Essays on Literary Genres

2889

Understatement in One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich

3 pages / 1444 words

Harsh climatic conditions, no food and hard work; all of these aspects symbolize the daily life of a prisoner inside the Gulag. The horrifying treatment of the prisoners is very well documented in many prison novels. However, the way that the conditions are described can...

Novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

2890

An Analysis of Ivan’s Role as an Existential Character in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich

3 pages / 1555 words

In his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn illustrates the struggle for survival zeks faced within the GULAG. He elucidates this effectively through the portrayal of a day’s experiences in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a working-class prisoner in...

Novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

2891

The Identity of Shukhov: Persistence and Dignity in "One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich"

2 pages / 947 words

A sense of identity is what defines the human being, what sets each person apart from the next, is the constitution of an individual. In the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the author uses information from personal experiences...

Novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

2892

The Roles of Symbols in Oranges Are not The Only Fruit

6 pages / 2743 words

Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit explores the themes of homosexuality and relationships affected by difference. Throughout this novel, it is clear that there are symbols present that carry the overall meaning in this piece. Jeanette, the protagonist, discovers that she is a...

Literature Review Novel

2893

James Bond and Post-war England

3 pages / 1152 words

The failed British invasion of Suez in 1957 has come to represent the end of Britain’s reign of military, commercial and imperial dominance in the world. British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden resigned in the wake of this humiliating defeat; shortly thereafter, he traveled to...

Novel

2894

A Case of The Babbitts: How Modern Workplace Satire Takes Inspiration from Babbitt

8 pages / 3463 words

The evolving workplace of 1920s America presented industries and businesses with an innovative new standard of operation: work smarter, not harder. These innovations included the popularization of the assembly line, the right for women to vote (and, thereafter, the quest for the right to equal...

Film Analysis Protagonist Satire

2895

Push Me Pull You: Ideology Vs. Individuality in Mcewan’s on Chesil Beach

5 pages / 2070 words

“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...

Fiction

2896

Prufrock, Underground: Anonymity in The Face of Desire

5 pages / 2355 words

In all of modern literature, there are few protagonists as self-effacing, miserable, indecisive, or morally contemptible as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Given the Underground Man’s interminable Hamlet-like meanderings, one might surely conjure up the Dostoevsky-influenced likenesses of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa or any number of characters...

Notes from Underground Novel

2897

The Concept of Free Action in Notes from Underground

4 pages / 1744 words

In Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, the Underground Man proposes a radically different conception of free action from that of Kant. While Kant thinks that an agent is not acting freely unless he acts for some reason, the Underground Man seems to take the opposite stance:...

Notes from Underground Novel

2898

Notes from Underground and Sartre’s Philosophy: Existentialism Arisen from Conscious Inertia

5 pages / 2210 words

On the surface, it appears that the Underground Man is no more than Dostoevsky’s attempt of a fascinating and contradictory refutation of Chernyshevsky’s proposal of rational egoism as a solution to an emerging hyperconscious culture. Fascinating in the sense that the Underground Man refuses to...

Notes from Underground Novel

2899

My Antonia: The Early-american Working Woman’s Reprimand

4 pages / 1816 words

Despite the trajectories and implications Jim Burden may have imposed upon the female characters of My Antonia, each of the “hired girls” winds up successful by their own means, simultaneously demonstrating and defying the stereotypical roles of women during the late 19th century and ultimately...

My Antonia Novel

2900

Breaking New Ground: Passion and Love in Willa Cather’s O’ Pioneers!

8 pages / 3558 words

Pioneering, or the act of breaking new ground, is what has established the United States as the enormous international presence it is today. From ideals represented by manifest destiny, the Declaration of Independence, institutions such as Wellesley College, and the Second Amendment, the United States...

Novel

2901

The Social Commentary of O Pioneers

3 pages / 1239 words

Willa Cather’s 1913 novel O Pioneers! is very much a work of its time, providing social commentary regarding a number of significant issues of the nineteenth into early twentieth century. This commentary presents a variety of frameworks for critical analysis: from the perspective of reform...

Novel

2902

Tearing Down and Building Up: The Dismantlement and Reconstruction of Identity in John Okada’s No-no Boy

3 pages / 1557 words

Frank Chin’s gripping afterword to the novel No-No Boy emphasizes the crucial influence of John Okada’s literary pursuits in his own life as an Asian-American writer. In a world where words had formerly danced across the pages of books to the sole tune of white...

Novel

2903

Shifting Identities: Racial Conflict in No-no Boy

4 pages / 1752 words

John Okada’s No-No Boy illustrates the racial conflicts between the Japanese-American community and American popular culture as well as differing views on assimilation among Japanese-Americans themselves. Kenji, who suffers from a fatal wound sustained fighting for the U.S. in World War II, represents a sort...

Novel

2904

She once Had Me: The Significance of The Women in Norwegian Wood

5 pages / 2495 words

The people in one’s life are often more important in shaping one’s future than the choices of that individual themselves. In Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, the protagonist, Toru Watanabe, encounters various women who influence him and alter his outlook on life as he progresses through...

Literature Review Novel Woman

2905

The Strange and The Unusual: The Complexities of a Bildungsroman in 1960’s Tokyo

4 pages / 1636 words

Thrusting into the world of Tokyo in the 1960’s, Norwegian Wood is a novel by Haruki Murakami, which was published in 1987. At first seeming very foreign and obscure, Norwegian Wood proves that even over a span of nearly five decades, not much changes socially....

Literature Review Novel Protagonist

2906

"Whores of Mirth": Examining Sex Work in Angela Carter’s Nights at The Circus

4 pages / 1840 words

It takes a writer like Angela Carter to make connections between circus clowns and prostitutes. Her novel, Nights at the Circus, depicts both, and they are shown to be more similar than one might first imagine. In Nights at the Circus, Carter uses circuses and...

Fiction

2907

The Tragedy of Permanence in "Nightwood"

2 pages / 943 words

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...

Fiction