Vague connections between the novels we read

When I like to listen to music I like to listen to full albums rather then individual songs because I like to see how the songs int he album comment on each other or gain no meanings based on the other songs around them. Similarly I like to look for the ways novels in a syllabus comment on each other, especially if they were written in a similar time period. So I’m just going to discuss some random connections I saw throughout the syllabus.
    The theme of the value, or lack thereof, of daily life was big towards the beginning of the year. Baker and Woolf are big on the importance of daily life. Baker emphasizes it by showing how the little things, when taken in isolation, are beautiful. Woolf by showing us that there is true passion and power in the most mundane parts of our lives. After that we get Hemmingway who seems to be the middle ground on the topic. His characters are going through relatively meaningless lives because of the modern condition but occasionally have moments of passion Kafka portrays modern life as a nightmare transforming us into something repugnant and horrible. Camus would seem to be critical of the Baker woolf view on the topic but if we see him as condemning Mersault for viewing life as meaningless then he seems pretty much aligned with them.
    I thought Woolf's caves and Hemingway's icebergs were interesting opposites. Both achieve very developed characters but one does it by explicitly showing the emotion while the other lets it exist implicitly. Masculinity is a theme in a lot of the novels, most prominently in Hemingway but also in Wide Sargaso Sea and Song of Solomon. Rochester’s failing is his pride as well as the fact that he embraces an idea of masculinity that requires him to posses Antoinette. Milkman’s struggle with maturity is linked with masculinity which is always a loaded topic in African American literature. In all cases the characters are struggling to try and figure out how to be a man in places where the conventional definition is inapplicable, or at least unhelpful.