This inquiry is my reflection back across the entire school year, my first here at Miami. I examine specifically my struggle to find a proper balance between concise and “padded” writing. From inquiry 1 of the first semester to inquiry 3 of the last, I look at my writing style to try and identify what I have done well up to this point and what needs continued work.
Inquiry 4
Journal of Josiah Young, Citizen of Rapture
January 19th, 1951.
Man oh man, this place is wild! Even the atrium when you first come in is surreal. Heck, it’s all surreal. The lights, the sounds, the people. I’ve never seen anything like it before. All my years, I never imagined I’d see a city built underwater, and a glorious one at that. That Kashmir restaurant looks mighty fine. I don’t think Kate and I will ever be able to afford it. But, you gotta have something to look forward to.
Our apartment is small, but I like to think of it as cozy. We have everything we need. And I know we’ll be happy here. Not sure what we are going to do for work but from everything I know about the economy here, I think we’ll be able to find something.
Basically, I’m just excited to have a fresh start. I didn’t want to end up one of those GIs who sold car insurance for the rest of his days. I fought hard in the war. I think I deserve better than an average life. Kate and I are going to do something special here. I know it.
Speaking of Kate, she and I loved Fort Frolic. What a place! World class art and theater, though I guess I never really seen world class art or theater but that’s what I bet it looks like!
I gotta say, this place is something else.
August 31st, 1952.
Damn rich people, running everyone out of business! Kate and I were doing just fine a few months ago with our little clothing shop and one of those damn elites decided they were going to open a huge store right next door selling shirts for just a little less. And of course, people looking for the best deal didn’t want OUR shirts anymore. Makes me sick. You got the money, you got the power. I gotta say, Frank Fontaine is the only guy keeping this place from going nuts. Thank goodness for his poor house or else Kate and I would be who-knows-where, more than likely in some alley somewhere.
Fontaine has several of these houses for the poor around Rapture. Its sickening that he was the first person to even make them. Ryan is a prick. He honestly believes the strong will survive and that’s the way its gotta be. Problem is, you can’t just come into Rapture and compete with these tycoons. Its not possible!
I know tons of poor people, on account of the fact of us living in the poor house. I’m working as a janitor at Fort Frolic now. Pisses me off like nothing else to see all those rich people there, either not knowing or not caring about all us infinitely less fortunate. I swear, without Fontaine, this place would be hell.
March 24th, 1954.
I don’t know what I’m gonna do without Kate. She was my world, and now she’s gone. Damn ADAM, messing up peoples genes. Kate was so beautiful. But she wanted to be perfect. I tried to tell her I loved her and that she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever known but she wanted to be positively PERFECT. Steinman, that son of a bitch, offered her exactly that.
I just can’t believe she’s really gone. I love her so much. I don’t want her to really be dead. Damn Rapture. I hate this place. My wife is dead, I have no job and people are going crazy all over the place. It’s like a terrible dream, one I can’t get out of.
June 9, 1956.
I really don’t know how I’m still alive, let alone how I’m writing this. Many of my friends down here in the poor house are dead or missing. ADAM is now turning people into what they’re calling “Splicers.” It sounds like Fontaine is forming some kind of army down here to fight Andrew Ryan. I already fought one god forsaken war, I’m not about to fight another one. They’ll have to kill me first.
I see now how this happened. They taught us in the Marines that Fascism and Communism essentially led to one thing: totalitarianism. We’ve got ourselves a goddamn Adolf Hitler down here in Andrew Ryan. You cross him, you die. It’s that simple. That’s what happened to Fontaine. He was trying to make a difference in Rapture. Now I don’t know what to think. Sure he was a smuggler, but what he was doing wasn’t all bad. So what if people wanna read the Bible, y’know? I say let them. Doesn’t matter now though, Fontaine is dead. We are stuck with Andrew Ryan and his dictatorship. Shit, sometimes I just wanna die.
Journal by Tom Stoner, credit to http://bioshock.wikia.com/wiki/BioShock for images and content.
So my rough draft looks nothing like my final draft, but that’s ok. I went about the revisions in a different format as I looked at them more in the terms of revising as I go as opposed to redoing it after it was completed. My project is in the form of a journal and I really enjoyed diving into the intricacies of writing someone else’s journal for them. That seems really odd to me and its definitely not something I’ve really tried to do before. I enjoy the challenge of putting myself in someone else’s shoes. Creating the world of an entirely different person in and of itself is also a bit challenging.
