...A Rose for Emily Author: William Faulkner Plot: The story is broken down in 5 sections. In section I, the narrator recalls the time of Emily Grierson’s death and how the entire town attended her funeral in her home, which no stranger had entered for more than ten years. Colonel Sartoris, the town’s previous mayor, had suspended Emily’s tax responsibilities to the town after her father’s death, justifying the action by claiming that Mr. Grierson had once lent the community a significant sum. As new town leaders take over, they make unsuccessful attempts to get Emily to resume payments. When members of the Board of Aldermen pay her a visit, in the dusty and antiquated parlor, Emily reasserts the fact that she is not required to pay taxes in Jefferson and that the officials should talk to Colonel Sartoris about the matter. However, at that point he has been dead for almost a decade. She asks her servant, Tobe, to show the men out. Section II: the narrator describes a time thirty years earlier when Emily resists another official inquiry on behalf of the town leaders, when the townspeople detect a powerful odor emanating from her property. Her father has just died, and Emily has been abandoned by the man whom the townsfolk believed Emily was to marry. As complaints mount, Judge Stevens, the mayor at the time, decides to have lime sprinkled along the foundation of the Grierson home in the middle of the night. Within a couple of weeks, the odor subsides, but the townspeople begin...
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...parents are carrying a huge responsibility for their children, and if the parents cannot live up to the following expectation, which comes with a kid, it will make them unsuitable as parents. This cannot only relate to the relationship between the narrator and his father, but the young boy and his father as well. They both suffer from the same privations and hunger after acknowledgement from their fathers. The short story starts in medias res and is told through a male first-person narrator, which leads us to an understanding of the narrator’s thoughts and feelings. The short story is written in past tense, and we only need to read the first sentence in the story, to figure out that the narrator also is the main character. We do not know the name of the narrator, and therefore he remains unknown, which creates anonymity. Through several flashbacks we get an insight into the narrators childhood, and we get to understand his personality, position and social status in the society. The narrator belongs to a lower social group in society, and we get that impression, because of the use of slang and everyday language. This finds expression in sentences like: “My ma tried to raise me well” (p. 1, l. 15) The narrator uses slang, instead of writing, “mother”, as we would have preferred. Also, we have another expression like: “Hey, kid, you lost?” (p. 2, l. 78) The verb “are” in this sentence, which comes from “to-be”, is omitted. The father of the narrator teaches him pick pocketing...
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...In “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, Herman Melville tells a tale about Bartleby, who works for a law office and abruptly refuses to write. When the narrator, the boss, asks for the reason, all Bartleby says is “I would prefer not to”. The narrator migrates his office to get rid of Bartleby after a long stretch of thought. Toward the end of the story, Bartleby refuses to eat and starves himself to death in prison. In spite of the fact that Bartleby is dead, his soul is still alive as the narrator is spooked by his otherworldly pride and is at battle with the standards of equity and profound quality of the rest of his life. Bartleby is a saint. He not only exhibits his braveness by going up against the unreasonable society, utilizing his self-control,...
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...Murder in “The House Behind”? In the short story “The House Behind” recounting a murder that took place between two houses, the author uses the motif of the trashcan, the distinct shift in residences’ behavior and smell imagery to explore its effect. Through detailing the increased anxiety between the pair of houses that differ socially and economically and residents’ deteriorating spirits, the author emphasizes the consequences an event can have on those involved. The motif of the trashcan is symbolically used in “The House Behind” to express the growing unease between the house in front and the house behind after the murder. The narrator, a resident of the house behind, states: “Tenants in the front house are high civil servants, while the house behind is filled with shopkeepers, salesmen, retired post-office employees…” (1). The narrator then continues: “the trashcans were always a source of embarrassment” (1). Upon the murder, “the atmosphere has sharpened: the tenants from the house in front are afraid to empty their trash” (1). Clearly, the house in front and the house behind had always— even prior to the murder— been distinguished by their contrasting social and economic states. Though residents in the back house “can’t really blame the people in the front house for their wealth”, the well-established disparities triggered the “ill will that has always existed between the two houses” (1). Thus situated in the courtyard— “a sort of no-man’s-land” (3)— the trashcan that...
