QUICKSAND

Sinking into Quicksand

Jaclyn K.

Looking for a short but interesting read, I chose Quicksand by Nella Larsen, a novel that tells the story of an outsider struggling against oppression in search of happiness. The description on the back of the book depicts main character Helga Crane as a girl struggling because of her skin color, which made me feel sympathetic for her. However, I lost all of my sympathetic feelings towards Helga once I began reading. The plot is filled with Helga’s constant complaining about people and how they treat her, yet everybody in the book respects her highly. She makes rash decisions to try to escape her “oppression,” yet she is never happy with the results. Helga was an overconfident pessimist, which made me grow frustrated with the book and its themes immediately.

Although I didn’t care for the novel, there were some important themes to be taken away from it. Relating to a central theme in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Quicksand embodies a theme of the difficulty of oppression. Helga faces discrimination for her dark skin, while Frankenstein’s monster faces discrimination for his scary appearance. In my opinion, the theme of oppression was not well executed in Quicksand, but it is still an important take away from the novel. An additional central theme of the novel is the pursuit of happiness. Throughout the novel, Helga does everything she can in order to finally find her happy place in life. However, her ambition is in vain when she finds herself unable to escape oppression. The Bible portrays the struggles of ambition in the story of Adam and Eve and the Tower of Babel, where Adam and Eve are punished for attempting to gain God’s knowledge, and God scatters the languages of the people who arrogantly attempt to build a tower that reaches the heavens. Victor Frankenstein gains a life-ruining monster in his ambition, and Beowulf learns that pride and success can ultimately result in failure. These novels collectively demonstrate that ambition and pursuit of happiness can have negative results.

Hailey G.

In choosing my personal choice book, I was in search of a short and captivating book that would discuss some type of matter or idea that was still relevant today. Upon opening the first page, I was offered a full description of Helga Crane, including personality and behavior. I had originally been enticed with this book, however overall I was disappointed. I found the opening of the book to be rather long and complicated, much like the character. And, although I can empathize for someone enduring some type of hardship, Helga Crane’s pessimistic attitude and temporary happiness made the entire story boring and unengaging. Birthed to a white mother and non attending black father, Helga Crane struggles through her life lost and incomplete. Despised by others and herself for her skin color, Helga believed she was ostracized for whatever community she tried to embrace. As a young woman, she taught at an all -black school in the South, yet where she traveled she felt indifferent to the people around her. Helga’s personality much resembles major themes found within some of the books we have read this semester including Frankenstein, The Bible, Beowulf, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Within each of these books there is some presence of a monster or profound being. Helga Crane does not physically or characteristically appear to resemble a monster, however because she does not fit within the norm on her adventure to an all-white community in Denmark, she can empathize for Victor’s monster, Satan, and Grendel. Overall, the storyline of this book or the main character were not enjoyable but there were some important messages this book was successful in conveying. The most important of these themes was the idea of racism. Racism is the belief that all members of one particular race share the same ideas or characteristics. Quicksand by Nella Larsen, focusses on the very evident racism black members of a predominantly white community are subjected to and the racist beliefs the main character’s friends have about white people in return. Although the world continues to develop, there are some concepts that will always be present regardless of laws that are passed, and unfortunately racism is one of them.