...a cruel, random murder each and every June, that has been repeated for hundreds of years. The other shows two neighbors repairing a wall, the narrator thinks that repairing the wall is unnecessary and that the wall should not exist only to exist and serve no purpose, but his neighbor claims that the wall is key to maintaining their relationship. Both Shirley Jackson and Robert Frost play with the idea of blindly following tradition and how it can be harmful. This short story and poem are similar because in both, there are people who refuse to question tradition; while they differ because the consequences of ignorance are much greater in “The Lottery”. “He only says, “Good Fences make good neighbours.” Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder if I could put a notion in his head: “Why do they make good neighbours?”” The message Robert Frost tries to convey in this poem, is that breaking free of tradition if one feels the need to do so, is not wrong. He’s trying to tell the reader to be the one who questions things rather than just blindly following someone else’s beliefs or customs. In the short...
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...In the short stories “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula LeGuin, the authors consider their society as a utopia and believe sacrifice is the only way for it to remain a utopian society. The similarities and differences of the sacrifice of the two short stories consists of the type of society, the types of government, and how relates to the modern society. In “The Lottery,” their believes that without sacrifice is the only way to obtain livelihood. It is the only way to have food and to prevent a community wide famine. They choose to do a “lottery” because it randomly chooses a person out of the entire community to sacrifice their lives at a random pick which is much like modern day society and how people are chosen at random ny the card/number they get to win a certain amount of money. “Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in june, corn be heavy soon’” (Jackson 4). In “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” they also believe that sacrifice is essential to life. In their society happiness,...
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...both share the theme of family. I. Jackson’s purpose for writing “The Lottery” is to satirize a society that blindly follows tradition. A. Jackson uses the graphic story to show the audience the brutality in society. B. Jackson’s short story also shows how society victimizes those randomly. II. Lawrence uses “The Rocking-Horse Winner” to highlight life’s problems. A. Paul’s mother, Hester, neglects to give her children the attention that they need and deserve to become healthy adults. B. Lawrence grew up in town where coal-mining was the livelihood. Lawrence’s father worked as a coal miner his whole life and expected his sons to do the same. Lawrence knew from an early age that he would not be a miner. C. Lawrence did not do well in school and was often alone and considered different. III. Both Jackson and Lawrence use their purpose for writing to portray theme. A. The lottery is based on family. Each member of every family are listed and must be present during the lottery. B. In “The Lottery” the unlucky person will experience their family turn against him or her. C. Lawrence uses Paul to portray the need for family, attention, and love. D. Paul’s mother, Hester, is more infatuated with materials rather than her family. E. Both stories show the importance and destruction of family. An Analysis of Author’s Purpose in Relation to Theme From the beginning of time people have felt the need to express...
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...non-forgettable, haunting, short story about a lottery that takes place in a rural city. The author writes the story to take place in a small city in New England. This is not the typical lottery that first comes to mind. This is not a lottery where a one or more lucky winners are chosen at random to be given a great amount of money, but rather a lottery that is held annually in the city and one individual is selected at random to be killed by the citizens of the village. The tradition of the lottery has been practiced for many years by the people living in the city. The setting of ‘The Lottery’ hides the significance and the purpose of the lottery that actually takes place in the small city. Typically, if a ritual such as “The Lottery” has been part of society for such a great amount of time the habit is hard to break. Even as negative as someone being chosen at random to be killed by the people around them, others seek out that it will happen once per year no matter what. Jackson uses symbolism throughout the short story through objects and names of characters that hold meaning to the lottery. This short story may infer that a theme for the story is that not all traditions are positive and the outcome could literally be life changing. The name of each character in ‘The Lottery’ holds a symbolic meaning within the story. By using symbolic names, Jackson can foreshadow things that will come later on in the story. Jackson uses names in the story to help foreshadow the new...
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...In the short story “The Bear”, William Faulkner writes a story that includes many different characters who experience life-changing events. Faulkner demonstrates that a person’s success and failure will ultimately cause him to mistake his rightful place in society. Faulkner illustrates this theme throughout the story by using the developing characteristics of Boon. At the end of the short story, Boon’s unsteady life leads the developing world to exclude him because of his faulty success (Hess). To demonstrate how success and failure in an individual's life can steer that person to misinterpret his place in the world, Faulkner uses Boon’s strong bond with Lion as an example. In part due to Lion’s aggressive name and nature, Boon has high expectations...
