Geoff- Post 1 (pgs. 1-49)

I'd like to open up with this quote: "If this didn't work, then he knew he would die. He let himself go limp; he did not brace himself against the nausea. He didn't care any more if it came; he didn't care any more if he died." (39). So far, I'm really not liking this dude. I understand he was a part of the Bataan Death March, and he watched his cousin Rocky die, but I can't stand people that are sullen about life. I would hope that being a survivor would be evidence of Tayo's strength of character, that his love of life was carrying him through it all. But no; it seems Tayo survived the Death March because of dumb luck. Tayo's defining character trait is apathy; he's an emotionless shell of a man. I wish this kid would get excited about life; isn't surviving a brutal war something to be happy about? Yes, the author intends for the war to be life-changing, dramatic experience, but shouldn't that change the character for the better? Aren't people at their best only after hardship? (Remember Elie Wiesel, who became a writer and a humanitarian after the Holocaust?) There's my little rant; I hope this kid has a serious paradigm shift by the end of story, because this sob story is killing my enthusiasm for life (or just making me a little angry as I type). Whew.
On a different note, has anybody actually figured out the correct sequence of events? Because, for the longest time, I was thinking that the donkey ride to the bar was in the present. The randomly dispersed poems aren't really helping that.
Finally, I think the most telling part of the novel so far has been the bar scene, when everybody's plastered and Tayo's true colors show. This is the first real demonstration of cultural conflict in the novel, when Tayo starts railing on white people and how things were better during the war. If a theme of the novel is Laguna/Caucasian cultural conflict, I'd predict Tayo will find some sort of reconciliation between these elements so he can lead a normal life. Just a head's up, Laguna is not the native name of the Indians; they call themselves Kawaik. Laguna is of course, Spanish; it refers to a lake on Laguna land. They're a tribe of the Pueblo Indians, so, traditionally, they lived in those adobe houses.