Research Journal 3

Even though I was assigned Lost in Translation I enjoyed Meatless Days the most. A lot of my classmates found trouble understanding it or just plain didn't like it. I however really liked it. The way it is written in stream of consciousness really appealed to me. I thought that all of the transitions from story to story were so smooth you didn't even realize the author was telling a new story until she was halfway through it. Stream of consciousness seemed to make the story flow better and helped me understand it better. It reminded me of when my class read James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man last year. The entire time I was reading meatless days I kept thinking of how similar the structure was to portrait of an artist.
When comparing it to Lost in Translation or Coming of Age in Mississippi, Meatless Days' style was much more effective for me. In both Lost and Mississippi I felt like I was just reading a bunch of incidents the writers went through while in Meatless Days it seemed to be one large story. Something both Lost and Meatless Days did however was use an overall theme throughout the story to connect all the events. In Meatless it's food, and in Lost it's language. This idea that we talked about in class might be a possible topic for my paper. Both have a thread that is woven throughout the story, making specific events in the authors' lives come together and flow better. In my opinion, Meatless Days does this better than Lost in Translation though.
Another possible paper idea would be to compare Mississippi and When Heaven and Earth change places. They both have this huge problem going on in the world around them and become involved in it. In Mississippi it's the civil rights movement and in Heaven it's the war. Both of these events affect the author greatly and change her. It would be interesting to look at how the author changes and when and where we can see it in the text.