... play in the reduction of isolation and alienation in a character's life. Early in the story, the narrator reveals his own creativity. He imaginatively describes his wife's employment with the blind man, his wife's attempted suicide, even the relationship between Robert and Beulah, Robert's wife. However, although imaginative, this monologue is only shared with the reader, not with the other characters ... asks the narrator to employ his creativity and imagination in drawing a cathedral. By complying with Robert's wishes, the narrator finds himself in physical, intellectual, and emotiona...

• Word Count: 11148
• Approx Pages: 45
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... worker. He married a year after finishing high school and maintained his wife and two children by working as a janitor, gas-station attendant, and delivery man. He became extremely concerned in a writing career after having a creative-writing course at Chico State College (now California State University, Chico) in 1958 ... blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to." (Carver's Cathedral). Carver's choice of first-person point of view for ...

• Word Count: 3978
• Approx Pages: 16
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... in which little actually 'happens'" to the protagonists, which means that almost all of the substance emerges from the vague dialogue between the man and the girl, Jig (Link 3). In short stories, language is particularly notable because the decision to include each word is likely scrutinized by the ... quot; allowing for other possible "white elephants" to exist in the story (Link 4). Scholars have suggested the white elephant may be the man himself, or the couple's relationship or the costly act of getting an abortion (Link 4). Examining the relationship of the couple reveals that t...

• Word Count: 3072
• Approx Pages: 12
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... leaves home (i.e. the secure place of childhood), is confronted with new situations, places and people on his journey and returns back home as a `new man′ himself, in a more mature state of mind (Freese 89). 2.2.3 The aspect of effect in stories of initiation Marcus suggests another classification of ... Nick [...] is out on his own for the first time" (Young 99), although in this case the protagonist does not return home as a changed man. Furthermore, the story deals with the motif of "promise given and the promise withdrawn" (DeFalco 71) which implies the loss of security in NickR...

• Word Count: 5305
• Approx Pages: 21
• Grade Level: High School

... of domestic violence and guilt, however this story does not deal with calculated murder. The reader is told that the narrator appears to be a happily married man, who has always been exceedingly kind and gentle. The disturbed speaker attributes his downfall to the "Fiend Intemperance" (p.12) and "the spirit of perverseness." ... contrary to his own belief. As the narrator begins to depict his story in the form of a rather subtle flashback, the reader discovers that the man's personality has undergone a drastic transformation, which he attributes to his abuse of alcohol and the perverse ...

• Word Count: 4324
• Approx Pages: 17
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... went squirrel hunting and we had stopped at a gas station along the way. I walked into the gas station. There standing behind the counter was an old weathered man with thick glasses and an unkempt looking cat. I walk up to this battered looking fridge and grabbed a blue Gatorade and a can of snuff. I put it ... neighbor treats him as an equal. He can't stand that his neighbor treats him like an equal when he should be the superior because he is a white man and his neighbor is of color. O'Connor uses language throughout her stories that a reader almost cringes in present day hearing, like ...

• Word Count: 2519
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... suppose to be. "Young Goodman Brown" is a short story that demonstrates hypocrisy in a different way than The Scarlet Letter. In "Young Goodman Brown," a man has an experience that he is not sure is reality or a dream. He engages in a witch festival in the middle of the night and sees many ... besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom. (Hawthorne 112) So, because of the young man's hypocrisy, he was very unhappy. He revolved his whole life around the sins of his peers and never treated them the same way, but apparently forg...

• Word Count: 3188
• Approx Pages: 13
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... women in later novels. Dot is a Southern illiterate girl who is stupid, earthy, uneducated, too easy to get in bed and horribly in love with her man. Anthony is broke, drunk, and is returning home from the war. Book three portrays Gloria and Anthony who have totally lost their youth, their dreams, and ... counter." "If he did not marry her his life would be a feeble parody on his own adolescence." (p. ll9). Fitzgerald creates Anthony to be a dreamer, a man trapped in his illusions of what he hoped life would be like. He is one in a long line of dreamers to follow in the next five novels...

