Thursday, May 19, 2011
Chapters 6-7
Post your own observations, questions, and remarks about Chapters 5-6. When you respond to this posting, DO NOT simply repeat the thoughts of your classmates. You can add something new to a previous comment. You can comment or critique a previous posting, but your main goal is to add something new to the discussion. Remember, try to include direct quotes as much as possible!
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9 comments:
I would mostly like to focus on Dr. Seward's Diary in chapter 6, starting on page 59.
In all honesty, I found the rest of the chapter to be a complete bore, but Dr. Seward seems to intrigue me as well as his patient, Renfield. As Seward himself says, this patient is quite interesting and unpredictable!
Instead of being violent, as most people think of when they hear the word "madman", he remains somewhat calm, even as far as begging Dr. Seward for things, such as a kitten. I am quite curious as to why Renfield, or the Zoophagous patient, is feeding animals just to feed them to other animals.
Why does he plead with Dr. Seward for a kitten and claims it's for his salvation? This man is clearly of importance later in the book...
You are not the only reader to be intrigued by Renfield. I promise many of your questions will be answered late.
The patient Reinfield amuses me, for he is not what you would expect out of a person who is put in an asylum. He is an unique man in an odd way. But towards the beginning of chapter 7, Mina paste things from the Dailygraph about the storm and the ship that came into harbor. But I like the quote that says, "As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean." Even though the sea was full of life, and throwing every punch it can, the ship remains motionless in the vast commotion of the storm.
Throughout Dracula, I have been trying to keep up on the dates that the characters have written on. I'm almost positive that the ship Miranda is talking about, belonged to the captain, whose journal entries were posted within the book after the Dailygraph part. However, the article in the Dailygraph is written on August 8th, and the captain's journal ends on Ausust 4th.
Starting on July 26, the captain's men have been drowing in fear of a creature(no pun intended.) The captain explains that most men go to the extremity of jumping overboard. The monster is described on page 95 as, "like a man, tall and thin, ghostly pale." At one point, the captain wrote down, "I crept behind It, and gave It my knife; but the knife went through It, empty as the air."
Obviously, this could not be a mortal enemy of the captain's. They are seeing a vampire One clue of a vampire would be the article's description of the man on page 89. "The man was simply fastened by his hands, tied one over the other, to a spoke of the wheel. Between the inner hand and the wood was a crucifix." Also, looking at the dates, the captain would have arrived one or two days before the newspaper had published that article..
Libby...
I like your logic here and your scientific approach, and we should be thankful for Mina's attempt to keep things organized, right? And let me point of ATTEMPT!.
I'd also like to point out that the men mostly died at their own hands. Was Dracula attempting to kill them? Were they just scared? Why didn't Dracula just kill them all? He is in control of the elements, right? Does he need them? Does he need their blood?
Dracula is a vampire that needs to stay strong to be the best. What he needs is the strong men. I'm sure he petrified the men to see which ones were actually tough, and which ones were faking it. Maybe the captain was the one who got his blood sucked. He seemed to be the only mentally stable one on the boat when Dracula appeared. The rest were like chump change for the hungry vampire.
This doesn't have to do so much with things happening in the book, as much as my interest in what was said. While reading through chapter 6, Lucy and Mina were talking to the old man about the guy George Canon's tomb and death. A direct quote from the old man about George was, "...I've often heard him say masel' that he hopd he'd go to hell, for his mother was so pious that she'd be sure to go to heaven, an' he didn't wan't to addle where she was." (pg75) What I found interesting and significant about what he said, was it instantly reminded me of Huckleberry Finn. Where Huck was talking to Miss Watson about the 'bad place'. "..She said it was wicked to say what I said; said she wouldn't say it for the whole world; she was going to live so as to go to the good place. Well, I couldn't see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn't try for it."
/end of pointless comment.
On page 68 of chapter 6, Dr. Seward states "My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind." Peculiar doesn't even begin to describe Renfield. In Dr. Seward's journal for 11 a.m., it says "The attendant has just been to me to say that Renfield has been very sick and has disgorged a whole lot of feathers. "My belief is, doctor," he said, "that he has eaten his birds, and that he just took and ate them raw!" Would you describe this as a 'peculiar' act? I personally find this more to be horrific. On page 66 of the same chapter, Renfield says that eating the fly "... was very good and very wholesome; that it was life, strong life, and gave life to him." Is this what he was thinking the birds would give to him?
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