Summary Of Self-Reliance, By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great Essays
1. Do you agree with the main assertions in Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance?” How does it relate to Bryant’s “To A Waterfowl?” In “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson the main belief is that each individual should depend on themselves and themselves alone. Emerson talks about how trying to conform to the rules and views of society can cause a person to lose their own identity. Emerson stresses that the thoughts an individual has while in solitude is who the person really is; however, people try to cover up and change that person to meet the expectations of society. Emerson says that people should live more like babies and young children who have not yet learned the consequences of what they say or do, so they are still live by their own …show more content…
Argue for or against the idea that we can accept the narrator in Poe’s works as being reliable. Was there a second cat? Did Ligeia rise from the shroud of Rowena? If not the supernatural, what is the explanation? For the works written by Edgar Allen Poe, “The Black Cat” and “Ligeia” I feel as though the narrator is an unreliable because in both works he talks about substance abuse. In “The Black Cat” the narrator talks about a disease of alcoholism. At the beginning of “The Black Cat” the narrator talks about how the man loves animals; however, in the story the man ultimate cuts out the cat’s eye and hangs the first cat causing death. In “Ligeia” the narrator refers to an “opium dream”, which can be interpreted as a hallucination. I think these points in both stories shows that the narrator is unreliable. In the story of “The Black Cat” I do believe there was a second cat, only because the investigators heard and saw the cat sitting on the head of the dead wife. Also this cat had a white patch on the chest, which was not a characteristic on the first cat. I think the man obtained the second cat trying to overcome his guilt of what he had done to the first cat. I can; however, see how the second cat could be used as an imaginary form of the man’s guilt. I just think with the description of where the cat was sitting, this makes the cat more real for

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