In his works “Tonio Krager,” “Death in Venice,” and “Tristan,” Thomas Mann discusses the artist’s struggle in terms of who he is, who he should be, and who he will be. In the three works, the artistic protagonists struggle with either a metaphorical or physical...
Nathan Englander’s “Free Fruit for Young Widows” is strong story full of morality. In the center of the story is Professor Tendler, who escaped from the concentration camp during the Holocaust to get back to his family home. He finds his babysitter with her family...
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is, on its surface, about a woman who suffers postpartum depression, which is the ultimate factor leading to her insanity; however, a closer examination of the protagonist’s portrayal and description reveals that the story is primarily about her...
Society often misjudge people because of how they look on the outside. In the story, On the Sidewalk Bleeding by Evan Hunter, shows that people presume other people’s personality by their looks. Andy, the protagonist of the story, is labeled as a bad person by...
Written by J.L Carr, A Month in the Country focuses on the story of Tom Birkin; a veteran of World War I who, after his wife leaves him, takes a job to restore a medieval painting in the church of a small village in Yorkshire...
In her essays “That Crafty Feeling,” “F. Kafka, Everyman,” and “The Rise of the Essay,” Zadie Smith writes about the universal experience of writing using her own personal experience as the standard writing experience. Smith completely blends together her personal experiences with more generalized statements...
Fiction has created the opportunity for humanity to explore concepts in an experimental and safe arena. The Anthropocene has seen the adverse consequences of the human species experimentation, which is why it is essential for literature to be allowed the parameters for experimentation. This essay...
In his short stories, Ivan Bunin frequently showcases the inability to attain earthly happiness. This reality is often manifested in his characters’ attempts to return to the past, when the evanescence of joy was still a mystery to the protagonists’ callow consciousness. In his story...
Written in 1983, Njabulo Ndebele’s “Fools & Other Stories” deals with the experiences of ordinary people living under the apartheid regime. The author subtly comments on the political environment of the 1980s through the lives of average black citizens whom the apartheid system affects. Ndebele’s...
Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners depicts three separate stories based on historical facts and accounts of three Black men living in Great Britain at different times. Their lives, though not literally intertwined, greatly inform one another due to what substance Phillips’s writing highlights in each. The titular...
Richard Price is an accomplished novelist and screenwriter, writing his first novel The Wanderers while he was attending Columbia University. After this impressive debut he wrote several more novels in quick succession including Bloodbrothers, Ladies’ Man, and The Breaks. The Breaks, written in 1983, was...
Oppression is a common theme in literature; this is not surprising in light of humanity’s history of vying for power. In literature as in society, are many factors behind oppression – differences in skin color, sex, religion, and family history among them. The one motivation...
In Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien, one abundantly clear theme is disjunction. Much of the text is fragmented, split up and moving between locations, characters, and time periods. Coupled with what often seems like magical realism, this paints a rather indistinct picture of many...
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson portrays the life of its narrator, Ruthie, alongside her sister Lucille as the two grow from mere children to young women while being surrounded by the confusion of shifting guardians, as well as the influence of transiency. Once the final guardian...
“I thought I could make my life into a room and choose what came into it.” While influenced by others at times, one’s life is impacted the most by the choices they make and whether or not they decide to grapple the opportunities they are...
Isobel’s wildly vivid imagination serves as a powerful survival tool throughout a traumatic childhood and subsequent tumultuous transition into adulthood, providing escapism from an agonizing and often humiliating reality, and comfort that she cannot receive from anyone or anything else. Her love for and reliance...
Isobel was not responsible for her mother’s unjust actions when she was a child but as a result of Ms Callaghan’s distortion and sadistic manipulation, Isobel closed herself off emotionally grappling for control over her own life. Through the characterization of Ms. Callaghan we are...
For a large portion of the novel, Isobel drifts through life believing intensely that the key to her happiness is belonging- that if she is a part of a crowd, if she is accepted, she will be “normal,” and it is this goal on which...
In Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat expands on the difficult role women must fulfill in a corrupted Haitian society. She portrays some of these requirements through the various transformations in the story, “The Missing Peace”. With this important text, Danticat indicates that maturity and sexuality are...
“‘Nothing?’ said Mama piercingly, ‘Nothing to come home to?’ She gave me a short glance full of meaning. I had, after all, come home, even husbandless, childless, driving a fall-apart car” (Erdrich, 13). This moment from Louis Erdrich’s Love Medicine captures the life of Albertine...
Louise Erdrich’s novel Love Medicine conveys the state of Native American life in today’s society. Her symbolism stands out to me above all else in the book. While Erdrich uses many symbols and motifs, the most poignant is her water and river imagery and the...
Novelist Ray Bradbury once said, “I used to take my short stories to girls’ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?” (“Ray Bradbury Quotes”). While speaking from a comical perspective,...
For centuries, philosophers have debated just how much truth can be found in the concept of free will. As humans, we tend to favor a viewpoint that grants us more control, that is, that we are capable of determining our future with our actions. However,...
Small towns are often depicted as serene and bucolic places filled with caring people. Gopher Prairie appears, at first glance, to be one of these towns. But through the trials of Carol Kennicott the true nature of these towns is exposed. In this town the...
It is very common in literature, both in the past and modern-day, for characters to have dark backgrounds. Many authors choose this approach because it creates an approachable character with whom the reader can identify, and provides the reader with an admirable protagonist. This darkness...
In the novel Midaq Alley, author Naguib Mahfouz depicts a poorer middle eastern alley. This measly Alley doesn’t act only as a physical barrier, but a societal one as well. Midaq Alley is shielded from the rest of the world, and has little outside influence....
Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, revolutionized the world of Arabic narrative. Neither the novel nor the short story were common forms of expression until Mahfouz’ works became popular in the 1950s and 1960s. His writing is unique, both in Arabic culture...
Throughout Naguib Mahfouz’s 1947 masterpiece Midaq Alley, the alley’s microcosmic nature turns its powerfully crafted characters into living renditions of sin. More specifically, Mahfouz creates characters to represent the Christian church’s Seven Deadly Sins, with almost each and every character fitting perfectly into a respective...
With its alternately overt and subtle use of symbolism, Nathanael West’s ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ works on three separate yet interrelated symbolic levels: a simple symbolic level, in which objects, people, and events in a particular scene are representative of one small symptom of the overall weariness...
In Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonists search for order and meaning. The books are similar in that both suggest the possibility of meaninglessness in America’s modern state of chaos. Although both books portray a dismal and...
Fiction is an integral part of literature, a kind of art of the word that describes reality in artistic images. It is a collection of written and printed works of certain people, eras, and humanity. In its narrowest sense, fiction refers to written prose narratives, and often specifically to novels, as well as novellas and short stories.
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