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...helping Emily. While listening, the mother partakes in a mental or interior monologue of her first born child’s life, and how being a single teen mother facing poverty shaped her daughter into who she is to today; a stiff, awkward ,and isolated young woman. Although there are various angles in which to analyze this text, the prominent angle is how society, especially in the 1930’s, view of women and motherhood have affected the narrator in her way of raising Emily. A sociological critique of I Stand Here Ironing by Tillie Olsen examines a wide range of social and feminist issues throughout the short story. Theses social ills have left the narrator with a strained psyche and have her questioning her parenting. I “Stand Here Ironing” is a short story in which the reader gets a mental image of the way it was for the narrator to raise her child alone. The narrator was a single mother at the age of nineteen, living during the latter years of the Depression. As a single mother during the depths of the Great Depression it was an especially hard time. The narrator describes the world in which her first child, Emily was born into. “It was the pre-WPA world of the depression” (290). Emily’s mother struggled to find a job to support her child, and eventually she was able to. Still not making enough money to support them both, she felt she needed to leave her child with other family members until she could get on her feet. The first time Emily was sent away for two years, before her mother...
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...In the exposition which is the beginning of the story, where the author sets up the story including characters, setting, and main conflicts the story. The narrator starts off by talking about the death of Emily Grierson and how the entire town attended her funeral in her home, which no one had been in for more than Ten years. The narrator then goes on to tell how Colonel Sartoris, the town’s previous mayor, had suspended Emily’s tax responsibilities to the town after her father’s death, justifying the action by claiming that Mr. Grierson had once lent the community a significant sum. As new town leaders take over, they make unsuccessful attempts to get Emily to resume payments. When members of the Board of Aldermen pay her a visit, Emily reasserts...
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...The Glass Menagerie explores the unique and interesting issues through intriguing characters and events. These Texts are valued due to the quality of their construction and how efficiently the audience can relate to it. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams written in 1941 is a timeless and universal place that defers the boundaries of time and space to explore a range of interesting ideas. Through a range of interesting techniques, this semi-biographical explores themes of escape, abandonment and responsibility to the family through the memory of the narrator Tom Wingfield. Tom States ‘ The Play is a memory’. This is shown through the dim lighting and the settings of the scenes. We can see this by noting the lack of realism; it's overblown and there is too-perfect symbolism, as well as its frequent use of music. The narrator, Tom, is not the only character haunted by his memories. Amanda also lives in constant pursuit of her disappeared youth, and old records from her childhood are almost as important to Laura as her glass animals. For these characters, memory is a hindering force that stops them from finding happiness in the present or potential of the future. But it is also the driving force for Tom, who eventually uses the memory of his father to get away from the trap of his family, to create a life of his own. The plot of this play is based around abandonment, which we see each member of the Wingfield family has experienced abandonment. Mr. Wingfield abandoned...
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...isn't real. May it be through the written word, beautiful lyrics and distracting figures, or looking in the past reliving happy times, these characters choose to create a world where they are each in control of their lives. Each family member in The Glass Menagerie lives in a fantasy world to escape the reality of their sad lives. The narrator, Tom, is a complex character. He finds his life to be restricting and boring. Tom feels, since his father left, a sense of responsibility for his mother and sister. Tom craves adventure and fun; he often has a warped sense of priorities. Every chance Tom gets while at work, he goes to the washroom and writes poetry. When Tom isn't working, and doesn't want to be at home, he again neglects his responsibility by going to the movies. This is seen when the lights go out and the Amanda finds that Tom hasn't paid the electric bill. “I go to the movies because - I like adventure. Adventure is something I don't have much of at work, so I go to the movies.” (1210) Though Tom seems bound to the petty world of supporting his family, his obsession with adventure leaves no time to concentrate on his responsibilities as the head of the household or at work. The matriarch of the family, Amanda, relives her past as a southern belle to escape the loneliness of her reality. Amanda resents her home, subconsciously seems like she also resents her family which keeps her there. She believes she is better than the poverty-stricken life she now has. Amanda is...
