...“Nothing Lasts Forever” ENG125: Introduction to Literature Instructor Shawn Mangerino November 25, 2013 Patricia Martinez In all aspects of life we have a beginning and an end. Not many things last forever and if they do they do not usually stay the same. In life things change, and they end. I believe the pieces I have chosen both speak of endings and changes. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” describes a sunrise and the beauty of it and how that beauty fades as the sun continues to rise. In “I Used to Live Here Once” the main character is remembering her childhood home and in the story visits the home and describes the changes. I choose these pieces because they are both about endings and change and use symbolism to describe the changes. These pieces both show the change in a very detailed way even though one is a poem and the other a story. In comparison they may not look the same but when you read the words in both you can imagine what is being seen and feel that you can see it fade, as nothing lasts forever. In the poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” I found it is full of symbolism. "Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold, Her early leaf's a flower, But only so an hour, Then leaf subsides to leaf, So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day, Nothing gold can stay.” (as cited in Clugston, 2010) In the poem the first line states “Natures first green is gold” the symbolism I find in this line is green refers to new life or birth, often times you hear...
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...investigate the murder on their own. This is exactly what happens to our main character in this short story Land of the Lost by Stewart O’Nan. We do not know the name of our main character and that indicates how generalized she is. The short story is told by a third person narrator - and it is seen from the main character’s point of view: “Thank God, she thought. What would Brian say now?” (p. 11, ll.138) She is following a murder case very carefully. Her and her husband have broken up and her to boys are out of the house. She only has the German shepherd Ollie at home - so there is nobody to prevent or disturb when she is working with the case. She needs content in her life and something to do. The murder case takes all her attention - it gives her problems at her job, because she tells the customers about the case: “so much so that her manager had to ask her to stop.” (p. 8, ll. 4-5) The murder, James Wade, tells where the girl is buried - west of Kingsville - and the main character begins keeping a file. The main character of the short story keeps it all in secret - she does not tell anybody about it: “The first time was the hardest because she felt foolish.” (p. 8, ll. 11-12) she knows, that what she makes is not ‘normal’ for a woman like her. That is why she keeps it secret - so people will not think she is stupid. Her dog, Ollie, is by her side when she searches for the dead body. After they have searched in one place without success, she starts being more seriously:...
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...they have lost, because they fear the loneliness, and thereby find it challenging letting them go because death is so hard to accept. That is the reason why people find other ways to keep the memory of a lost person, like pretending they see the dead as ghosts or angels. This paradox and theme is presented in the short story ‘’No Angel,’’ written by Bernie McGill in 2010, where our main character deals with the loneliness and grief. The short story is told in first person narrative in a limited point of view. We see the events through our main characters eyes, who’s name we are not told, which gives us a specific and circumstantial information about her thoughts. The disadvantage of this kind of narration is that we only get one point of view and thereby the main character can be essentially unreliable, and important information and happenings can be omitted from the story, but in this case it has no influence on the plot because of the composition in this short story. The composition is jumping in time with flashbacks and flash-forwards. Some of the telling is streams of consciousness, and for that reason the chronological order has been unregulated. As an extension of this, the author tributes the short story in media res, where the story starts in an important and pivotal event. In this first event, which is a flash back in time, our main character is meeting her father for the first time after his death. Here...
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...Angel The short story No Angel is written by the Bernie McGill in 2010. She is an author who lives in Northern Ireland, where the story also takes place. It is from the anthrology The Best British Short Stories 2011. The story is about grief, loneliness and how to recover from a death of a loved one. People got different ways to move on, but no matter what, it is terribly painful to lose a loved one, because you suddenly are alone. On the one hand you recover by trying to forget about the pain the loss has brought, but on the other hand you want to remember the one who passed away, because of the fear of loneliness and because the death is hard to accept. Others don’t want to accept the fact that they’re gone and will never be here again, and thereby they find a rather special way to keep the memory of the lost person. They create the lost one(s) inside their head, and pretending they see the dead(s) as ghosts or angels. This makes them able to talk to them and get advices from their beloved, even though they are no longer here. This is the way our main character of No Angel is using to handle her sorrows of her family’s death. The main characters name is Annie. You get to know it when the father says “Have you forgotten what they did to your brother, Annie?...”(p. 3, l. 63). Annie has lost her brother and both of her parents and deals with being left on her own without them to support, guide and, most of all, love her. She still sees them after they’re dead as angels and...
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...living. This is a painful time Sometimes, the loss of beloved ones can be so heartbreaking that you might still see them in your daily life despite the fact that they are already dead. This could give you the comfort of them still being around, while you can still carry out conversations and feel like they are alive. The protagonist, Annie, experiences this supernatural situation in the short story “No Angel” written by Bernie McGill in 2011. The story is told in a first person narrative with a limited point of view, where the reader has full access to the protagonist’s thoughts, however because we are dealing with a first person narrator, we do not hear the story from a different perspective. Thus first person narrators can debatably be defined as unreliable. Another aspect of using a first person narrator is that the reader is able to identify oneself with the protagonist because the reader is basically inside her head. The loss of a family member is a devastating situation, which many can relate to. In this short the period of time does not pass in the traditional chronological order where event A is followed by event B. The story includes nothing but flashbacks. Instead of introducing the characters in the beginning the author has chosen to use in medias res which is an effect where the story begins in the middle of an important event. This method is often used in...
