...Elie and his father go through major relationship changes throughout the book and it is interesting to watch the evolution of a father-son relationship like this. Elie and his father live in a town called, Sighet, they live in a Jewish community and are jews themselves. They have a person in the community named, Moshe the Beadle, he is taken away for a bit and when he returns he tells a story of how he and other people were taken out to a ditch and everyone was shot and killed, he escaped. Nobody believes such a thing is possible, until the Hungary police and nazis come in and put them in ghettos, small walled off communities. Then they are sent to the camp. The first time Elie and his father’s relationship is shown, they are distant. His father cares more about the community than his own family. Elie and his father don’t really talk much at all and have no sign of any good relationship there. Elie said, “My father was occupied with his business and the doings of the community” (Wiesel 5). His father has all his time occupied by everything but his family. Elie at this point is devoted to his religion and constantly is studying on it and learning more through a book called the “Cabbala”. It is a higher learning of their religion. Elie and his father’s relationship is getting better, but only due to them being forced to be together in the...
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...I choose to read the essay Daughters, Fathers, and Dancing by John D. Larwy. I figured I would be able to relate to this essay more than the other being I am a daughter and I have a good relationship with my father. Larwy mentions that many fathers prefer to talk to their sons over their daughters. In my family that was not the case. My father and I have a lot more in common with me than my father and my brother, which leads to my father having more conversations with me as opposed to my brother. My father is the one who encouraged me to play sports. Not only would he take me to practices he would coach my teams. He would make me practice all the time, but he would come outside with me and help me. If you looked out the window and and saw us kicking the soccer ball around you would assume we were taking about random things, and sometimes we were, but I had a lot of important conversations with my dad when we...
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...Brad Manning’s essay “Arm Wresting With My Father” recollects a time where he discovers his father’s love. The story is about his childhood and his relationship with his father. In the very first sentences Manning talks about how his relationship with his father is physical, and that is how his father expresses his love. “Arm Wrestling With My Father” is an effective essay because Manning gets the purpose across and entertains the audience, and uses a variety of sentence structures throughout the essay. In the story, “Arm Wrestling With My Father” it talks about the relationship Manning has with his father and how it changes over time. When he was little he would never win the arm wrestling fights, and his father would always win. He would try so hard to use all of his will power to try and beat his father; it never worked. When they first began to wrestle, Manning loved it and he would get so happy even if he lost. He just liked knowing the fact that his dad was very...
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...The bond of a child with a mother and or a father is everything pleasant and special, it creates passion, loyal, connection, and sympathy. No matter in what form is it being given, as long as the other person understands they are sending their love. For a few, unfortunately, don’t get the love and connection needed. The bond creates sensations in order to cause feelings of strength and protection. For example, a bond between a father and son, both considered males, which portrays them to play a strong, manly role and a bond which doesn’t involve much emotional connections but further of a competitive bond such as engaging in sports related activity. Simply on an account of men not relying on demonstrating emotional feelings for one another, only when necessary....
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...Arm Wrestling with my father by Brad Manning and Shooting Dad by Sarah Vowell are essays that depict the relationship between a child and father. Although both essays describe the struggle for communication between a child and father, what hinders the communication and how they communicate differ greatly. In Arm Wrestling with my Father, Manning finds his relationship with his father to be primarily physical, which is the way they communicate for much of his life. In Shooting Dad, Vowell finds that communicating with her dad is difficult because they have different views and interests. Sarah only comes to communicate with her father in a positive way when she finally understands his obsession with guns. Both essays describe the obstacles...
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...Meagan Hess Ms. Phillips English 1 (4025) Essay 1, draft 1 June 9, 2014 With Maturity Comes Understanding Effective communication skills are the foundation of any successful relationship. This good communication is necessary for healthy relationships, but it can be a difficult skill to master. Brad Manning expresses his own troubles communicating with his father in the essay, “Arm Wrestling with My Father”. In this piece, Manning shares his struggle finding love through his father’s physical forms of endearment. However, as he matures, he understands the purpose of his father’s actions and realizes he will soon take his father’s place protecting the family. Similarly, Sarah Vowell expresses her own conflict with her father in the essay, “Shooting Dad”. Young Sarah and her father do not agree on much of anything. Their differences challenge the strength of their relationship, resulting in difficulty getting along. But even so, once Vowell gains maturity, she begins to see that she and her father are more alike than she originally thought. She finds that they share three qualities: hard work, passion, and love. Due to miscommunications, Both Manning and Vowell experience similar struggles feeling loved by their fathers. Miscommunications linked to indirect communication, differences in morals and values, and lack of feeling relatable are inevitable between parents and children; but, once matured, children are able to expand their minds to understand and connect with their...