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...From Sensation through Perception to Reflection: Twenty minutes passed six, Tuesday morning, December 04, 2012 – many un orchestrated noises coming to my ears - the sighs and low prayers of awakening aged fathers and mothers, the moving feet on slippers, the disturbing sounds of opening and closing windows and doors, ONs and OFFs of the light-switches, the sound of nagging deeply inspired by your style of writing, I badly desired to make this day ‘A Day to Remember’, giving you a bigger challenge of creating simplicity out of complexity. To be frank I did not hate your approach of telling us a number of coincidental stories and portraying perception with your personal experiences and encounters. So our today’s dialogue is to investigate if Sensation is truly the root for our conscious learning. And you should go-bring-bread for breakfast from the nearby shops, the usual drones of cars moving by the main street, the to do this, happily I will take the podium on the remotely ringing bells – which I wished stage and you take the audiences’ seat. they were not school bells, the clucking of hens, the bark of the distant dogs and Mr. W: A challenge! I am glad that you come up with this ‘challenge’, actually I prefer to call this all seemed to be an alarm to my ears. an opportunity, opportunity to better articulate My being deep asleep by that moment showed how much exhausted I was on municate and collaborate with the wider comthe previous day and my late sleep- munity of readers and...
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...vital part of life. But being young is not always as easy as it sounds. Even though freedom is within reach, responsibility and expectations are breathing young people in the neck reminding you of the pressure that comes with it. Instead of choosing the right path that brings them the best, more and more young people feel a massive pressure when undergoing the transition from child to adult. This pressure often result in frequent use of drugs and alcohol to escape from the harsh reality.This is the case in the short story “A Gap of Sky” by Anna Hope from 2008 that deals with the issues of drugs, freedom and pressure. The story is set in todays London and starts in medias res when the story's main character, Ellie, wakes up. Ellie seems tired, worn out from last night and you understand that she has a hard time getting out of bed. The first sentence describe the darkness around her: “It is dark, but the wrong dark. Something is wrong with the dark” (p. 1, l. 1) Her room is probably dark because the curtains block the sunlight. The wrong dark may symbolize Ellie's state of mind. Her unconsciousness tells her that something is wrong in her life, but she has yet to discover what it is. Ellie is a 19-year old girl who attends University College London (UCL). We quickly get the impression that Ellie is a rather obscene girl because she wakes up a monday morning after a party sunday night. She barely remembers anything that had happened the night before other that she did some hard drugs...
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...up, and it can cost a lot of frustrations. There are so many things you have to think about and take care of when you stand on the line between being a child and an independent adult person. You have to learn to take responsibility for yourself and that can be one of the hardest parts – that’s when you disappoint yourself and the people around you the most because you don’t always see how important something really is. Sometimes you don’t even know what you feel, and that’s why you see how tempting it is to choose the easy way, where you just live your life and pretend that you don’t have to worry about anything, and keep locking your bad conscience out of your head and just do what you exactly feel to do in the moment. The story “A gap of sky” written by Anna Hope (2008) is about a character named Ellie who is nineteen years old and has come to a place in her life where she has to find herself and be a sensible person and take responsibility. Ellie is the main character in the short story. She’s nineteen years old, and a wild girl, living the wild life with several kinds of drugs, parties and alcohol in London. We are introduced to her when she wakes up in her room on a Monday after a wild night going out, which alludes that she’s been going out on a Sunday which is an unusually day to go party. She doesn’t care much about school and it seems like she really doesn’t want go there, and she’s only doing it because her parents forced her to do it (“To mom, to dad, not them especially...
