Difficulty Paper

I enjoyed reading In Dubious Battle. It’s a book about Farm Workers and their struggle to attain a better life. The book is a bit hard to understand because its timeframe is quite different from ours. Most of the books that are available today are, in most cases, related to technology, economy, health and politics because today's people have special interest on these subjects, and I think that is why authors have chosen to stay on the same subjects. Thus, it becomes hard a person like me to fathom the subject of a book that was written about 75 years ago, especially when the book's subject had to do with farm workers. I found it difficult to grasp what the book is narrating, which may have happened during that particular time when the book was in a writing process or even before that. Even though the author of the book tries his best to give a vivid description on every iota of the book’s content, but then it was had for me to get a clear picture of how life was during that time, and the sort of oppressions the Farm Workers had to face and how they fight against this injustice. It was the first time I read a book on Farm Workers and their struggle, so the subject was new to me and this is were my confusion stems from. Fortunately, reading and exploring the UFW website eases  a bit on my understanding of the book because that website itself is related to a current event and how the Farm Worker are still suffering on the hands of some farm owners. 

Another aspect of the book that I found it hard was the language of the book, especially that of the characters. As we know languages evolve with time just like everything else. In Dubious Battle, there are too many slogans that the characters used in their conversations at different times. For example, one of the conversations that I struggled in their meaning was a talk between Jim and an old man called Dan. He, Dan, appeared to be an aggressive person, and he said to Jim, “I was in the north woods when the Wobblies was raising hell.” Dan continues to brag himself and said to Jim, “I’m a top-faller” (52). To understand the Wobblies and what sort of “hell” they were raising, I scrutinized the conversation between Jim and Dan by reading and re-reading slowly and carefully. It seems to me Dan is referring to a well-organized group who changed some difficulties. I also thought the “raising hell” that Dan was talking about had to do with a successful strike made by the Wobblies in which they have regained some of the rights the group felt was missing. There are several passages in the book like this, and any passage that I couldn't comprehend, I had to read and re-read it several times so as to make sense out of it because that usually the closest and best solution one could get.