Blog 10 part 1

This isn't going to be my only blog that we have to do for this upcoming week, just a heads up. Today when we were discussing how the military would run the factories in Cuba, it made me think of how, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the Death Eaters, who were kind of like the military of Voldemort, ran the ministry of magic, and it brought to mind a specific scene from the movie when Harry is exploring Umbridge's office and there is a sort of factory producing brochures near her office. It makes me wonder if the role of the military in Cuba in factories was the same as the Death Eaters at the ministry. For example, were they feared in factories? or were they normal around the workplace? or did they like have their own factories, specifically for the military? were they like advisors around the factories? like in Harry Potter?

Blog 9

The ending to the short story we read this week, Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon, was very surprising. I did not expect the story to end like that honestly. I was expecting something much better, like he was seen as a saint to the people for granting Pepe's wish for a cage and giving it to the rich at no price, or like the doctor came back and bought something and him and Ursula became rich, but not that he was found in the street without any shoes and that's just the ending. It just seems like the ending could have been a little more epic, it was almost like a let down. I also would have wished there would have been another one of those "dream"-like ending, where Balthazar was just a homeless man who dreamed of making a beautiful cage and getting all this praise for it but, nearing the end, reality starts creeping into his dream, eventually leading to where he really is in his life.

Blog 8

Re-reading the story The South was helpful in many ways, mainly because it helped me think of more meanings that Jose Luis Borges might have had in writing it. Initially, I believed that the story after Dahlmann was in the sanitarium was all imagined. I thought it was supposed to be like Dahlmann either died or was still asleep at the sanitarium and he was just imagining everything that happened. But after rereading it, it was brought to my attention about all the things that were in Dahlmann's past, like the cat, the shopkeeper that looked like the nurse, all the billboards and such, and him returning to his ranch. After noticing those objects and events, I began to believe that the meaning was supposed to be that the past has a way of coming back into your life, like the phrase "history repeats itself". This also just seemed to me that the whole story is just a major case of deja vu for Dahlmann. Now, after seeing all these similarities between before and after the sanitarium in the story, I wondered if all this is supposed to be Dahlmann's life flash before his eyes, like he is going to die during surgery at the sanitarium. As if this event that occurred during his trip to his ranch all happened in the past, and, because this is the event that comes to mind before he died, is the event in which he wished to die in, so that he would die a heroic death instead of during surgery at a sanitarium because of an injury he got after banging his head. I would also very much appreciate it if Jorge Luis Borges would have finished this story because, while the open ending leads to alternative endings, I would like to know what Borges would have happen to Dahlmann at the end and whether or not my beliefs on the meaning of the story are true.