Reaction to NY Times article on North Korean Gulag

Shin Dong Hyok was born and raised in a North Korean gulag, the life he was forced to live was the only life he knew existed. To us, or at least to me, it seemed as though this lifestyle, the way these people were treated in these camps was completely barbaric, it was something that doesn't really happen, something that we only read about. This makes it strange to read about someone who only knew this life and nothing outside of the walls of his prison camp. Shin assumed that everyone lived the way he did and he never thought it was unfair. 

Shin's life relates to the life of the Party members in 1984. To the reader it's clear that the each of the members of the Party are treated is wrong or unfair, but to them it's standard, they love the Party, and they think there's anything bad about it enforcing the idea of Ignorance is Strength, a piece of the Party’s slogan which is similar to the saying that ignorance is bliss. Winston however, is one of the few who can even vaguely remember how life was previously causing him to be unsatisfied with his life now

It's hard to accept that Shin found this way of life normal. The world I was born into is the world I know, the world I find normal, making it shocking to know that Shin never questioned the way he was forced to live in, showing how much surroundings affect one's thinking. Ignorance is bliss. It makes sense when Shin says sometimes he wished he could go back to before he knew about the rest of the world, before he knew about anything because in a sense his oblivion never brought him problems, he "only had to do what [he] was told", finding his life now more difficult than it was in the camp. Shin having lived in the camp for so long knew nothing more than it, being pushed into a bigger world and seeing completely new things has to be hard.

Reaction to The Psychology of the Novel

The chapter Psychology of the Novel, from Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel seemed very purposeless to me. I don't quite understand why someone would write a chapter explaining what is necessary in a novel, or what many authors need to do to make their novel appealing. To me, they way an author chooses to write their novel should make the novel appealing to its readers, of course there are certain measures the author must take to make it that way but there aren't any rules. It's never guaranteed that all types of readers will read these novels, but some will because they relate in some way to the novel. Smiley mentions this relationship in the Psychology of the Novel repeatedly. "When a reader reads, she is communicating with herself, but when she feels a sense of kinship with a particular novel, she feels that the author is communicating with her," (85). I agree with the idea that every reader when reading a novel tries to relate themselves with the characters or plot, by reading they think as the author had thought, thus communicating. But it isn't absolutely necessary to have built a relationship with the author in order to enjoy the novel. Being comfortable with a novel may compel a reader to continue reading the novel, but it is not as significant Smiley makes it out to be. Smiley continuously emphasizes this idea of comfort, using multiple examples to show multiple approaches of creating a connection with the reader, which for me got boring. 

In the beginning of the Psychology of the Novel,  Smiley mentioned how the author needs to keep the reader’s attention but I feel like she didn’t do a very good job of keeping mine, many of the statements made by Smiley seemed like generalizations which bothered me a bit. While reading this chapter I kept getting bored by how repetitive and useless it seemed. Smiley’s Psychology of the Novel really just gave an impression of being guidelines for writing a novel, which I find unnecessary. A novel is a novel, and should be written how the author chooses to write it, instead of analyzing the methods other authors used, and definitely without all this “psychology”.