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...the lives of countless of people. The movie Fed Up shows how tragic and corrupt this problem is by talking about obesity, its causes, and the role the food industries play. Fed Up effectively uses appeals to get their messages across. For the appeal logos, statistics, facts, results of studies, predictions, and stories of the past were presented. The movie uses ethos by having professionals give explanations that support its purpose, like doctors and former president Bill Clinton. Pathos is also though out the entire movie. Having four kids describe how obesity has affected their lives and showing that greed is motivating food industries not to fix this crisis touches viewers’ emotional side both sadly and furiously. Katie Couric (narrator and the executive producer) and Stephanie Soechtig (director and producer) are two of the people responsible for the film’s creation (http://fedupmovie.com/#/page/about-the-film?scrollTo=experts). Katie and Stephanie included opinions that differed from theirs as well. Despise its claims facing opposition, the movie proves the beliefs that eating less and exercising more works, individuals are to blame for their weight, and the government’s attempts to control the situation is risky to our freedoms are far from the truth. Dr. Mark Hyman is one of the experts who spoke in the movie Fed Up. He said a famous theory is eating less and getting exercise is the key to losing weight (Fed Up, 2014). The Mayo Clinic even put a calorie calculator...
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...difficult being a teenager because you suddenly have to stand on your own two feet, and deal with everything yourself, instead of your parents deciding for you. Finding out what you stand for, and how you want to live your life are what prepares you for adulthood. However, it is not always easy as it sounds because they might find it difficult to make their own decisions, and feel pressured. Therefor they want to escape from reality by ingesting drugs or drinking alcohol which could be their way of protesting against responsibilities and a search for freedom, or maybe it is just because they are in that age where they are open to all kinds of experimentations. This is what the main character Ellie is facing, in the short story “A Gap of Sky” written by Anna Hope in 2008; Ellie is wandering around in the streets of London and in her own mind as well. Her walk around London’s streets becomes a walk through her own mind. Crisis, confusion, changes, responsibilities and fear, are the main components of a short story by Anna Hope. A story which is intriguing, and will take you one step closer, to understand what a ‘typical’ teenager can go through. In this essay I will analyze and interpret Anna Hope’s short story A Gap of Sky. I will characterize the main character Ellie, and analyze her behavior as a teenager. I will also focus on the narrative technique in the short story and the importance of the city sitting. Though an analysis I will conclude upon my discoveries and determine...
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...Story Preparation Introduction “Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize.” --Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977 in Nigeria, the fifth of six children, to Igbo parents. She left for the United States at the age of 19, and by the time she was 21, she had published a play, For Love of Biafra, and a collection of poems, Decisions. She eventually earned master’s degrees in creative writing, from Johns Hopkins University, and in African studies, from Yale University. Adichie writes on her website, “I didn’t ever consciously decide to pursue writing. I’ve been writing since I was old enough to spell, and just sitting down and writing made me feel incredibly fulfilled.” Adichie writes about ethnicity and its importance, both in Africa and in the United States; her stories and novels also detail the hardships endured by first-generation immigrants. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, treats themes of family, religion, politics and tolerance. Her second book, Half of a Yellow Sun, takes place before and during the Biafran war and deals with questions of gender, race and class. Her work has won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. It has been translated into thirty-one languages. Adichie writes, “I just write. I have to write. I like to say that I didn’t choose writing, writing chose me. This may sound slightly mythical, but...
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...Page 1 Ulysses S. Grant (2002) Program Transcript Part One Narrator: October 23, 1863. Chattanooga, Tennessee. After a grueling four-day journey, General Ulysses S. Grant arrived at Union headquarters. He had injured his leg and had to be helped off his horse. Once again, he was dogged by rumors that he'd been drinking. He listened silently as his officers described a bleak situation. The Union Army was surrounded. Men and horses faced starvation. A Confederate victory seemed inevitable. Grant thanked his men, and began to write his orders. Max Byrd, Novelist: You see a lot of Grant in just that act of writing. The concentration and the determination. He never looked up. He never hesitated. He never seemed to search for a word. Geoffrey Perr et, Biographer: By the time he'd finished, he was surrounded by pieces of, of paper that he'd covered with his, his very even hand writing. In effect, he had fought the battle already in his o wn mind. Narrator: Before the war, Grant had been a nobody, a failure as a farmer and a businessman. As Commanding General, he was called an incompetent, a butcher. But he would win every campaign he ever fought. His plain, Midwestern w ays would captivate the American people. David W. Blight, Historian: There was something about that element of the American dream of that rags to riches story. He had experienced humiliation and he had understood failure. And I suspect a lot of Americans could see themselves in him. Donald Miller, Historian: Grant...
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