Reflections on Class 2

Note: Our assignment is to reflect on anything in the class so far. Since I accidentally wrote the answer to the wrong question last time, I've decided not to waste a good reflection on Fuentes and the Great Gatsby. I've reposted it here. With editing. (My spelling last time was atrocious. I mean, I think I spelled the word 'amazing' wrong.) After all, we did talk about something like this today in class.

Further Note: I really need to learn how to use italics in this thing.

Further further Note: Is over 450 words a bad thing? I just got carried away.
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Fuentes' piece showed the way his experiences influenced his writing and how his heritage influenced it as well. It's amazing just how much something that can be considered ‘obsolete’ in today’s culture can influence someone so much. After all, today everyone is supposed to be a sophisticated, regular, all-American Westerner. Everyone is supposed to be equal and the same. (Which are two different things). The idea that being different [is bad] is supposedly obsolete. People aren't the same though, nor are they equal. When Fuentes spoke of his being looked down on for being Mexican at school, that shows how you are perceived is more apparent than what you really are.

How does this relate to the Great Gatsby? Well, Fuentes was thought of as Mexican and looked Mexican and so he began to feel Mexican. Sort of like Gatsby looked and thought of himself as a mysterious, exotic, fascinating guy, and people began to see him as he thought he was. It's actually the opposite of what Fuentes did. Gatsby's self-opinion caused the change in everyone else's opinion of him. Everyone else's opinions of Fuentes (his father's Mexican stories, his family's nationalism, the teasing at school, the news) influenced his opinion of himself, (which caused him to care more about his Latin American culture and propelled him into a situation where he started to write.)

Also: on the Red Sky in the Morning post, LaMags asked about what I meant by 'a memoir tells a mind, not a story'. That's a quote from Patricia Hampl's essay. What I think she means is that a story conveys something limited. It's like telling you a few things about something, but leaving loads more open for thought. Like the example in class, naming a table is a story. It tells you that the table has a name and its name is table. Stories are usually more complex than that and they can tell you even thousands of things. But they leave out some whys and some hows and questions and things. Stories don't tell everything, just most of something, or a lot of it, or very little of it. A memoir, in contrast, tells everything. Who and what and how and why and where and when and everything like that. A memoir doesn't just set the scene and add a plot and descriptions and ideas. It has to tell something beyond the ordinary facts of who and how and why. It has to tell what the person is like and how they feel, neither of which is rational or logical or definable and is the epitome of the phrase 'I could tell you stories'- you could but you can't because there's too much to tell and no way to explain it. It being your mind, your /self/.