Post 6 Book 3 Listicle

 For my Listicle I am going to talk about an observation I've made throughout the book Donnie Brasco. Throughout the book lots of things happen, but one reoccurrence that you see is that the main character, Joe Pistone (he is under cover in the Mafia, Donnie Brasco is a fake name), never gets too involved, meaning he never does drugs, kills anyone, or does anything illegal. He doesn't even lie about doing bad stuff. The question is why?

 1. The FBI won't let him. Joe Pistone is an undercover FBI agent, but he is kind of a guinea pig. He is the first FBI agent to get really deep into the Mafia, so there are no set rules for what he can and can't do. When the FBI realizes this, they put him on lockdown: no murders, drugs, anything illegal, otherwise they don't help him if he's caught. So "Donnie" has to watch what he's doing during his 6 years as a Mafia member.

 2. He won't. Throughout the book, you begin to see Pistone portrayed as the Mafia member with a set of morals, and those are pretty rare. When offered cocaine, he has to refuse, or the FBI would have to end his operation and question him. But also, he is very against drugs. The other Mafiosi offer to take him on "hits", or assassinations, but he would be tried for murder, or caught by them for trying to stop it. During the book he thinks to himself, "If a hit is going down and I'm on the scene, do I risk trying to stop it and maybe getting killed myself "(Woodley 139)?

 3. It snowballs. If Pistone does drugs or kills someone once, who's to say he won't do it again? Pistone thinks that if he even lies about having killed or done drugs this will make the Mafia think that he's game for more killing and drug-doing. Over time a simple lie could lead to Joe having to choose between killing an innocent civilian or blowing his cover.

 4. He has a family to think about. Having a wife and 3 daughters can really complicate being an FBI agent. Especially if you are spending next to no time with them because of being undercover. "Nobody wanted to stand in the way of the work I was doing, but neither did anybody really know what I was doing"(Woodley 147). This shows that his family doesn't want to distract Joe from what he is doing, but at the same time they want to know what he is getting into. By not staying on the really dark side of the Mafia Joe is helping his family cope by them knowing that he isn't is serious business.

 5. His status in court is at stake. The point of the operation is to get operation about Mafia activities and indict them to send the Mafia members to jail. it is Joe's job to testify against them after the operation. He won't be a very trust worthy witness if he was involved in the same illegal activities as the Mafia members he is trying to throw into jail.

 All in all, there are several reasons Pistone stays away from illegal activities in Donnie Brasco. There are probably way more than I gave, but the 5 I offered are the main 5 reasons I could find.

Post 5: My thoughts on Genres

When talking about books, we often think of one thing: genre. But sometimes the question arises; Do we really need genre. Are all the rules separating different themes and styles of writing really necessary? Or can we just let stories be stories with no bounds or limits?

 The author David Shields asks do we need lines between genres—do we need to label something fiction or non-fiction? I think he has an excellent point. When we talk about a book, we talk about it's content, as in the characters, the plot, the settings and descriptions. Often, the genre is not needed. But at the same time, we can't just lump together everything from an instruction manual to the Bible to Harry Potter into one category: books. We need some form of line drawn in to keep our books categorized and organized.

 To argue for genres, however, is history. Since humanity started keeping books, we've organized them. From giant libraries to small collections, stored books have been categorized by their length, plot, author, ect. But the important thing is keeping books separated. Without genre and other boundaries we would have a giant blob of anything written called literature. So in the end, we need genre. It helps to stabilize literature and knowledge, and therefore us.