Sunday, December 14, 2014

Amy

Amy is a really frickin cool character. I'm talking about in the literary sense. One of the things that I disliked about Their Eyes Were Watching God was the Tolkien-esque feel of all the characters. There were the good guys and the bad guys and everything they did and everything they said supported their status as a good person or a bad person.

The book Beloved is much more George RR Martin-esque, as there are characters that I either don't know how to feel about (Beloved) or characters who I both love and am annoyed by at the same time (Amy and Denver).

Amy is a really cool character because she's not the knight in shining armor coming to save Sethe. She sort of stumbles onto Sethe, calls her a "nigger woman" or something like that, and keeps rambling on about her pipe dream of buying velvet in Boston (.... okay?). But the more I read her story the more I liked her.

She made it seem like she really didn't want to help Sethe and wanted to move on towards Boston, but as readers we were kind of made to feel that deep down she really did want to help Sethe. When he eventually sticks with Sethe for a few days and saves her from frostbite, our hopes are confirmed.

All in all Amy is a really well written and interesting character. She's written as if a bunch of strings were pulling her in all different directions.

4 comments:

  1. Amy was one of those characters for me that I really liked, right off the bat, but I couldn't figure out why I actually liked her. You hit the nail on the head here -- she's not just a good person or a bad person. She has her own personality, and motivations for everything she says or does, and she's not just motivated by trying to be a "knight in shining armor" to Sethe.

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  2. I think Amy is an often-overlooked character, when she is more complex than she seems as you've said.

    As for your point about TEWWG, I'm not exactly a fan of the novel either, but I think there are some morally ambiguous characters, most clearly in Tea Cake. He seems to be Janie's ideal man, yet he still beats her and "steals" her money. I think the primary flaw of these characters is in their lack of philosophical depth.

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  3. Sethe was a really fun character and I think you were right about why, it because she is so human. The rest of these characters seem to be representing some kind of motif or idea. Amy just felt like someone you would meet in real life. I think it was also nice to get break from the intense struggles of slavery to the petty struggle of being unable to get a nice piece of velvet.

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  4. Amy was very interesting. To me, she came across as a very young and rather naive girl, who on her way to find this velvet that she so desired, came across a struggling woman who she helped because she just believed that it was something she was supposed to do. It seems she was raised with privilege, so I assume she was taught manners and such, and the way she tends to Sethe reminds me of how a young child would tend to their parent, maybe a young child that is asked to give their parent a foot rub. They likely aren't doing it thinking about how good they are feeling and how much they love helping and doing good, it's just something they do because they are supposed to.

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