Knut Hamsun’s fin de siècle novel Hunger sets the reader up for a journey with its opening sentence when Hamsun writes, “Christiania, singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away traces of his sojourn there.” (Hunger 1). Here, Hamsun puts into place the...
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe leaves home to see the world, only to find himself in a shipwreck, leaving him stranded on a deserted island for years, while Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is a royal prince turned slave who meets his ultimate demise in the African country...
Arcadia, written in 1993 by Tom Stoppard, is concerned with the relationship between order and disorder, past and present, and certainty and uncertainty. The action is split between two timelines unravelling in a room of an English manor house, Sidley Park, almost two hundred years...
“I put it all there as a matter of historical record… We will all only exist as my inventions. No one will care what events and which individuals were misinterpreted to make a novel… How can a novelist achieve atonement when… she is also God?...
Aura is a novel that explores the corporeality of aging, the eternal nature of desire and the struggle against mortality. What strikes the reader from the outset is the second person narrative in the present tense, a stylistic choice that is known to have a...
Sons and Lovers renders a fractured narrative capturing the dynamic nature of the ‘interior of the text’ through a rigorous analysis of its characters (and their actions); this is achieved by the narration’s rhythmic pattern of theses and antitheses being constantly posited against each other....
The Book of Margery Kempe is widely considered to be the first autobiography in the English language. Unlike previous texts, in which a presumably truthful narrator voiced the story of the characters, Kempe is the author of her own story. As readers from an age...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Erendira” is a frustrating story. It is full of beautiful images, fascinating characters, and puzzling events. The frustration lies in trying to figure out why the characters behave they way that they do. Why does Erendira’s...
Camara Laye’s demonstrative narrative The Dark Child delineates the author’s childhood and adolescence in colonial Upper Guinea in the early twentieth century. Simple in construction, the story gives emotional value to the experiences common among young boys of Laye’s social class as well as to...
The role of the primary external narrator in Herodotus’ 3.50-3 is essential in developing the discourse, and transforming the fabula from historical facts into the structure of an Aristotelean tragedy. This essay will examine the role of the primary external narrator in developing the discourse...
In the ancient world, communication was minimal, resulting in contact between nations being few and far between. Because of this, each nation developed its own view of primacy, immediately shunning others and boosting themselves. The Book of Exodus and The Histories of Herodotus are two...
In The Histories, Herodotus offers an account of the events leading to the Greco-Persian Wars between the Achaemenid Empire and Greek city-states of 5th century BC and attempts to determine “the reason why they fought one another” (1.1). In recounting the events that preceded the...
Captivity and slave narratives allow insight into the trauma that the victim experiences; however, the victim’s narrative is often influenced and therefore, altered, to conform to the society’s pressures at that time. Focusing on the reception of the audience creates a struggle for the writer...
In the novel The Smell of Apples, written by Mark Behr, Behr uses a first-person perspective through the main character Marnus, an eleven year old boy. The book uses a first-person narration, through Marnus, to relay both the events of when he is older and...
As the narrator of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Clara is unreliable. The fantastic events she recounts are unbelievable and unexplained, leading readers to question the validity of her tale. For example, she introduces the theory of empiricism, which claims that all humans are born with...
In “Bottoms” by Dagoberto Gilb, the protagonist, who is also the narrator wishes he were the kind of person who would act on “raw desire”. In other words, he wishes for the kind of dominance he identifies with being a top. In order to connect...
Both “The Moonlit Road” and “In a Grove” are murder mysteries that confront the reader with the question of truth in storytelling. The texts present the reader with several first person testimonies of a crime, or the witness’ involvement in it, but give it no...
Bonnie Jo Campbell’s “Gorilla Girl” tells the twisted coming-of-age story of a budding sociopath in southern Michigan. The narrator, whose name is not revealed in the text, takes the reader through some of the more notable life events in her adolescence, describing actions and emotions...
Agnes Varda defines “Cinécriture” as the style that each film maker has to produce films. For Varda, cinema is a craft made slowly and carefully by hand. For that reason, the selection of each shot, photo, light, music, etc. are the most important parts of...
Gilman wrote this story as a symbol of the oppression women face in a society full of paternalism over women. The narrator, a woman, feels powerless against her husband (John), who determines what she does, who she sees, and where she goes while she is...
Radio Drama is a old but still very real format for storytelling, where the imagination takes on a much bigger role during the performance. Radio Dramas are nowadays mostly listened to by Middle/Upper Class people, usually older. In 2011, BBC Radio 4 (famous for being...
Dalit writers have been expressing their experiences, thoughts, ideas, and feelings about their lives in the casteist social system of India through their writings. Initially, they resorted to the genre of poetry and later moved to other genres of literature. Autobiography has been a popular...
One of the most unique things about your novella is the absence of chapters and also the significance of the setting. Was that a conscious decision? How does the setting and structure impact how the audience read the novel? The presentation of the novella as...
In the book A Prayer for Owen Meany, there are many different characters that were appeared in the story. All of those characters have a very strong characteristic, and had a lot of thoughts on different things, and had their own ideas. Although not every...
“When you make a choice, you also choose the consequence.” Everyday we make choices, but the outcome of those choices may be good or bad depending on the situations we are in. The Pit And The Pendulum tells a story about consequences to make the...
Amy Tan is a prolific Asian American writer who has been successful in depicting the sentiments of children of Chinese immigrants to the United States. Most of her work focused on the relationship dynamics of mothers and daughters inspired by her own conflicted experiences with...
‘Writing, when properly managed … is but a different name for conversation … The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.’ (Laurence Sterne) ...
Is the desire to do evil part of human nature, or does this desire stem from somewhere else? In the short story “The Black Cat” (1843), Edgar Allan Poe illustrates the difficulties that the narrator is experiencing through his personal perspective, which portrays him as...
The extract from the novel Nervous Conditions provided for this essay is revelatory of how heaven fell down upon earth for Tambu as she was making the transition from village life to a mission school. Climbing onto Babamukuru’s car with the knowledge that she was...
William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a play that depicts a once noble man who instigates his downfall by committing treason against his own country. The play harmonises the idea of a man who is destroyed by his own need for power and striking ambition to obtain...
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