The Cubs had this really annoying narrating style.  It took me a couple paragraphs to figure out that it was a group of people talking, all at once.  Still it seemed cruel to put hardly any punctuation in the story at all.  I realized later that the lack of punctuation gives the story a more accurate feeling of what it would be like to be talking to the group as they tell their story.  In the end, I chose to write my paper on that topic. 

For my paper, I focused on the grammatical because I am still not comfortable dealing with the different interpretations, especially when the author says that it had no symbolism in it.  I did try to look below the “surface meaning”. 

I started with the thought that when penises are involved, it is hard not to psychoanalyze.  The psychoanalysis would make it easy to explain that the author did not even realize that he was using symbolism.  But I could not find anything else in the novel to discuss on that idea.

I tried looking to history.  Perhaps Cuellar could represent Latin America losing its global power, and in the end petering out to global non-importance.  But I found nothing to go with that either.

In frustration, I thought that there is always some connection to Christ, right?  I found that the dog’s name was Judas, and there is not much more betraying of a boy in Latin American society than biting off his thing.  Cuellar does kind of walk on water when he surfs on the water that is deadly.  And he did die at a young age.  But, none of this shows me anything, so I dropped it.

As I have thought many times before class, I am quite currious to see what other people understood out of the story that I did not. 

I found it most weird how most of the poem has punctuaion, but there are times when all punctuation is left out, most notably on page 12-13. 

I did note some interesting ways to define himself in that area that is not definable.  That area that post-colonialist talk about that is not self, and not other.  I liked the picture that I got when he says that he includes himself between latitude and longitude.  I saw that as saying that he is not definable using the standards that we know today.

I did not follow the discussion about which English word best matched the ideas put forward by the French words for black.  I understand that languages are not going to match up word for word, or even thought for thought.  What seemed weird to me was the words that they did choose.  But maybe that is because I am not familiar with all the denotations and conotations of the words in my own language.  I was just surprised that negritude was choosen as a derogatory