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...Analysis of Joanne Fedler’s short story “A Simple Exchange of Niceties” There are many great moment of every humans life. But one of the biggest moments – maybe the biggest of all – in a woman’s life is the time when her first baby enters the world, and she hold the baby in her arms for the first time. The feelings in a moment like this can’t be described – they have to be felt, to be understood. Those are the feelings our main character in Joanne Fedler’s short story “A Simple Exchange of Niceties” faces in the end of the story. But before she is ready for those feelings, an important meeting with another woman takes place. When we first meet the narrator, she seems like a woman with low self-esteem. A misunderstood soul in a world she doesn’t fit in to. She is alone in the park, confused and miserable; she has just realized that she is pregnant, and has decided to get an abortion. She doesn’t feel like she is worth loving; neither by the man who got her pregnant, and afterwards referred to her as a trashy whore, or by her mother, who has never cared much for her. She went to prison for three months, when she was caught in shoplifting. She feels like she haven’s achieved much in life: “I’ve never done anything with my life”, she says on page 11, line 37. During the story, she only mentions her friend Barbie as an important person in her life, which makes her seem a bit lonely. She fits in in the box of outsiders which exists in every community. The bench plays an important...
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...role in the advancements humans have made throughout history. And if someone were to take a look at all of those who have become successful in their endeavors, they would find that what all of these people have in common is the driving force that is passion that somehow allows people to set out on a path to achieve their goals and face all the obstacles along the way. An instance of passion can be seen in Aimee Bender’s “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt,” a short story about a teenage girl’s strained relationship with her sick father. At quick glance the story is basically a collection of random, loosely connected events that also consists of ridiculous characters which might leave some to question its direction and the message it is trying to convey the readers. But if someone were to take a closer look at the story and take note of the symbolism Bender is using then they would be able to see how the story deals with passion and what it has to say about it. And despite the seemingly occurrences that take place in it, the story shows the effect of passion has on people and communicates that passion is a force that drives us and allows those with a strong desire and mind to realize and achieve the potential that lives within them. There many different obstacles that people may face in life and the main character’s obstacle is just one of many. What they all have in common, however, is that whether or not they can be overcome all comes down to passion, and...
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...Ghosts by Naomi Wood The short story by Naomi Wood was written in 2012, and is about Pia, who is a middle-aged woman and the day where the short story takes place, is her 40th birthday. In this story we meet Pia, her partner Daniel and random people from the streets and of course Pia is our main character. The short story starts in the middle of Pia’s day, she just finished working and she is about to leave the car park at work. She is on her way home, where her partner Daniel waits to take her to a restaurant to celebrate her birthday, but on her way home she is reflecting over what it means to turn 40. The short story is told in a chronological order, but with flash back-like situations “Giving in, she ghosted back through memory. She drank the coffee, ate the omelette, took down the laundry...”. What’s most important is the middle and the ending of the short story, how Pia starts by thinking that turning forty will only be the first of many depressing situations, but actually comes to the conclusion that it is only as depressing as you make it. It is kind of an open ending where the author puts in a line saying “Time waits for no man” which sums up on every reflections Pia had during her drive home. The atmosphere of the story is to begin with really tense and dim because of how Pia feels about herself. Turning 40 should be something to celebrate but for Pia it is the same as starting digging your own grave. When she hears the news of the neutrinos she “…wondered...
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...Harrison Bergeron is a short story written about a teen boy named Harrison living in a dystopian society who uses his exceptionality to fight against the government. Later on, a film adaption was made. Both are completely different in mood and tone. Harrison Bergeron is a light-hearted satire unlike its movie adaptation, 2081. In the short story, Harrison had a clown-like and laughable appearance because he was considered above average in his looks. “...To set off his good looks, H-G men required that he wear a red ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle tooth random,”(45) imagining someone to appear as this in real life is humorous and would usually make someone laugh. “He flung away his rubber nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder,”(57). He also ripped away the scrap metal on his body as if it were as “wet tissue paper,”(54) unlike in the movie where he struggled a bit to add emphasis. 2081 is...
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...he has mostly lived abroad - in Paris, New York, Barcelona and Mexico - in a more or less compulsory exile. Besides his large output of fiction he has written screenplays and has continued to work as a journalist. Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty (February 8, 1850 – August 22, 1904), was an American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century. From 1892 to 1895, she wrote short stories for both children and adults which were published in such magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The Youth's Companion. Her major works were two short story collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her important short stories included "Desiree's Baby", a tale of miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana (published in 1893),"The Story of an Hour" (1894),[2] and "The Storm "(1898). "The Storm" is a sequel to "The 'Cadian Ball," which appeared in her first collection of short stories, Bayou Folk. Chopin also wrote two novels: At Fault(1890) and The Awakening (1899), which are set in New Orleans and Grand Isle, respectively. The people in her stories are usually inhabitants of Louisiana. Many of her works are set in Natchitoches in north central Louisiana. Within a decade of her death, Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading writers of her time. In...
