Having my entire family from Poland has no doubt influenced my deep interest in Poland’s history and my love of the culture and language. After reading about Naomi Klein’s pessimistic views on Poland’s economic transition after 1989 in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, I drew a connection to the dreary imagery of Warsaw around this time as portrayed in Andrzej Stasiuk’s novel Nine. I agreed with Klein’s assertions that Poland’s transition from a controlled to a market economy was mishandled, thus making the daily lives of Poles more difficult. I set about to support this with Stasiuk’s gloomy descriptions of Warsaw’s landscape in Nine, which I felt illustrated the struggle of many at the time.
What I found most difficult about writing this paper was its organization. I found that making several outlines before writing helped me organize the paper and see what information to include in each paragraph. However, formulating my argument and addressing it properly was time consuming and took several drafts to properly complete.
Comments from students and my professor helped me notice flaws in my argument in addition to giving me helpful suggestions on how to improve my paper. After reading my first draft, students said that I should add more of Klein’s statistics to the paper to strengthen my argument, as it is her statistics and facts that I am agreeing with. One student also pointed out that I should expand upon the references to cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol in Stasiuk’s Nine. The feedback I received from both students and my professor was especially beneficial to my writing process as it helped me strengthen my paper and improve on weak areas in my writing.
Though I am pleased with the final draft of this assignment, I think that it would be stronger if I used more examples from both books. I feel that my thesis would be better supported if I added more of Klein’s assertions and statistics about the difficulty of daily life in Poland in the wake of its economic transition. In addition, I would perhaps add more interpretations of the descriptions of Warsaw in Stasiuk’s Nine.
GABRIELLE MIGDALSKI is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is unsure of what major to pursue but is interested in computer science, languages, and history. This essay was written for Jura Avizienis’s course, WR 150: Entering Europe.