Blog #4 What is "Alive" and "Westbury Court" about?

Sincerely speaking the point or main idea of “Westbury Court” is a bit difficult to capture or basically to point out one particular thesis is somewhat problematical and challenging. Nevertheless I thought the essay was written and structures beautifully; it definitely kept me interested throughout the entire essay. So let’s decipher this essay if we can; the author Danticat foreshadows that by the end of the story he is no longer going to be living in Westbury Court, and the reason he gives in his first paragraph is because of a fire. He continues the essay by describing the fire and he gives the who, what, where and why. He takes us, the reader through a very detailed account of the experience what he was feeling at the time so on and so forth. He goes on with the essay wondering what it would have been like if he were one of the children in the show General Hospital, maybe he would’ve had to have lived through such an experience because “the nanny would take care of it”. Danticat then writes of what happened to the apartment that caught fire ant the new tenants that moved in. then he states everything wrong that went on in the vicinity of the building three after the fire and before they moved. The end is where the story gets interesting. This is where I think you can take two main points from the story. The first being the even though there terrible events occurring around the building he states that people die in other places other then their apartment building (bad things happen everywhere) and he really loved where he lived. He makes this statement when he writes “It was an elevated castle above a clattering train tunnel …… It was home”. Now that can be one point but another one can be the quote that he finishes the story with which he mentions twice. This is when his mother says “Sometimes it is too late to say, ‘I shouldn’t have”. This is the moral that the brothers learned from the horrific fire. So which one is it I don’t know you decide, LoL. Otherwise the structure of the essay is very clear he writes in a descriptive fashion and includes a lot of detail and feeling into the story. Now, does the structure help getting the point across, I would argue that it doesn’t for the first one and it does for the latter, because the fact that he loved where he lived isn’t clear until he mentions it and I think that gives clarity to the story or an epiphany. For the second he only mentions in the beginning of the story very, if I may say, quietly and then throws it at us again at the end; so for me it doesn’t work so much.

For “Alive” all I can say is wow. The essay is almost like experiencing being chased. I love story where the author gives lots of details as the events are happening, this allows the reader to really dive into the story and use our imaginations to relive the events that are flying off of the page. I am not a woman, but it must really suck to feel like you are being harassed every time a “creepy” guy looks at you. I wonder, do women really think like this are they paranoid all the time? The point of this essay is a bit easier figure out; and it is “I am vulnerable simply because I’m alive”. This is true, everybody is vulnerable to some type of horrible death or dreadful experience, what can I say it is part of the human condition, or animal condition for that matter, or any living thing to be real general. However, a person cannot live in a state of paranoia, people have to come to realization that we are all going to die one day, but for as long as we are here we might as well make the best of it, because if not then why even go on living. As I mentioned, I really like this story because the way she structured it giving examples of the kidnappings and then putting us, the reader, in a tense state because we don’t know if she is going to be abducted or not, this really captured me.