Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Nervous Conditions

          One of the parts in the story that interest me is the part in chapter 2, when Mr. Matimba took her to sell her green maize to the white people.  He felt since white people had more money they would spend more on her maize then black people.  When they tried to sell the maize the white people got mad at him.  They thought he was making her sell the maize like she was in slavery.  The white woman named, Doris actually called herself telling him off.  She eventually gave Mr. Matimba money for her fee's but it still was after her assumptions.
          This part was interesting to me because all people make assumptions without knowing the truth.  Just like Matimba assumed that white people would pay more because they can afford to be generous. We as people look at people and assume certain things.  Like for example, some people may assume that just because a person dresses a certain way they either assume you don't have any money because your not dressed how they think you should dress with having money.  Or assume you have money because you dress nice and drive a nice, new car.
          One year, when I used to work at Petermann bus company, it was this man that rode a bike to work everyday and he wore dirty clothes.  We all use to look at him and say," why they hire someone like him".  We also thought he didn't have a car because he rode a bike to work everyday.  Well, the truth was he had a car, in fact, he was a very wealthy man.  He was just driving buses to have something to do.  We all assumed that because of the way he looked he was poor.  When you make assumptions most of the time you assume wrong.
          Mr. Matimba didn't think Doris would act the way she reacted at first.  He assumed, (before she turned out to be), that she should be generous because she could afford to.  She wasn't generous until after he explained everything.
          Overall, I don't think I would read this story again.  It is kind of boring.  I had a hard time reading the story.  I can say some parts do interest me though, like the part I just mentioned. 

1 comment:

  1. You make a great point about assumptions: this is called "fundamental attribution error" in psychology. A person makes judgements based on a misunderstanding of a situation. I'm glad you were able to find a part of the novel that was interesting. It is true that at times, the text is a hard slog. When you do your movie reviews, when you find a hard section, it is equally interesting to your reader to hear about why you did not like something in equal detail to how you did like something. Remember to include that detail in your movie reviews that are coming up.

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