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...Written assignment about “Reunion” Write an essay in approximately 700 words in which you analyze and interpret John Cheever’s “Reunion”. In your essay you must include the following points: * A characterization of the boy * A characterization of the father * The relationship between the boy and his father * The ending Tips about writing analytical essays: * An essay in English is not the same as in Danish. In English it is a broader term referring to an analysis of a given text - and a structure with an introduction, an analysis and a conclusion. * Start off by writing an introduction where you introduce: * The overall theme(s) of the essay * Make a short presentation of the short story you are going to write about. The introduction may sound like this: “In this essay, I am going to analyze the short story “Reunion” by John Cheever in which the main themes are… and … My main focus will be on the characters and their relationship as well as the ending”. (You may use this introduction or a variation of it in your essay) * Avoid a summary (your reader knows the story!!!). * Do not use headlines in the middle of the essay. * Handle one aspect/point at a time. * Analyzing means reading between the lines to find the author’s message. * When you characterize a character make sure you focus on what lies beneath the surface, fx how he relates to others, his behavior and needs and how he develops in the story. ...
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...An Essay on ’Compass And Torch’ Today it’s not rare that parents split up, which can be very difficult for some children to deal with. At some point a mother and a father are the two most important people for a child’s future in life. It’s two people who can’t be replaced by anyone. Therefore most children feel caught between their parents after a divorce because they want both sides to be happy. This is clear in the Essay ‘Compass and Torch written by Elisabeth Baines. The boy whose parents are having a divorce seems to be a bit of insecure when it comes to his mother and father. He’s eight years old and lives with his mother and her new boyfriend Jim. He doesn’t like when his parents are fighting or arguing. He just wants peace and for them both to be happy. This is emphasized on p.7, lines: 16-26. The boy overhears his mother complaining about the boy’s father and he wants her to stop. He knows how to stop it by walking into the room. This is a sign of him wanting anything but peace between his parents. He’s very attached by the divorce and does what many divorce children do; blame themselves. This is why he’s seeking his father’s approval or attention. This is shown on p.8, line 34-35 when the boy emphasize that Jim is not his dad and never will be. Here it’s clearly that the boy only seeks his father’s approval and it’s only his father’s confirmation that is important to him. The relationship between father and son seems to be damaged by the divorce. It’s four...
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...The Haunting Despair in Gordon’s “Can We Love Our Battering Fathers?”: How it is created by Literary Devices and Devices of Emphasis In the essay by Helen H. Gordon, Gordon illustrates that her father is the primary cause of her despair. It is a reflective essay that shows how the relationship of Gordon to her father suffers from his beating of the mother. She expresses her haunting despair through the use of diction, parallelism, and allusion. The choice of words that Gordon uses paint an image of her despair. “What my sister and I have not been able to reconcile, is Dad’s treatment of Mother—gentle, loving Mother, who lived for her family and adored her husband, the quintessential traditional woman, domestic and submissive even to the point of martyrdom” (par. 5). She describes her mother as the very essence of a traditional woman. An image of a warm, gentle loving woman is seen. In contrast, Gordon describes the last act of violence of the father against the mother: “We watched in terror as Dad pushed Mother down two flights of stairs and pummeled her crumpled body as we ran, barefooted and nightgowned, for help” (par. 9) An image of an evil, violent man is seen breaking the very being of the mother. A young girl seeing her warm, loving mother being broken mentally is traumatizing. Gordon alludes to popular literary works of fiction to express her despair. In the beginning of the essay while picking out a Father’s Day card, she thinks of what Cordelia says to King Lear...
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...Essay: Compass And Torch The short story Compass and Torch is written by Elizabeth Baines and published in 2003. I will in this essay discuss the relationship between the father and the boy and also include a characterisation of the boy. I will focus on the use of symbolism and the story’s main theme. The main character is an eight-year old boy. His mother and father are divorced. The boy lives with his mother and her new boyfriend Jim. He does not see his father very often. The boy is desperate for his father’s acknowledgement and is refusing to accept Jim as a replacement for his father. “”It’s a good one,” said Jim, pointedly approving, handing it back. “Yes,” said the boy, forcing himself to acknowledge Jim’s kindness and affirmation. But Jim is not dad.” (p. 8, ll. 33-35). The boy knows that Jim is only trying to be nice but does not believe anyone can do anything better than his dad. Jim is much more open and friendly towards the boy than his real father is but the boy can’t or will not see his father flaws. His mother does not believe the father will obtain to restore the broken relationship with his son. The boy’s knowledge of this only fuels his idolisation of his father. The father and the boy are not very close. They have not seen each other in four months prior to this camping trip. As much as they both want to be close, there is a distance between them. The father is first introduced as the man. The broken relationship as made them more as strangers...
