Ian McEwan portrays a theme of architectural detail throughout his novel Atonement. Through the use of these descriptions, McEwan constructs the theme of guilt, and the quest of finding atonement, that follows through his main character, Briony Tallis. Briony, who is a writer, writes these...
Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott composed soon after the Civil War in light of a publisher’s interest for a novel, which was initially distributed in two volumes in 1868 and 1869, as two books. Little Women transcends many of...
Familial bonds add arresting dimensions to even the most torturously mundane of novels. The literary options are truly myriad; family ties can represent both complexity and simplicity, and provide characters with both adversity and appeasement. The intricate interaction between mother and son has particularly saturated...
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is an unprecedented novel which is particularly concerned with the problem of forging secure identities in the face of modern challenges: consumerism, capitalism, emasculating white-collar work, an absence of fathers, and an absence of historical distinctiveness. The text’s protagonist is a...
“Historical fiction tells the stories of ordinary people living in extraordinary times,” as quoted by Ellen Klages and it is through these stories of ordinary people that we are able to deepen our understanding of the human experience. Stories that unveil our clouded view of...
In the start of the novel, Little Women, the four March sisters struggle to understand that having very little could mean so much more. For instance, when Meg talks about how dreadful it is to be poor. It seems as if she has no positive...
Fear is in all human beings that always pulls us back into the darkness. It is also something that will protect us by signaling danger and preparing us to deal with it. But behind that fear is your Personal Legend. A Personal Legend is your...
Ancestral trauma can be inherited in Black and communities of color. In Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, Sophie Caco is a Haitian woman who immigrated to the United States to be with her mother (Martine) after living majority of her childhood in Haiti without...
While on the surface a straightforward story about the four March girls’ journeys from childhood to adulthood, Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig, centers on the conflict between two phases in a young woman’s life — that which she places on herself, which she places...
Nobody follows their dreams; in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist it is stressed that everyone has a designated personal legend. In the reading it demonstrates “people’s inability to choose their own personal legends” inflicted by the world’s greatest lie, “our lives become controlled by fate”. Coelho’s...
Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness tells the story of a Mennonite teen, Nomi Nickels, and her response to the rise of conflict and tragedy in her family. This novel, however, explores not simply the life of a fictional coming-of-age young woman, but also of the...
The title of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, All the Pretty Horses, reflects the significance and variance of roles that horses play in this coming-of-age story, as they relate to John Grady. The horse, which was the social foundation of Western American culture until the mid-20th century,...
During war, men and woman are swept by emotions that make it difficult to overlook their experiences in war. Jack Croasdile, a prisoner of war, drew under his captivity in 1941 by the Germans a picture titled Anticipating 1942. Featured in the picture, he and...
Percival Everett writes Erasure with an incredibly avant-garde structure for a fiction novel. The primary narrative is actually a frame story in which a plethora of writings stemming from a myriad of genres are skillfully embedded. The work features a brooding, African-American protagonist named Thelonius...
One of the most distinctive and immediately impressive things about Ernest Gaines’ novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, is the way the author opens his story with an introduction of a collective of speakers, his cast of character/narrators, so to speak. Gaines weaves his...
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...
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie is a literary tour de force that examines Nigerian culture through the lens of three main characters. The novel focuses on violence and the familial relationships of core characters over a significant period of time, the Biafran...
In Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, we see how Calvino attempts to compare the reading of a novel to a man pursuing a woman. In this text, the reader takes on the role of a male protagonist attempting to read a...
Martin Amis’ London Fields depicts a non-traditional murder story which Samson Young, the narrator, seeks to transcribe. On a quest to find her murderer as part of a suicidal death wish, Nicola Six forms relationships with Keith Talent and Guy Clinch, two candidates she believes...
When discussing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Haddon has made it clear that he sees it as a piece of realistic fiction that is actually realistic: no lucky encounters, no interventions from a deity, just humdrum life. However, some have leveled...
Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, which follows Rasselas and his companions as they search for the choice of life that generates the most happiness, influenced Johnson’s generation so profoundly that the period from 1750 to 1784 has been dubbed the “Age...
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...
John Bunyan, as he tells us in his prefatory remarks, didn’t mean to write Pilgrim’s Progress; it all happened while he was otherwise engaged. His Apology, at least at first, takes on the word’s modern connotations. He regrets having inflicted the reader with the book,...
When Shane was published in 1949, it was considered a very unusual western fiction novel. Unlike other books at the time, the book’s hero was the title character. Still more unusual was the fact that Shane himself was not a cold-blooded killer. Instead he was...
Harry T. Moore, in the afterword to William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, says, “Much of the criticism of Silas Lapham has been directed at the love-story subplot” (345). Critics of Howells are quick to point out the Romantic elements in this otherwise...
The Woman in White, with its many twists and cliffhangers, reflects the turmoil of Victorian England, which was becoming a multicultural society. London’s hosting of the 1851 World Fair, a lavish affair hosted in a massive “Crystal Palace”, reflected both this transformation and England’s pride...
Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters Remix reflects multiple theories presented in Peter Mendelsund’s What We See When We Read. Throughout Palahniuk’s episodic novel, the reader is taken, nonlinearly, through the life of protagonist, Shannon McFarland. McFarland, a former fashion model, purposely injures her face in attempt...
The kite runner is a novel written by Hossein Khaled, an Afghan-American author. The book informs readers about a story of a young boy, Amir from the Kabul district. This story is set from a backdrop of events such as the Soviet military’s intervention in...
The narrator and protagonist in Gunter Grass’ novel The Tin Drum is unique in not only his stature, but by his mental progress as well. He chooses to stop growing at the age of three and does not speak, except through the beating of his...
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is a story of a young shepherd, Santiago, who dreams of travel and to leave the spanish countryside. He abandons everything and goes in search of a treasure he saw in his dreams. During his journey he learns to listen...
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