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...Rosa, Stella, and Magda are the main characters in the short story “The Shawl.” Rosa is the mother of Stella and Magda. But Magda is different then her mother and sister. She has blonde hair and blue eyes. She was of the Aryan race. The short story took place in a concentration camp. It does not say where exactly but from context clues you realize the kind of situation they are in. Two out of the three characters are starving and they rarely get any food. But when they do get food, Rosa hands it right to Magda. Rosa carries Magda in a shawl. It is where Magda is the most comfortable and she cannot be seen. No one knows that Magda exists. Being that Magda is wrapped in a shawl, she gets to feed off of her mother’s breasts. But eventually Rosa’s breasts stop producing milk. It crossed Rosa’s mind several times to give away her daughter Magda to a random on the street. But Rosa was terrified of getting killed so she never did so. The shawl that carried Magda was magical. When Rosa ran out of breast milk, Magda began to suck on the corner of the shawl. It kept Magda feed for three days and three nights. Stella wanted to eat her little sister because she was very jealous of her. She was so hungry she did not think it would be wrong of her. Stella stole Magda’s shawl from her. Magda has not said a word since Rosa stopped producing milk. But she finally said something when she was looking for her mom when she wondered off. Rosa took the shawl back from Stella and went to go find Magda...
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...My Mother and her Sister Happiness is a key factor in life. Weather happiness is found in love, in career, in family - everybody deserves to experience true happiness sometime in life. Life is not complete without this key factor. This is true in the case of the mother in the short story “My Mother and her Sister” who does not seem to find true happiness in life before her days are over. This assignment will begin with an analysis and interpretation of the short story “My Mother and her Sister” by Jane Rogers. To put the story into perspective the assignment includes a discussion of the text, “Their Social Duties and Domestic habits” by Sarah Stickney Ellis and the picture, “The kiss” by Gustav Klimt. The assignment ends with a short essay about the poem “Affirmation” by Donald Hall to conclude the paper. A: The short story by Jane Rogers from 2006 is about a mother, Dorothy and her sister, Lucy. When Dorothy dies her sister temporarily moves in with her niece, the narrator. They don’t communicate that well but when they start talking about Dorothy they open up and the narrator expands her knowledge about her mother and her aunt. The main characters in the story are Lucy and the narrator. Lucy is the sister of Dorothy who died. She is 75 years old and has become a widow after 49 years of marriage. She has 5 children and used to be the perfect old fashioned stay at home mother making homemade jam, knitting cardigans and making huge home cooked meals. As she has gotten older...
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...“The Lottery” is a short story that would have most people thinking and feeling good at the beginning. At the end, however, they learn the ironic truth that the reward is death. In the small village, the villagers repeat this horrific tradition of picking a person at random and stoning them to death without question. Jackson shows us how easily and willingly we will follow a tradition for no other reason than that’s just how things are. In her short story “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson shows us the blind following of tradition and the slow deterioration of the tradition through the use of symbols such as the black box, the Lottery, and Old Man Warner. The black box represents how the villagers really feel about the tradition. Every year they...
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...Ashley Word Count: 654 English 100 L51 February 4, 2015 Alexie SWA # 1 In the short story “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie, he talks about being a 3 year old who lived on the Spokane Indian Reservation who loved to read. Alexie talks about the struggles that his family endures with money, but he doesn’t let that stop him from reading. Alexie learned to read from comic books such as “Superman”, he used the pictures to help tell the story. As he became older and started school he was teased because he was an Indian child who could read and write. Now, Alexie is a writer who visits schools to help Indian children to understand how reading had an impact on his life and he wants to try and get more Indian children involved with reading. Alexie describes his family as being poor but they are considered second class according to Reservation standards. As told in the story Alexie’s family consist of 7 family members and at least one parent held a job so the family could make it through a time where poverty was hitting the world hard. They lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear, and government surplus food, but managed to be doing better than a lot of others in the reservation. The role of Alexie’s father played a huge role in his life. His father loved books and since Alexie loved is father with an aching devotion, he decided that he would love books also. Alexie’s father was one of the few Indians who attended a Catholic school, so I think that had a big...
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...that. This is the way a lot of people would describe getting a ticket. But this description does not fit the way Toby writes his tickets. Toby gives tickets to random people, who he believes are breaking the rules of a well-being society. It might seem very peculiar, that Toby writes tickets for small incidents. He gives two ladies a ticket for standing in the middle of the pavement. But there is a reason why, and the quote proves this point of view – everything in Tobys life is wrong. In order to rectify things in his mind Toby writes tickets to get a healthy society. Given tickets is something in his life, which he can control. A central theme is therefore, how Toby tries to get everything around him to be right. The text “TICKITS” was written in 1978. The writer is Paul Milenski. The text is about a young chap, his name is Toby Heckler. The story deals with a serious subject regarding human relationships and the lack of order in a Toby’s life. The narrative technique is a third person narrative. The third person narrative is in this case subjective, because we are tied down to one point of view. In this story we are tied down to Toby’s point of view. Things are described from Toby’s angle. The text is a short story. It is a short story because it has classic traits of the short stories as a genre. The story is short, and it deals with a serious subject, which is supposed to make the reader think. It describes...
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