• Word Count: 2828
• Approx Pages: 11
• Grade Level: High School

... the Thomaston Penitentiary in present day America; the exact geographic location of the setting, however, remains unknown. The text, which is told in a first person narrative, essentially revolves around a young man who, due to a minor drug offence, suffers the hardships of imprisonment in an American correctional facility. The protagonist is throughout the tale addressed only by his surname, Caine. Caine seems ... as a reaction to a disciplinary offense; this is also the case with Caine. Caine was according to the text put in the hole subsequent to a verbal row with Strazinsky, the man ...

• Word Count: 2809
• Approx Pages: 11
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... searches for identity and light. Without these elements, he lacks love and cannot survive the world. A passage in chapter three describes him as a lonely man that is isolated from the world around him. "Clara and Ambrose and Alice and Temelcoff and Cato- this cluster made up a drama without him. ... And he himself was noting but a prism that refracted their lives. He searched out things, he collected things. He was an abashed man, an inheritance from his father. Born in Abashed, Ontario. What did the word mean? Something that suggested there was a terrible horizon in him beyond ... This...

• Word Count: 3985
• Approx Pages: 16
• Grade Level: High School

... et cetura' expresses the superficiality of her words as does her false joy. It is not until after the conversation we witness the impact this man has had on the mother. The women feeds her baby whilst staring at her feet indicating she feels more depressed and rejected than at the ... this dialogue is also crucial the quotes to feign indifference to that casual nod' and "too late- indicates the mother is embarrassed to let this man see how she has transformed. Later, when the women comprehends she has been destroyed by the strains of motherhood and has been left lonely, enslaved and ......

• Word Count: 2540
• Approx Pages: 10
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... his development as a child in that he was unsocial, terribly shy, and had difficulty communicating and expressing his feelings. In the novel There are no Elders, we are introduced to a man, the narrator, and his friend named John who unite after fifty years literally bumping in to each other on the street. The two friends both left their families and country ... countries they were never able to find true love and happiness as they had on the island. The following quote is an example of this point. "We leave the cradle, man, and our mothers feed us Cream of Wheat to make us men and we h...

• Word Count: 2760
• Approx Pages: 11
• Grade Level: High School

... . Yet buried in this unpretentious narrative approach and unassuming prose style there appear surprising passages, such as this one in "Lend Me Your Light" that captures in striking terms a young man's reaction to Bombay on his return from North America: As if enacting a scene for my benefit with all the subtlety of a sixteenth-century morality play, a crowd clawed its way into ... balance the conflicting forces: that is, the outside world and the inner sphere. Outside is rotten to the core, he confirms over and again, and will corrupt the most decent man, even a man like Gustad Noble. D...

• Word Count: 4673
• Approx Pages: 19
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... . Yet buried in this unpretentious narrative approach and unassuming prose style there appear surprising passages, such as this one in "Lend Me Your Light" that captures in striking terms a young man's reaction to Bombay on his return from North America: As if enacting a scene for my benefit with all the subtlety of a sixteenth-century morality play, a crowd clawed its way into ... balance the conflicting forces: that is, the outside world and the inner sphere. Outside is rotten to the core, he confirms over and again, and will corrupt the most decent man, even a man like Gustad Noble. D...

• Word Count: 4675
• Approx Pages: 19
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... the similarities between this short story and the novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Irish writer and poet, Oscar Wilde, which is about a supernatural portrait of a young man which hides the sins and immoralities committed by the protagonist of the story, Dorian gray, and the portrait itself become horrible in aspect but make him look innocent and pure ... between Poe's views and those of Oscar Wilde's about the matter of art and aesthetics in general. Poe states somewhere that: "An immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful. This it ...

• Word Count: 3098
• Approx Pages: 12
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Willa Cather's short story, "Paul's Case," is about a young man who is fighting what he fears most: to be as common and plain as the world around him. Paul feels he is drowning in his everyday, dull environment and his ... . Within the text of Willa Cather's short story "Paul's Case" the use of symbols and motives help to develop and understand the main character. Paul is introduced as a smiling young man with disrespect for most things but the reader slowly comes to realize that his sense of the world is irrational and his inner flaws are gradually exposed.  Paul has created ... ...

