Essays on Novel

The novel begins with the John Nichol’s Milagro inhabitants speculating the motives of a local native, Joe Mondragón after he began illegally propagating an arid beanfield by using an irrigation system while the rest of the town withered in the drought. The townspeople of Milagro...

Most people remember the twenties as a decade of life, new beliefs and fun. Only Yesterday by Fredrick Lewis Allen, is a book documenting life during the 1920’s. The 1920’s was known as the greatest era of Americas time. When the economy was booming, consumerism...

Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet depicts characters who naturally challenge the conventional perceptions of race, gender, identity, and other socially constructed aspects of humanity. The text is set in the United Kingdom in the early to mid twentieth century, a time when being unconventional in these...

The New Historicism of the ‘Passing’ by Nella Larsen narrations can be used to give insights and explain a period when the American society was segregated on racial lines. Being raised in white Chicago suburb, Larsen was captivated by mixed race dynamics which became the...

The novel takes place in the 1930s in a ranch beside Salinas River in Soledad in California. Two friends: George, a farm worker, and Lennie a tall simple-minded man. They are always searching about new job because Lennie gets them in trouble. He took by...

In Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman criticizes people’s struggles to hold onto time through hyperbole, nameless characters, average themes and simplistic syntax. The people in Lightman’s vignettes have a common problem: how to slow down time; whether to hold onto youth or save a moment for...

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a novel in which the theme of savagery versus civilisation is explored. Some British boys are stranded on an isolated island at the time of an imaginary nuclear war. On the island we see conflict between...

Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits is a whirlwind of color, sound, and magic, set in the midst of Chile’s 1970 socialist revolution. Although the novel paints a lucid portrait of Chile in tragedy, I would like to focus on the conclusively transcultural and...

Average adolescence is a perpetual wave of emotions and expression; however, when one reads the story of soon-to-be adult Holden, it is an emotional wreck of a roller coaster. The Catcher in the Rye introduces readers with an opportunity to investigate deeper hidden meanings behind...

In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton uses weather in a variety of ways that provide symbolic significance along with a vivid setting. Wharton uses weather, climate, and the change of seasons to foreshadow events in the immediate future and to reflect Lily’s emotional state...

Author Philip K. Dick once said, “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” The theme of the source of madness is explored in all three stories that form Paul Auster’s novel The New York Trilogy. The three relatively short detective stories...

George Meredith once reasoned, “The true test of comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter.” The importance of encouraging thoughtful laughter in comedy lies in its ability to humorously provoke reflection of some greater idea or theme. In the dark comedy Catch-22, Joseph Heller...

The issue of immigration and American attitudes towards it are the object of satire in T.C Boyle’s novel ‘Tortilla Curtain’. Boyle uses sarcasm to attack what he sees as the self-obsessed nature of middle-class America and their naïve view of the world. He laments the...

Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic weaves together history and fiction to create an extremely personalized account of actual events. Two of these stories, that of Frederick Douglass coupled with those of Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown, are particularly interesting because they are predominantly concerned with the bodies...

One of the major themes of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov is the concept of justice, both earthly and divine. Dostoevsky investigates the differences between the two forms and examines several aspects of justice. The novel introduces several different philosophies on justice and shows what...

A Decameron can be said to a collection or pool of a hundred stories, grouped together to form one story but the tales have other different types of designs. The commonly known Decameron is the Boccaccio made in the fourteenth century, is believed to be...

When colonial settlers arrived in North America on the Mayflower in 1620, the primary concern of the newly established society was to ensure survival; however, nowadays, Western consumer society has placed a significant emphasis on shallow ideals, particularly the worth of outward appearance. Over the...

Prep, written by Curtis Sittenfeld in 2005, was a New York Times bestseller. This narrative gives a glimpse of the prestigious boarding school experiences of a poor girl named Lee Fiora who comes from Indiana. The author directly reveals struggles involving social classes and race...

A succession of men had sat in that chair. I became aware of that thought suddenly, vividly, …as if a sort of composite soul, the soul of command, had whispered suddenly to mine of long days at sea and of anxious moments. “You, too!” it...