Reflection on "Sarah Cole: A type of love story"

             The story “Sarah Cole: A type of Love story” is a typical confessional story. It honestly reveals about the relationship the narrator had with the woman Sarah Cole.

             But when reading the story, I somewhat felt uncomfortable about the predisposed idea of characters, that the ugly people tend to be more substantial and more “real”. In the story, the handsome narrator thought Sarah was different from other folly women who are vapid. However, as time passes, the narrator realizes that Sarah is not that different from the others in essence: she wants to boast her handsome boyfriend to others. Disappointed at the reality, the narrator acts cruel to her, in order to kill the relationship for their benefits.

             And all of these sequences in the story show that the old idea of “good, kind ugly people” is wrong. The narrator certainly had this prejudice towards ugly people and this resulted in another scar from the relationship between him and Sarah.

             This myth would have come from the ordinary people’s envy. Of course it is often true that the ugly people tend to be kind and humane. However, considering the counterexamples, it is plausible that those who are ordinary would have created the myth because they want to complement the inferior aspect they feel from those who are handsome and pretty.

             To sum up, I felt uncomfortable about the old myth related to ugly people and thus felt interesting about how the story disapproves that myth. It can be seen that the narrator is confessing about the misunderstanding he had about the ugly people.

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Jin Gyeong: I pretty don’t understand the last two paragraphs. Do people really regard ugly people good and kind? (Or, is that can be called myth?) I think there is a stereotype about ugly people that they will always grumble and would have lower self-confidence. As you can see in the animations or movies, enemies (the evils) are depicted ugly (or extremely beautiful??) What do you think about my opinion? J

Chonghyun Ahn: Although I don’t agree on the notion that your interpretation of “hot” boyfriend, I certainly find your criticism on the “old myth” on the function between ugliness and truthfulness very interesting. Why do we have such myths? Is it because that is often true in real life? Or is it because of common men’s envy?

Hyunseok Lee: Sometimes I wonder about “reverse discrimination” in appearances. Handsome or attractive people often regarded as ill-tempered ones, while lots of people expect unattractive people to be kind and cool. If we don’t like the fact that people should not be judged based on exterior appearances, reverse discrimination also should be removed.

Reflection of "Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep"

                  Reading a science fiction is at once fascinating and depressing. It’s amazing to imagine how technology would develop while it’s depressing to somehow acknowledge that even in the future, the selfishness of human will never change.

             “Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep” is the novella that is fascinating and depressing. And it portrayed an interesting model of the future: humans and machines will become similar.

             This model is deeply related to the irony presented in the novella. In the story, Androids, who are supposed to be distinct (usually in an inferior way by human’s standards), are so similar to humans (both physically and mentally) that it is hard to know whether the one is Android or not. On the other side, humans in the story are becoming alike to the machines in that they try to program their mind status like the computers adjusting their state with programming.

This interesting phenomenon, humans becoming machine-like and machines becoming human-like, can be explained with the two factors: human’s desire to replicate themselves and to be superior to others. These seemingly contradicting desires of humans are actually same in an essence; selfishness. Because humans are self-interested, they want to make another version of them while willing to be superior to their replicas. And when linking the selfishness(people have) to the outcome of that impulse, it’s easy to understand the irony in the story: people’s desire to discriminate themselves with replicas simply resulted in the opposite situation, humans and machines becoming similar.

             Overall, I thought that the story was effective in depicting a dystopian society with the irony related to human’s desire.

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Jin Gyeong: You wrote on topic which exactly points out the main idea of the novella and what Mr. Menard talked in today’s class. Your analysis about the motivation of human making Androids was interesting. And I especially liked the expression “humans becoming machine-like, machines becoming human-like”. I think this short phrase really describes what’s going on now, and what will be like in future. How about adding more comparison between the Androids and humans before mentioning the ironies?

Rhee Ji Yoon: “Ironies” that you have mentioned at the start of second (or is it third?) paragraph are not mentioned and explained fully yet, right? (lack of timeL)