Friday, May 6, 2011

The Sweet Hereafter & Being Wrong

Hello All,

For Monday, find two quotes from the last two chapters of Being Wrong that would apply to the theme of The Sweet Hereafter or the motivation/psychology of one of its characters.

Chapter 14:
Chapter 15:

Enjoy your weekend!

26 comments:

2walstib said...

The character of Nichole from 'The Sweet Hereafter' is a literary realization that "…sometimes we are able to embrace uncertainty and error—and not just in domains where life, limb, and finance demand it, but in the tussle and clamor of everyday life.” (Being Wrong. p.307) The bus accident brought out the realist in Nichole's character.

The theme of 'The Sweet Hereafter' is humanities search for justification and/or explanation of accidents. The town of Sam Dent is personified by Kathryn Schultz' 'Being Wrong', “Michael Foucault once proposed that Quixote represents an extreme version of us all—of “the imaginary relations [man in general] maintains with himself.” […]
These kinds of beneficial self-deceptions can be sweeping and existential in nature—as when we ignore or deny the fact that we have only limited control over the course of our lives, and none at all over the inevitability of death.” (337) Billy Ansel and Nichole are the only people of the town who are not looking for answers as to why the accident happened. The two of them seem to have come to the realization that 'accidents happen' and sometimes there is better explanation.
-L.S. Niederauer

Anonymous said...

In the "Sweet Hereafter" one them would be believing in my story. Mainly in every character with had a different point of view."[Believing the best of ourselves even when we are intimately familiar with the worst and the merely average..."(338)

Billy Ansel had a one of the bigger motivates of all when he left his daughter at the store. " [The] allure of certainty, and the defensiveness and denial we often resort to in the aftermath of our mistakes. And yet, despite of all that, sometimes we are able to embrace uncertainty and error..."(307)

E. Garcia

Anonymous said...

"Is that if you don't acknowledge that mistakes occurred, you'll eliminate the likelihood that they'll occur again." (302)

"Here, then, are some ways we can try to prevent mistakes. We can foster the ability to listen to each otehr and the freedom to speak our minds. We can create open and transparent environments instead of cultures of secrecy and concealment. And we can permit and encourage everyone, not just a powerful inner circle, to speak up when they see the potential for error." (311)

-Sandy Ornelas

Anonymous said...

Chapter 14:
"If you really want to be right (or at least improve the odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them. (Schulz 302)

Chapter 15:
"By the logic of the superiority theory, error makes us laugh because they make their perpetrators look foolish, and thereby make us look better." (Schulz 322)

- C. Buccat

Anonymous said...

Chapter 14:
“[…] if you want to try to eradicate error, you have to start by assuming that it is inevitable.” (Schulz 302)

Chapter 15:
“And they understand, all too acutely, the basic conditions of existence: that their lifespan is just a brief blip in the cold sweep of history, that suffering is real and ongoing, that they and all the people they love are going to die. That outlook is known as depressive realism.” (Schulz 336)

-Jessica Gonzalez

Anonymous said...

Chapter 14:
“In love, as in medicine, as in life more generally, listening is an act of humility. It says that other people’s ideas are interesting and important; that our own could be in error; that there is still plenty left for us to learn.”(pg.311)

Chapter 15:
“Our mistakes, when we face up to them, show us both the world and the self from previously unseen angels, and remind us to care about perspectives other than our own.”(pg.332)

Gabriel Becerra

Anonymous said...

Chapter 14
"To get a sense of what this means, consider that a company that a company that ships 300,000 packages per year with a 99 percent success rate sends 3,000 packages to the wrong place. If that same company achieved Six Sigma, only a single package would go astry" (303 Schuls) This goes good with Mitchell Stevens becuase of how he wanted to get perfectly what happened in the incident and also wanting to get to the person who was the cause of the accident and try to get the most of the money to the people.
Chapter 15
"False beliefs might be in essence of error, but they are also one of the most popular and effective of comic plot drivers, from Tartuffe(possibly the funniest comedy manners of all time Tootsie(possibly the funniest romantic comedy of all time)."(324 Schulz)It gives good about Nicole Burnell on how she lies about how fast Delores was actually driving the bus.
- Raul Mendoza

Anonymous said...

-Irene Hernandez

"Is that if you don't acknowledge that mistakes occurred, you'll eliminate the likelihood that they'll occur again." (302)

“Our mistakes, when we face up to them, show us both the world and the self from previously unseen angels, and remind us to care about perspectives other than our own.”(pg.332)

Anonymous said...

