Alcatraz vs San Francisco
Kirin Shannon
Alcatraz, a prison within the city of San Francisco. San Francisco is a city on the coast of California and home to approximately 809,000 people. The common perception of the city of San Francisco is that the city compared to other large American cities is weird or unusual. Although a defining weird is no easy task San Francisco could certainly be known as a different kind of city compared to other large American cities. The entire city is filled with the last permanent operational cable car system in the world. Not only the image of San Francisco it makes navigating the continuous hills throughout the city a little easier. A large variety of houses from Victorian to new age style litter the giant slopes of this fair city. With a city that isn't quite like the others it became the perfect place for a prison that wasn't quite like the others.
In 1934 Alcatraz became a federal prison but a few things made it unique compared to its counterparts. It was located upon an island within San Francisco causing its eventual closure after 29 years as the price to transport the goods over the water was too high.
In our novel Little Brother by Cory Doctorow an alternate version of our current reality is shown. Within this reality one of the most prominent differences is how under such heavily surveillance the people in the U.S.A. are. After a large scale terror attack upon San Francisco the government re establishes a secret army prison within Alcatraz. Through the experiences of the main character I believe that he now feels imprisoned always.
Within his school are cameras everywhere. His every move tracked but now after he has seen what the government did to him within Alcatraz the imprisonment has spread. Now because he is a "marked target" his keyboard is tapped and a constant surveillance of him is sure. Through these changes between Alcatraz in 1934, now, and his beloved city San Francisco he feels safe nowhere. All of San Francisco had become a prison.
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ReplyDeleteI appreciate the fact that you gave a "not-too-brief-but-still-brief" description of both, Alcatraz and San Francisco, rather than jumpingright into comparing them and identifying their importance in the story. I summative description is always helpful in undertanding the reasoning behind comparisons without going into unrequired detail. What I would've, however, paid closer attention to is thw wording or the grammar and sentence structure. Its flow seemed uneasy and awkward while reading. The lack of proper sentence structure can dramatically lower the impact of its context's quality. It was, nonetheless, quite informative in a to-the-point sense, and I enjoyed reading it.
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