... Angeles, Washington. Carver's personal victory in 1977 over decades of alcoholism featured the many professional triumphs of the final decade. His reputation as a master craftsman of the contemporary short story was still growing at the end of his life, which ended permanently after the struggle with lung cancer. He died in August 2, 1988 at the age of fifty (Kennedy, X. J. and Gioia, Dana, 2005). Writing Style Carver's ... 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 the narrat...

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

... any such relationship. He is not a willing collaborator in the human project unfolding in his living room. The limited point of view and the ironic parallels between the blind man and the narrator set up the final scene, the moment when the narrator, Robert, and the reader work together to create a moment of meaning. The phrase, "The blind leading the blind," seems to best describe the action of this scene. When a television documentary begins ... showing pictures of cathedrals, Robert asks the narrator to describe them to him. Because the narrator is unable to adequately use language t...

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

... hysteria lurking beneath our carefully structured lives." This exposition comes from his thoroughly descriptive diction as the setting is exposed to the reader. In many of Poe's works, setting is used to render a dark and gloomy picture in the reader's mind. It is these images that help to set the stage for those twisted conflicts, which Poe so effectively portrays. Poe also writes introspectively, which ... lets the reader glimpse into the mind of the narrator or the main character of the story, exposing to us his fears, his hate, and his perversion. Many ... are stiff-frozen as they ...

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

... my expectations and reactions to things, trim them down to the proper proportions? (187) The collection's final story, "Swimming Lessons," takes an original turn by setting the commonplace doings of a young Parsi immigrant in Canada against the equally mundane existence of his parents in Bombay. What makes the story extraordinary, though, comes from the unexpected. The parents receive in the mail a book that their son has just published in ... as he did in Such a Long Journey, Mistry spends time in this novel castigating Indira Gandhi and her cohorts. One passage draws a brutal picture ...

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

... my expectations and reactions to things, trim them down to the proper proportions? (187) The collection's final story, "Swimming Lessons," takes an original turn by setting the commonplace doings of a young Parsi immigrant in Canada against the equally mundane existence of his parents in Bombay. What makes the story extraordinary, though, comes from the unexpected. The parents receive in the mail a book that their son has just published in ... as he did in Such a Long Journey, Mistry spends time in this novel castigating Indira Gandhi and her cohorts. One passage draws a brutal picture ...

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

... this novel, is associated with anonymity and passivity; on the other hand, personal narratives as well as the act of telling them entail a creative, fluid, restorative and life-enhancing process. History does not reflect the process of its construction, the final product is what counts; to reflect the process of recording History would encompasses the risk of exposing its biased nature and consequently ruining its ... illusory objectivity and totality. Patrick's narrative, on the other hand, reflects the process of its construction; Patrick shows the reader how he builds his story out o...

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