“Levy’s principle can be generalized. If you really want to be right (or at least improve the odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledge what caused you to make them.” (302)
-The lawyer, Mitchell Stephens, applies the form of thinking into his profession; except he is determined to acknowledge the mistakes of others.
“As we’ll see in a moment, wrongness and comedy are entwined at the roots.” (321)
-Billy Ansel developed a drinking habit when his wife passed away, but when his children died that drinking habit became more severe; the final chapter reflects him as a drunk constantly laughing. It was a form of brushing the pain off, by laughing it off.

-Stephanie Santos

Anonymous said...

Chapter 14

- "Relying on hard data, committing to open and democratic communication, acknowledging fallibility: these are the central tenets of any system that aims to protect us from error" (Schulz 306)

Chapter 15

- "The fact that art is inherently an inaccurate representation of reality has long been a philosophical objection to the whole enterprise" (Schulz 326)

--Brian Escalante

Anonymous said...

Chapter 14
"open our culture to ideas from everyone, everywhere, decimated the bureaucracy and made boundary less behavior a reflexive, natural part of our culture."(305)



Chapter 15
" To see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying" (336)

Roberto Picos

Anonymous said...

"But there is no good side to medical error. If, like this patient, you someday wake up in a hospital to discover that a surgeon has operated on the wrong part of your body, you will not pause and reflect on all the ways you can learn and grow through error." (Schulz 300)This quote would evoke the psychology of Nichole Burnell, who would never forgive Dolores for the accident and holding her as responsible for the accident. An analogy can be made from Schulz's quote, o argue that regardless of how one chooses to look at the reason for the accident, what's done is done and no one would bring the kids back to life, or take away the pain of the families and all those who are suffering from that tragedy.
"Our mistakes, when we face up to them, show us both the world and the self from previously unseen angles, and remind us to care about perspectives other than our own." (Pge 332)Here we see how the acknowledgment of one's mistakes can make one look at certain problems from a different angle, which can be a plus and help growing. Dolores for example, realized that 22 years and driving the bus didn't prevent her from getting into an accident, and that there are certain things that are just out of her control.

Ivan Matip

Christina Cecil said...

In the book "The Sweet Hereafter" the character Mitchell Stephens believes there is
no such thing as an accident therefore the quote "They try to imagine every possible
reason a mistake could occur, they prevent as many of them as possible, and they conduct
exhaustive postmortems on the ones that slip thought." (Being Wrong. Pg. 302) this quote
shows how Mitchell Stephens thinks in regards to the accident.

"These kinds of beneficial self-deceptions can be sweeping and existential in nature---
as when we ignore or deny the fact that we have only limited control over the course of
our lives, and none at all over the inevitability of death.(Being Wrong. Pg. 337) this
quote is true for the people in the book "The Sweet Hereafter" they all try to either
come up with an explanation as to why the accident happened, try to find someone to blame
for the accident or simply believe that they know that something bad like the accident
was going to happen.

Anonymous said...

Chapter 14:" They try to imagine every possible reason a mistake could occur, they prevent as many of them as possible" (302). The lawyer is the one who mainly tries to get rid of the mistake by telling others they they may be right or that he agrees with them.
Chapter 15: "In this sense all wrongness is optimism"(338). Dolores feels that she is right and that she didn't do anything wrong. Therefore, she takes the mistake that she "committed" and took it as optimistic to start her life over.


-Erika Perez

Anonymous said...

"Relying on hard data, committing to open and democratic communication, acknowledging fallibility: aims to protect us from error." pg 306

"We can foster the ability to listen to each other and the freedom to speak our minds."Pg311 this can relate to the girl in the weal chair who spoke her mind in court about what happen at the accident, and prevent the whole town from making a mistake.
--V Nard

Anonymous said...

In Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz states, "They learn how to talk about unanticipated outcomes until a 'mistake' morphs into a 'complication'(300). This qoute applies to every character in the novel The Sweet Hereafter because the mistake of the accident is turning the characters and the town into a huge complication on why the accident occured.

Also, Kathryn Schulz states in Being Wrong that "Could reality come into direct contact with sense and consciousness" (326). This qoute in Being Wrong applies to the character Nichole from The Sweet Hereafter because the reality is that an accident happened and it affected her life indefinetly by paralyzing her, and it is coming into contact with her senses.

- G. McDaniel

Anonymous said...

Dominica Martinez

Ch.14:

"…listening is one of the best ways we can make room in our lives for our own fallibility" (309). This quote relates to the Nichole Burnell in the novel 'The Sweet Hereafter', when she avoids Billy Ansel when he comes to visit her family. She listens to his word from her room and realizes that she was the right about the law suits, and how they were wrong. So Nichole decides to fix the problem, and she lies about Dolores Driscoll driving over the speed limit making the accident Dolores fault and ending all law suits.

