Reflection Week 2/3

     This week the quote activity was hard for our group. Personally, I'm confused on the flow of the book and not so much the content so specific quotes didn't really help me overall. There are parts where metaphors are unclear to me and I wrote those down but the thing I am struggling most with is time. Ultimately, I have a hard time telling what is present and past, imagined and real, and if it is past or imagined why it is important to the whole of the story. I feel the specific quotes won't help me much because it is such a huge question and the story jumps around so often that there is no way to go through in complete detail what time frame Tayo is in throughout all the parts we have read. 

     I'm hoping that as we continue discussing quotes everything will become more clear to me. I feel as though I understand the details of the story, for example, when Tayo goes to see Night Swan. That portion of the story is very poetic and indirect but I was able to decipher the meaning behind it. It is figuring out when that happened initially and why Tayo is remembering it now that I struggle with. I also understood the direct parts of the portion about the homeless people living in shacks, hiding from the police. What I did not understand was how that pertained to Tayo's life. I couldn't tell if it was about Tayo, a memory of his, or if it was some sort of metaphor. I did pull quotes from that section to ask about but it is such a big portion with so many details it is hard to ask one specific question about it. I am hoping that as we continue discussing quotes as a class these will make more sense to me. 

 I chose this picture to represent Tayo. One thing I can understand very clearly from the reading is that Tayo has lead a very hard and sad life. Sadly enough, I think he will continue to be depressed beyond repair throughout the rest of the novel as he has so many hardships to deal with and hardly any support in dealing with them.