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...to deal with grief, longing and loneliness. In this essay I am going to analyze and interpret the short story “No Angel” by Bernie McGill from 2010. It’s a story writ-ten with a very unique spoken language and with an unusual composition, which I will de-scribe even further later in this essay. Additionally, I will make a characterization of the per-sons, get around the use of supernatural elements and in the end explain how I have inter-preted the short story. The story is written in a 1st person narrator, who is Annie – the main character. The spoken language is unique because the story takes place in contemporary Northern Ireland, and the writer has chosen to show the Irish dialect in the spoken language. The language, especially when the father speaks, contains a lot of slang and unusual ways to pronounce the words. An example of this, appears in this quotation: ““What’s that oul’ shite you’re listening to?” he said, and near put me off the road. A twitter of a laugh: “That would deave you,” and his arm reached out, and turned down the dial.” (Page 5, line 133-135). The fact that the short story is written from the narrative’s perspective, gives the reader an opportunity to feel like he is inside An-nie’s head. Her narrative language is not very formal; as an example she calls her father “Dad-dy”. The story begins in medias res, because the reader is thrown directly into the action when Annie sees her dead father for the first time in the shower. The reader knows therefore...
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...some say is mentally insane. Starting out in the beginning of the short story, Miss. Emily, who is the main character, passes away. Thirty years prior to Miss. Emily passing away, her father had just died. Miss Emily denied her father’s passing for three days before she let the townspeople take him away and bury him. After her father passed away Miss Emily stayed in her house for a long time before she was seen again. She finally emerges when a man by the name of Homer Baron. Miss. Emily becomes very fond of this man despite the fact of everyone trying to end their relationship. Towards the closing of the story, Miss. Emily buys arsenic but will...
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...he Dead Father Jerome Klinkowitzís remarkably insightful review of Donald Barthelmeís work begins with an anecdote about an evening they spent together in Greenwich Village (Barthelmeís home for most of his life as a writer), and how a perfectly Freudian remark by Barthelmeís wife put a stop to the writerís boorish mood:ìëWhy Donald,í she said, ëyour fatherís is bigger than yours.íShe was referring to their respective biosin Whoís Who in America.î It is Klinkowitz's well-argued contention that Barthelmeís mid-career novel The Dead Father (1975) not only represents the high-water mark of his skill as a technical master of postmodern prose, but that it also embodies the central neurosis/inspiration driving nearly all his work, from his first published story, ìMe and Miss Mandibleî in 1961, to his last novel, Paradise (1986).(Though The King is mentioned by Klinkowitz, it is clear he considers it to be barely part of the Barthelme canon.)For Klinkowitz, Barthelmeís near-obsessive goal as a post-modernist is to ìburyî his modernist father.For instance, Klinkowitz writes that, while at first glance ìMe and Miss Mandibleî seems a perfectly Kafkaesque tale of a man awakening to grotesquely transformed circumstances, in fact it is ì[f]ree of overweening anxiety and not painfully dedicated to existential questioning or angst ...î[1] ì[Barthelmeís] first inclination is to laugh at rather than flail angrily against the forms and themes of an earlier style ...î[2]Klinkowitz cites ìThe Indian...
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...The temptation to live in our memories, rather than except the present somehow keeps us from the realization that we are aging at all. E.B. White's essay Once More to the lake, evokes tones of pleasure and melancholy as he examines the relationships between father and son, realizing that past memories have an enormous effect on the present, and finally concluding that mankind has a foolish way of letting death sneak upon us. White's essay is about a man recounting his childhood summer's at the Lake with his family; his narrative is calm and unassuming. The essay begins with the yearning to relive secure memories of simple happiness. White's main character states, " I have since become a salt-water man, but sometimes in summer...
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...The essay “Calling Home,” written by Jean Brandt was about her experience as a child on a family trip to the mall to do last-minute Christmas shopping. The fun family trip ended when she stole a Snoopy pin from a general store in the mall. After stealing the pen, she is arrested and faces an embarrassing phone call to her parents. Jean Brandt, in her essay, “Calling Home,” addresses the issues of the quick thinking minds of children. Brandt’s purpose is to convey the message to her audience that while justice should be served it should not cause a child to be locked behind bars. She adopts an empathetic tone in order to obtain more sympathy from her readers. While many examples of suspense, allusions, and tension are present in Brandt’s essay, her use of imagery proves to be the most powerful influence over her audience. Brandt rapidly establishes the basis of children’s minds through the use of descriptive wording, such as, “I was thirteen years old at the time, and things like buttons and calenders and posters would catch me attention” (19). The strong use of imagery present throughout her essay gives her audience vivid detail. In the excerpt from “An American Childhood,” Annie Dillard explains a situation a few neighborhood boys and herself got themselves into. Dillard and her friends had typically...
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