Ch. 15:

“Our capacity to err is inseparable from our imagination” (328). This relates to Dolores Driscall and Billy Ansel in the novel 'The Sweet Hereafter'. When Dolores thinks she sees a dog in the middle of the road and drives off the road to miss the dog could have been her imagination, therefore causing her to err. This also relates to Billy when he leaves his daughter at the store when they were in Jamaica. Billy imagined or thought that his daughter was in the car, but she was not so they drove back to the store to get her. His err was leaving his daughter in the store, and thinking that she was in the car the whole drive home.

Anonymous said...

In "The Sweet Hereafter," Nichole does not tell the truth about the accident. "Needless to say, this uncommon reaction didn't come out of nowhere" (Schulz 301).

Dolores Driscoll didn't know exactly what she saw when she was driving the bud; it was "most notably in the form of optical illusions" (Schulz 324)

-Khulood Hussin

Anonymous said...

“Error, it would seem, is always one step ahead of us (Schulz 316).”

This quote from “Being Wrong” applies to the story in all, because nobody in the town Sam Dent knew whom to blame for the terrible bus accident that killed most of the town’s children. The story describes Dolores Driscoll as a positive person who would act like a negative person; she would check her bus constantly assuring that everything was in place, but no matter the precautions described could prevent an accident of such magnitude.

“[…] at the difficulty of recognizing the limits of our knowledge , the allure of certainty, and the defensiveness and denial we often resort to in the aftermath of our mistakes (Schulz 307).”
This quote applies to the entire towns people of Sam Dent after the accident. Many of the people after the terrible bus accident turned into living dead, the denial that it was an accident began to grow and they did not know who to blame for it, and they did not want to recognize that, and they blindly wanted to sue anything that they could blame. Their world as they knew it turned into uncertainty and defensiveness against each other.
--Maria Bravo

Anonymous said...

Chapter 14:"Jettison those techniques, leave us to our own devices, and--as we have seen--we will unreflectively assume that we are right and will investigate for error only after something has gone patently awry"(Schulz 306).


Chapter 15:"For us human organisms, with our richer relationship to wrongness, mistakes enable not only our biological evolution but our social, emotional, and intellectual evolution as well" (Schulz 336).

--S. Morales

Anonymous said...

Chapter 14

"Open our culture to ideas from everyone, everywhere, decimated the bureaucracy and made boundary less behavior a reflexive, natural part of our culture"(305).

Chapter 15

“Our mistakes, when we face up to them, show us both the world and the self from previously unseen angels, and remind us to care about perspectives other than our own”(332).

- Brian garcia

Anonymous said...

Chapter 14
"The truth has long been recognized in domains where being right is not just a zingy little ego boost but a matter of real urgency..." (Schulz 302)
-This quote relates to the lawyer, Stephens, because with his knowledge, grows his ego.
Chapter 15
"...We must also keep humbling into the gap between the world as we think it is and the world as it turns out to be..." (Schulz 325)
-This quote relates to Billy Ansel's issue with alcoholism. Since he lost his family, he is stuck in his own misery and tucked away from society since he is too afraid to face the inevitable.

-Leticia Orozco

Anonymous said...

Chapter 14
"By contrast, when we are aware that we could be wrong, we are far more inclined to hear other people out." (310).
Chapter 15
"Through error-as through the best works of art-we both lose and find ourselves." (332).

-G.Solano

N. Iniguez said...

Chapter 15:
"Through error-as through the best works of art-we both lose and find ourselves."(Schulz pg.332)

Chapter 14:
"We can foster the ability to listen to each other and the freedom to speak our minds. we can create open and transparent environments instead of cultures of secrecy and concealment. And we can permit and encourage everyone, not just a powerful inner circle, to speak up when they see the potential for error." (Schulz pg.311)

Anonymous said...

Chapter 14:"Listening only in order to contadict, argue, and accuse" (311). This is basicaly what Mitchell is about. He takes is job to a whole new leve tring to win his cases at all costs.

Chapter 15:"Our desire to be right, as ego-driven as it often seams, is essentially a desire to take ourselves out of the picture" (333). This reflect Billy. For the beinging Billy strived to be left out of the conflect to be left alone. Billy did not want anything to do with the case his fellow towns men were making.

-Gladys Mayra Delgado

Anonymous said...

chapter 15
"people who are depressed tend to perceive the harsher realities of life more clearly, and people who clearly perceive those harsh realities tend to be (or to get) depressed." (337)this applies to Billy Ansel and how he becomes depressed due to his new reality of having lost the most important people in his life.

chapter 14
"Paying attention to error pay"(307)
As is the case with Mirchell Stephens trying to look for errors that caused the accident so he can sue.

-R. Duran