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...1102 M,W, 7:45am Term Paper “The Theme of Human Struggle in the Works of Ernest Hemingway” In my research paper I will show how elements of life and death, folklore/fables, myths, and rites of passage support the theme of human struggle against nature in the stories "The Old Man and the Sea," "Indian Camp," "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway. Through comparative analysis of these stories' underlying themes I will address the initiation experiences of his heroes. Human dignity, morality, and the formation of human individuality through mental strife and the struggle against nature are often themes of Hemingway. Humans cope with the complexity of the world by developing simple mental models based on opposite parts. Life and death are together, two extremes of one energy. Life is the active force and death is the inactive force, but they cannot be separated. Thus, they are two aspects of one reality. When people are reading about living beings and mythological beings or those who are dead, they view the word of the dead as a living world. The dead eat, sleep and move. In the book “The Hero in Hemingway's short stories”, J. DeFalco points out that: " in the Myth there are usually three dominant movements which are cyclic in pattern. They are the departure of the hero, the initiation, and the return from heroic adventure." (17). The movements of the hero to the world where mythological beings dwell...
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...A summary of A Rose For Emily A Rose for Emily, written by William Faulkner, is a short story about the life and death of Miss Emily Grierson.Faulkner's primary themes are the struggle of the individual will against the pressures of time and change, and of the conflict between the interests of society and the individual's needs and desires.He arranged the story in five sections of roughly equal length. The first, which begins with her death, deals with Miss Emily's encounters with the tax officials, the next with the death of her father. The third tells the story of her buying poison for an unnamed purpose, and the fourth tells the story of Homer Barron and Emily's own aging and growing isolation. In the fifth section Faulkner returns to Emily's funeral, and the shocking discovery that follows it. The first section of this short story additionally includes a description of the history behind the town's relations to Miss Emily. The narrator comments: "Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town". This obligation began in the year 1894 when Miss Emily's father died; he left her nothing but the house. That year the town's mayor told Miss Emily she was exempt from all taxes because the town owed her father. Miss Emily accepted his exemption and the tradition began. As this section comes to an end, a new mayor tries to get Miss Emily to start paying taxes, but she refuses. The second section of A Rose for...
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...Frost and Rhys: Writing Similarities and Differences Charles R. Cobb ENG 125: GSH1331C Alessandra Cusimano August 28, 2013 People experience poetry and short stories differently, yet they all use similar techniques or terms used to write literature. All literature uses some type of tone, a point-of-view, and symbols. This tools for writing help tell the story by giving the reader the emotions, perspective and the hidden messages, making the story come alive to reader and in captivating the reader into the story itself. Others use different terms to help tell their story for poems, rhythm is used often. While in short stories and dramas, foreshadowing and metaphors are used to help tell the story. These tools are not used in every work of literature, but they are tools to help bring the reader into the story more, making the reader become excited or antsy about what is coming next. Looking at the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost and the short story “Used to Live Here Once” by Jean Rhys, there are a couple of similarities and a few differences in their techniques. These techniques are what can make a poem and a short story differ are; symbolism, tone, point of view, foreshadowing, and rhythm will be discussed here. Symbolism A symbol in literature “is something that has a literal identity but also stands for something else-something that is widely understood and has been developed over a long period of time or by common agreement” (Clugston, R. 2010...
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...The Miraculous Revenge is ostensibly about a dead man so vile that decent folk wouldn't be caught dead (literally) beside him. It is in actuality about a character, very much alive in the short story, who is so vile that no one living can stand him. Wolfe Tone Fitzgerald's reputation was unsullied by good praises, he was a dirty, drunken, blasphemous blackguard. He carried these distinctions to the grave; so much so that when he was buried in the town's cemetery, the next day it was discovered that everyone else's graves had moved, leaving Fitzgerald's grave lying alone. It would appear that even the dead shun those of ill repute. It is this miracle of prejudice, of graves moving by themselves because they care not for the qualities of their neighbor, that Zeno Legge is sent to investigate. Zeno has much in common with the late Wolfe Fitzgerald and this leads him to feel sympathy for the man, I looked down a the grave with a pang of compassion for the unfortunate Wolfe Tone Fitzgerald, with whom the blessed would not rest. It is telling to note that among all the characters in the short story, Zeno only identifies with Fitzgerald. Zeno is a man of great energy and passions. It is readily apparent that he is a man of quick wit (early in his conversation with his uncle he alludes to Poe), as knowledgeable in the arts as he is with stirring up controversy. Yet, as is common with those whose spirits flare so brightly, he is of a melancholy disposition, consumed by something he...
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...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 right away that this short story especially is about someone’s...