• Word Count: 2556
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... missing but that can still be felt. The thought of a ghost haunting her body can be thought of as physical abuse. Since this story was written in a time where the man solely ran the household and women were docile and submissive, it isn't incomprehensible for a husband to hit his wife. "The new spring life- could represent the new life that she ... first. He loved her as well as shown when she thinks of "the face that never looked save with love upon her."" But that didn't mean that he wasn't a harsh man. When saying that he only looked at her with love, it could mean that he never comp...

• Word Count: 4614
• Approx Pages: 18
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... ", too: " I have in my coop a little black hen that gives me a lot of trouble. It never roosts with the others, seldom cackles, and wouldn't lay for all the wheat Old Man Pierriche harvests on Sunday. Sometimes I feel like bleeding her; there is something suspicious about it." Irving's story revolves around a post-Dutch community living in a little valley by the name of ... and double jointed, with short curly black hair, and a bluff, but not unpleasant countenance, having a mingled air of fun and arrogance." Moreover, Brom Bones has the advantage of being a local man who is either admir...

• Word Count: 2890
• Approx Pages: 12
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... told from a first person point of view where the sensitive narrator is trying to comprehend the meaning of the epiphany that's what I'm writing this story about. I'm puzzled. I'm getting to be a man and want to think straight and be O.K. Comprehending and trying to understand can similarly be seen in The Grave', where Miranda, like the narrator in I Want To Know Why', is ... and why they hold a position of inferiority. He wants to know why Henry Riebeck's father is condemned by the community who, even though he is a gambler can still be a nice man and generous' and he wants to know why ...

• Word Count: 2806
• Approx Pages: 11
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... that being the strong women they were, most likely they had very strong beliefs in women's rights as well. They had, after all, already been widowed and had been the "man" and the "woman" in the house for years. The O'Flaherty women had strong souls and they knew how to take care of themselves. Safely said, Kate Chopin had a strong desire ... strict values and guidelines. She doesn't seem to use those values when living her life, as one would see by her many affairs after her husband's death, one with a married man. Kate appears to be a woman filled with passion and desires; she went af...

• Word Count: 2584
• Approx Pages: 10
• Grade Level: High School

... the vehicle through which the students learn about ideas prevalent through different historical and cultural contexts. For instance, teaching either Saul Bellow's Seize the Day or The Death of a Sales Man by Arthur Miller can give students a better understanding of how individuals have responded to their current society and culture and its relationship to the past. The human effect can be ... ...

• Word Count: 2530
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... , she broadens our understanding of what is happening. Throughout the story, there have been themes that have been exemplified undoubtedly well. One of the main themes, was the war between man and nature. Du Maurier shows us how easy it was for civilization to collapse. She does this so well that the audience is fearful for Nat and his family because ... ...

• Word Count: 4431
• Approx Pages: 18
• Grade Level: High School

... like most of writing did take long hours to perfect. They include a wide variety of genres ranging from poetry analysis essays of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and abstracts on epilepsy research projects to my own Shakespearean (or should I say, Santamarian) sonnets and elegant e-mails to a girlfriend. So evidently, I have written for many purposes, both academic and ... ...

• Word Count: 2564
• Approx Pages: 10
• Grade Level: High School

... , she broadens our understanding of what is happening. Throughout the story, there have been themes that have been exemplified undoubtedly well. One of the main themes, was the war between man and nature. Du Maurier shows us how easy it was for civilization to collapse. She does this so well that the audience is fearful for Nat and his family because ... ...

• Word Count: 4405
• Approx Pages: 18
• Grade Level: High School

... . These awards are reserved for only the most prestigious science fiction writers. In 1971 he won the Phoenix Award. 1972 brought a Hugo award for "Eurema's Dam" and the Invisible Little Man Award. He received the Smith Award in 1973. It would be twenty-seven more years before another award. In 1990 he was given the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. "Iron ... ...

• Word Count: 2850
• Approx Pages: 11
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School