Maggot Moon Reaction Piece Frick, freaking frack.
This book was tough. Disturbing. I really hated it. Well, maybe I just hated what happened to its characters. And how unlikely it seemed that anything good would ever happen to Standish. Standish narrates the book, which creates an odd, fragmented storyline in which the reader is introduced to concepts a little out of order… often out of focus and a little scrambled… just like words would be to a dyslexic mind. Pretty smart of Gardner, really. Standish Treadwell has one blue eye and one brown eye. Hector is gone. Raspberries helped them become friends. When Hector was here, Standish wasn’t bullied, but now he is. Mr. Lush is a scientist who was banished to Zone 7 when he refused to do something the Motherland wanted him to. Even the teachers bully. His mother and father are gone. The moon is in the basement. Grandfather shoots rats. Hector and Standish built a toy rocket ship in the attic and dream of croca-colas and ice-cream-colored Cadillac’s. Standish figures out the secret. He comes up with a plan. Standish lives in the Motherland, in Zone 7. He goes to school, lives in fear, and keeps secrets. This is a dystopian book. The motherland is obsessed with creating a pure race and keeping its citizens and its enemies convinced of its supremacy. Imagine Nazi Germany (the wall helps build this image) but it seems to be set in England (the fish and chips and the zones give that away). There are greenflies (the police), obstructers (rebels), and mothers and sons of purity (sheep). It’s really hard to talk about how I felt about this book without giving away the ending. When everyone who wants to read it has done so, we are definitely going to dissect it further. For now, I want to focus on the illustrations in Maggot Moon. The illustrations in Maggot Moon start appearing on page 31 of the book. The first illustration is a hole in the wall. A rat’s hole. Over the next 80 pages or so, the rat appears and disappears, as if investigating his surroundings. Around page 100, he finds a bottle, which a few pages later, turns out to be poison. The rat tips over the bottle, and drinks the poison. Dead rat. Around page 150, a fly appears. The fly lays eggs in the dead rat’s mouth. Over and over again (172). The eggs are spilling out of the rat’s mouth. The rat’s belly swells (196). Maggots come out of the rat. The maggots get bigger (200). One maggot takes center stage. It hatches. It flies away. Gross… but symbolic. The rat is a person who rebels. It’s someone who knows it’s dangerous to go poking around for the truth, but who has to do it anyway because he can’t be a sheep. By the time he’s located the poison, it’s too late. He knows it’s poison. He knows it will kill him, but he has to drink it anyway. He has to hope that his death will reveal the greenflies for who they really are and show the maggots on the moon to the other rats… Maybe that’s not a correct interpretation. What did you think? The reader KNOWS what’s going to happen to the rat. She knows what the fly will do. She knows that there is no hope for the rat. Maybe this is why the images bothered me so much. I knew what was going to happen to Standish. I could tell. I saw it coming from a long way off and there wasn’t a frick-fracking thing I could do about it. In response to Maggot Moon, I drew a two-faced moon. One side shows Standish hanging from above, holding on to a fake moon. The entire picture is made up of words rather than lines. The words on this side of the mood are words that reflect the world as the sheep see it. (Motherland, supreme race, moon landing, mothers of purity, trust, reeducation, etc.) The other side of the moon is the world as Standish sees it and everything that the greenflies are trying to hide: hoax, machine guns, over-boiled cabbage, cigarettes, maggots, rats, sheep, holes in your heart and head. A maggot from the true side digs through society’s false façade to show that the truth will come out eventually.
3 Comments
jhou6
6/1/2014 06:46:00 pm
Hi Jill, I was deeply impressed on your clear illustration of the Maggot Moon, which would be a very good reading guide for new readers of this book! I also like your ideas of the two-facet pictures which helped me understand the story atmosphere. You showed your great empathy oh what happened on Standish and you are so nice to share your feeling with us!
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6/3/2014 07:59:12 am
I love this genre-modal blurring! Using the text to create the image reminds me of found poetry. This has to be something that your more visually-inclined students would be drawn to. In fact, there's a lot of the comic-graphic novel visual appeal to this art form. You should consider creating a Tumblr to show it off well. Hmmm Tumblr nothing. You need your own domain! See http://werd.io/2014/how-were-on-the-verge-of-an-amazing-new-open I could see this becoming a real source of inspiration for your students and you could feature "guest student bloggers."
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Bethany
6/4/2014 08:19:54 am
I really love this visual you created! I especially love that you used hoax and that it's in a different color than the rest of the text. I know the "hoax" reference isn't until the end of the novel, but it was such a powerful moment. I think you captured Standish and his voice well, especially with the flipped letters! Overall just visually interesting and eye-catching.
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