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...Short stories are meant to be short and get to the point fast. All this short stories do that just in different ways. “A&P” by Updikes, Sammy starts as a weak character but then at the end he comes out stronger and with courage to do what he had been wanting to do for a long time. “A Pose for Emily” by Faulkner, Miss. Emily loses her father and is left all alone, she gets company from the delivery boy. “Young Goodman Brown” by Faulkner, he has his mind set at the being that everyone has goodness in them and then at the end when he meets the devil, he learns everyone does not have goodness in them. “A Pair of Tickets” by Amy Tan, Jing-Mei learns she has two sisters and finally goes to China to meet her family. Everyone has weakness and strength,...
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...try to forget it all, and some want to hold on to the memories about their lost ones, because they are afraid to be alone. The loneliness even makes some people see things that don’t exit like ghost and dead people. Things like this are presented in this story, “No Angel” written by Bernie McGill. The story ”No Angel” is written in narrative, first person. Everything that happens, we see through the main characters eyes. Her name is Annie. About the composition in the story, it is jumping in the time. There are a lot of flashbacks and even flash forwards too. The first flashback, the main character meets her dad for the first time after his death. She is in the bathroom when he appears, and he is small talking with her. The daughter knows everything about her father, and we know that by the detailed and specified description of the dead father. That tells us that she was very close to him. After this we immediately jump over to another flashback, where he appears on a train on it’s way to Belfast. In this flashback we get to know the main characters family a little better. This scene indicates how important the jumping in time and the flashbacks is, because it gives us a picture of the messages, the themes and of some of the characters in the story. In this short story we hear about Robbie, who is the main characters brother. He is very rude but confidant, and our main character admire him a bit because of her shyness. ”Some of the time I admired him for it; wished I could...
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...Indian Camp The short story Indian Camp is about Nick Adams and his father (Dr. Adams), who rows out to an Indian Camp, because there is an Indian lady, who has been in labor for two days. Nick is with his father on work, because he is about to be a grown up and therefore his father thinks, that it is in time, that Nick sees how life is created – but not the consequences of life. Through this day Nick goes through some rite of passages, because he learns how to make his own decisions without getting influenced by his father. Indian Camp happens in the 1920’s, where it was written, because of the primitive conditions. The short story takes place in an Indian camp, which look we picture in our heads, because the camp and its surroundings are described detailed in the text (page 13 line 16-19). There are three characters included in the action; Nick Adams, his father (Dr. Adams) and the American Indian woman. Nick is the protagonist in the short story, who goes through a rite of passage, which makes him develop. In the beginning he sits in his father’s arms on their way to the Indian camp, where the father says that the reason to, why they are going over to Indian camp is because, there is an Indian lady very sick (page 12 line 14). It is a very pedagogic way to say, that there is a woman, who has been in labor for two days. On their way home, Nick sits in the stern, while his father is rowing (page 16 line 21-22). Through this day Nick grows so much mentally, because he experiences...
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... How does growing from child to adult affect you? “The Flowers” is a short story by Alice Walker, in which you read about a little girl whose name is Myop. As she’s out picking flowers, she discovers something which will change her childhood and her view on life. By analyzing and interpreting this short story this essay will put focus on Myop’s development and her view on life after her discovery. “The Flowers” is a story of childhood innocent. Myop is a 10 years old girl. She only sees the beauty of life. She likes the nature, and flowers. The story is described as a beautiful summer day. The story takes place in the woods behind Myop’s house. Myop’s mood develops from a good to a bad mood. I can see that in the beginning “she felt light and good in the warm sun”. When you feel light and good warm sun, its symbols of something good. First Myop is picking flowers in the wood, she is happy. When she later gets further in to the woods “she finds it not as pleasant as her usual haunts”. But then she steps into a man’s face. She realizes that he is dead. She picks up a pink rose and put her bundle of flowers down. But after she had experienced with the innocent man, she had a bad mood and all the fun was over. The text ends with “the summer was over”, and it’s like Myop is growing up and could not have fun anymore. Her life is changed. She could never be the same again. In the beginning of the story the setting is important to understand how it affects Myop’s development...
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...“Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.” This quote by William S. Merwin exemplifies grief, which is portrayed throughout the course of the short story “A Rose for Emily,” but with an uncanny twist. In William Faulkner’s short story Emily, the main character. She is an old woman living in a town called Jefferson with a southern upbringing. Devastated and alone after her father’s death, she is an object of pity for the townspeople with the only comfort coming from her servant Tobe. After a life of having potential suitors rejected by her father, she spends time after his death with a newcomer, Homer Barron. As they continue their relationship the chances of his marrying her decrease as the years pass. As the connection dies off Emily isn’t seen except for the occasional glimpse of her in the windows. Once she has passed the townspeople arrive to the conclusion to enter the house, ultimately finding something troubling. In “A Rose for Emily,” a rose for Emily, the strand of hair, and decay are symbols that provide a strong representation of grief throughout the short story demonstrating the prominence of the passing. The first symbol that becomes recognized throughout “A Rose for Emily” is in the title itself. The rose for Emily is very symbolic for the reason that it represents the love that Emily was never able to capture and something more unsubstantiated. This caused for her to become a mysterious figure who...
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