just personal preference, but in my opinion, a book where you have to wonder what the plot is defeats the whole purpose of a novel. While I was reading this book, there were multiple times where I forgot what the book was about because it felt like reading random thoughts inside someone's head with no substance. What motivated this author to write this? What did he think people's reaction to this book would be? What defines a Novel? According to the Oxford Dictionary, a novel is "A long written story with characters and a plot, like a mystery or a romance". This book is definitely a long written story, with characters some form of a plot, but it is definitely not a good novel. m...