The strengths of this project format, in my opinion, is that I allow for a look into Rapture during the good times, before everything started going awry, and I can show that at least economically, the city was doomed from the beginning. That is the crux of my entire argument. So we will see Rapture in a different light than Andrew Ryan wanted us to.
One of my weaknesses is that I had to do a lot of research in order to create these scenes. Also, the overwhelming majority of my project takes place before the time frame of the game is realized so much of what I write about is based in speculation as to what I think the situation would be like.
All in all, I really feel strongly about my project and the new format in which it shows my critique of the city of Rapture.
Tom Stoner
Whitney Soares
English 112
7 April 2013
Journal of Josiah Young, Citizen of Rapture
The first journal entry will be from January 19th, 1951. It is Young’s first day in Rapture with his new wife, Katie Young. With the first entry, I plan on outlining Josiah’s first impressions of Rapture, keying in the reader perhaps to a few of the motives he had for traveling there in the first place. He will describe his first trip to Fort Frolic as well as his overall pleasure with the city as a whole. This diary entry will be long and descriptive as it takes place after his first week in the city.
The next entry will be highlighting much of the inequity in Rapture as Josiah loses his job and is forced to work for very low wages doing menial labor. Many of the people he works with have lost their homes and are forced to leave in the streets in the poorest areas of Rapture. It is meant to show how Rapture claims to be a utopia but in reality it shares many characteristics of a dystopia, even long before the civil war.
After this, another entry in the journal describes how ADAM is changing things for the worse. Drastic physical changes are taking place because of the new substance. Josiah’s wife is a victim of the demented Dr. Steinmann, leading Josiah to fall into depression, losing the low paying job that he has and forcing him to move into one of Fontaine’s Poor houses. This further displays the gross inequity of the pure market economics of Rapture.
Next, Josiah informs us how many of his chamber mates have been turned into Splicers, some of which have been used to fight Andrew Ryan’s forces. This is the last entry that Josiah gives us and he goes into great detail explaining how Rapture has torn apart his family. He explains how far Rapture has indeed fallen and where he thinks many of the people in charge had gone wrong. In a society with very few rules, conflict over power is inevitable.
It is important for me to note here that the journal will be presented as individual pieces of paper with perhaps cursive font to make them appear handwritten. Also, included with the entries will be photos of the places talked about.
Tom Stoner
Whitney Soares
English 112
4 April 2013
Diary of Male Citizen in Rapture
My thesis: The principle upon which Rapture was based (that a society can be run with a totally laissez-faire economic system) is seriously flawed and was never a viable concept from the start.
Through this project format, I hope to convey to readers how the theory behind Rapture is a flawed one, and that in practice it is even more egregiously flawed. I hope to use the citizen’s journal as a prime example of how the things that were happening even before the civil war in Rapture were not sustainable and then once the war broke out, how life was changed for the worse.
In this journal, I hope to include daily entries from the citizen showing the inequity in Rapture from the writer’s viewpoint. I will use this, in conjunction with pictures taken by the citizen (in reality they will be screenshots from the game, more than likely taken off the internet). I also have yet to decide whether or not to use a specific character from the game in some kind of periphery role as it pertains to the citizen. If I did, I could possibly use more specific photographs such as individual portraits.
The audience for this work is anyone interested in the game Bioshock. Also, others who might be interested include people who are intrigued by the theory behind the city of Rapture.
A considerable amount of extra research is needed for me to complete this assignment, the majority of which has to do with me exploring what life really would have been like for a citizen of Rapture from the earlier days throughout the civil war. I will need to look more extensively at the Bioshock wiki as well as searching far and wide for usable pictures to include in the diary.
“Haphaestus” – This level leads you to the main power plant of Rapture, which uses geothermal energy to provide power for the city. As I’ve stated in previous posts, the innovation shown in Rapture is truly awe inspiring at times. Jack’s objective is to get into Andrew Ryan’s office. Ryan, however, points out his trophy case (corpses of other would be assassins impaled on pillars) in order to try and intimidate you. Honestly, if it were me in real life, I’d probably just turn around.
“Rapture Control” – The most confusing level of the game so far. I really struggled to understand what this level represented on its own so I went and did some more research out of class. It appears as if Atlas is actually Frank Fontaine and he has Jack hypnotized. That’s definitely a plot twist…
“Olympus Heights” – This level took me a very long time. It’s interesting to see just how rich some of the citizens of Rapture were, but the chaos and everything that was going on caused them to commit suicide.
“Apollo Square” – Here we are exposed to more of Fontaine’s endeavors. He truly is a sadistic man, preying on little girls and the poor to create an army.
