In the story “Gryphon,” Charles Baxter fabricates a character that is not as perfect as we think she will be. Miss Ferenczi is a substitute teacher who came to Five Oaks Community to take over one of the teachers who has become ill until he...
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...
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...
The 1950s brought about a multitude of changes in the culture of the United States: “conservative family values and morals were threatened as the decade came to a close” (Literature and Its Times). What was unthinkable in the 1940s gradually became the norm in the...
James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk and “The Man Child” are both texts that demonstrate how the isolation of characters can yield overtly violent outcomes. Though the perspective from which Baldwin challenges dominant forces differs between the two texts, the race of the protagonists...
In the chapter “Go Down, Matthew” of Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, speaking to an ex-priest at the Cafe de la Mairie du Vie after an extensive and exhausting session of consoling a lamenting Nora Flood, relates himself and the ex-priest to ducks...
A Fiend in Disguise in Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Connie, a 15 year old in Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a prideful and churlish girl who has a habit of belittling...
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,...
Is it possible to live a happy life in spite of the disabilities that plague you? Many who suffer from mental or physical illnesses would say no. However, some have recovered and found solace from their hopelessness through friends, family, and lovers. In Say What...
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris is a collection of autobiographical essays that describes the difficulties that occur within American families as a young man recounts his childhood and youth as he becomes apart of the LGBTQ community and struggles to...
Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet (1991) is a fantastical and vivid exploration of the lives of the 20th century ‘Aussie battlers’ whose reputations fabricated the Australian identity present in today’s society. The novel resonates the idea that this identity was forged through hardship, tragedy, faith and luck...
The traditional human condition plagues every individual; each suffers, and consequently, thirsts for personal freedom and utter fulfillment in whatever way possible. While Western culture recognizes this tendency as rooted in religiousness or spirituality, most Eastern philosophy understands this human characteristic as ultimate, drawing no...
For the narrator of Winter in the Blood, by James Welch, motivation is at the root of all of his problems, from his need to leave his mother and the comfort of home, to his problems in dealing with the past, and finally to his...
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...
In response to the horrors of World War I, the modernism movement rose and rejected previous movements like romanticism. Alienation, fragmentation, and shell shock influenced modernist writers to create complex characters, stream of consciousness, and satirical plots. This later influenced surrealism and the exploration of...
At one time, when Lydia and her brother, Nathan, were small, meditating on her mother’s failure at her personal goals sparked a decision in Marilyn that left Lydia wondering for a time “how everything had changed in just one day, how someone she loved so...
With the second theater scene of Stephen Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the plot of the selected play is used ironically to provide insight to the hopes and concerns of its audience. Because the theater is a form of escape for Maggie...
In “Second Best”, D.H. Lawrence uses the symbol of the mole as the basis for three separate metaphors for dilemmas in the lives of his characters. Each character shows differences in attitude and action towards the creatures, and these differences represent the psychological disparities between...
Edith Wharton, the first woman to ever win the Pulitzer Prize, was an extremely vocal and critical figure of her time. She was born in 1862 and made it her life’s mission to bring the place of women at home and the workplace and the...
Societal oppression persists in many facets of life and forces individuals into imposed roles that drastically determine their mindsets and identities. Those oppressed are not accepted into such societies and instead forced into subservient positions. These roles then become these individuals’ entire identities as they...
In Mississippi Trial, 1955 by Chris Crowe, the author tells a story about a boy named Hiram who comes back to Greenwood, Mississippi to visit his Grandfather. When he revisits and goes down memory lane, he discovers that a lot of things have changed since...
In his book Winter’s Bone, Daniel Woodrell follows sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly in her struggle to help her family survive in the bleak Ozarks. The protagonist must constantly maintain a crucial balance between caring for her mentally incapacitated mother and younger siblings while hunting the hardscrabble...
The Relation To and the Importance of Henry Dawes, and the Dawes Act, to Green Grass, Running Water Made-to-order essay as fast as you need it Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences + experts online Get my essay Henry Dawes was...
“And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself” (McEwan 119). Throughout the novel On...
The central theme of the short piece Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield is the pain of loneliness and undeniable attempts people who are alone make to live their lives vicariously and insidiously through others and the environment around them. Rather than finding company through interaction...
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...
The Turn of the Screw as Metafiction Made-to-order essay as fast as you need it Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences + experts online Get my essay The Turn of the Screw has been read by some analysts as a straightforward...
In John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty”, he explores the question of whether society has a right to suppress an individual’s expression and opinions. Mill’s states, “if all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one...
Human history is rife with episodes of mass purgings, genocides, and tyrannies, driven by an ideal for purity that transcends all else. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, a dystopian society re-establishes itself in the wake of a radioactive fallout...
The conflict between Papua New Guinea and the Bougainville Revolutionary Army between 1988 and 1998 has been described as the largest conflict in Oceania since the end of World War II. The novel Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones examines the impacts of war on the...
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.