The game Bioshock is actually quite disturbing as far as video games go. I am impressed by how intense the game can be at certain points with stunning realism in spite of the fact that the game is so sci-fi based.
“Medical Pavillion” is a particularly disturbing level. The concept that ADAM caused mutations to people in such a way that they wished to have plastic surgery is unsettling. Dr. Steinman is quite insane. His quest for “perfection” when dealing with his patients in reality drives him to distort them more than they were before. ADAM had a pretty terrible effect on him.
“Neptune’s Bounty” is intriguing in that you are made somewhat aware of the smuggling that was going on in Rapture such as Bibles and crucifixes being brought into the city.
In “Smuggler’s Hideout,” we are exposed to the extent of the smuggling that was going on in Rapture. Fontaine’s men had been going topside twice a week to smuggle in illicit items that otherwise couldn’t be found in Rapture.
Personally, “Arcadia” was my favorite level at this point. It was so interesting to see what an underwater green area would look like and the presence of these plants make Rapture seem much more plausible yet surreal at the same time.
The bees in “Farmer’s Market” were particularly obnoxious in my opinion. Aside from that, the concept of a true fresh veggie market in an underwater city as early as 1948 is truly astounding! The unfortunate thing about Bioshock is that Rapture was such a wonderful concept early on.
“Fort Frolic” would have been my favorite place to be in Rapture before everything fell apart. As the entertainment capital of the city, it would have been really neat to see it in proper working order. Every civilization has their own distinct form of art and Rapture is no exception.
Jarvis, Christina. “The Vietnamization of World War II in Slaughterhouse-Five and Gravity’s Rainbow.” War, Literature and the Arts: An
International Journal of the Humanities 15.1 (2003): 95-117. Web. 17 Feb. 2013.
In terms of studying people’s attitudes towards war, this source is quite helpful. It examines the change in thought process involving World War II during the time of the Vietnam War. In that respect, it provides added context to the time period in which the book was written.
Doyle, RC. “Shadows of Slaughterhouse Five: Recollections and Reflections of the American Ex-POWs of Schlachthof Funf, Dresden,
Germany.” Journal of Military History(2010): 290-91. Web. 15 Feb. 2013.
This source provides personal accounts of American POWs that were present at the time of the Dresden bombing and will provide added perspective to that of Kurt Vonnegut, allowing for the most rounded account possible.
My topic for Inquiry 2 is the concept of why people are complacent about war and how we simply accept it as an inevitability.
Singh, Suhkbir. “Time, War and The Baghavad Gita.” N.p., 2010. Web. 15 Feb. 2013.
This source is an examination of Slaughterhouse-Five with the intent of relating it to the title of the journal article. I feel this will be helpful in that it falls directly in line with my topic. The most valuable asset of this source is that it pertains to my topic entirely.
Kunze, Peter C. “For the Boys: Masculinity, Gray Comedy and Vietnam in Slaughterhouse-Five.” Studies in American Humor 3.26 (n.d.):
41-57. Web. 16 Feb. 2013.
This source will help me better identify the places in which Vonnegut is making jokes that I may or may not have picked up on. With that, I will helpfully be able to broaden my available passages for usage in my response to Inquiry 2. The main point of this text, after all, is to analyze the humor of Slaughterhouse-Five.
Chabot, Barry C. “Slaughterhouse-Five and the Comforts of Indifference.” Essays in Literature 1981st ser. 8.1 (n.d.): 45-51. Web. 17 Feb.
2013.
The part I like about this source is the second half of the title. “The Comforts of Indifference” are exactly what I am attempting to write about and this source essentially explains in detail what I am trying to understand about the issues presented in Slaughterhouse-Five. The author of this source is after the same thing that I am, and it will provide added context to my argument.
For class on Monday, we were to have read to page 221 of The Road. I am really beginning to enjoy the book. I’m starting to find myself really engaging with the characters. For example, when the boy and man get to the ocean on page 216, I can really feel the way the man loves the boy. He at first does not want the boy to swim in the ocean, but after the boy assures him he will be fine, the man decides that he actually WANTS him to have this experience. It’s very interesting to see the man toe the line between caring so much for the boy that he must do everything he can to protect him and loving the boy so much that he wants him to have every possible good experience that the post-apocalyptic world can offer.
Also, another interesting note is that even when the man is talking to the boy and you can see the love he has for him, to the boy it must sound very serious still. I feel that the man is trying to keep the boy as strong as possible, not wanting to outwardly show him too much love for fear of coddling him. At the same time, as mentioned above, you can really tell how much he cares for the boy.
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