Richard Shelton's Short Story 'The Stones'

Decent Essays
1. In the short story “The Stones”, Richard Shelton, a contributor to Flash Fiction, illustrates the notion that each generation tends to alter their views on life as they grow older. 2. He provides evidence by first personifying an assortment of rocks and depicts the behaviors of their simplistic community. 3. He reveals that the ambitions of little stones exceed that of their parents, who view any movement as a shameful action. 4. Then, he asserts that these stones, once free, eventually become disposed to a comfortable idleness, and they too acquire new perspectives. 5. Toward the end of the text, the author infers that even elder stones, fat with comfort, may still dream of such exhilarating adventures. 6. Shelton’s purpose in writing this

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    At first glance, “You Throw a Stone,” by Juan Felipe Herrera, looks like a piece of found poetry written using the erasure method (a method of found poetry where poets take a piece of literature, usually a poem, and erase most of the words, leaving behind words that form a poem when read in order), but that is not so, Felipe’s words are all his own, albeit written in a creative and unique way. “You Throw a Stone,” is written in free verse, an open form of poetry that allows a poet to write to his heart’s content without restrictions on rhyme, meter, or rhythm. The most compelling and funky part of this poem is the structure, Felipe did not write “You Throw a Stone” like a typical poem: line after line, with correct punctuation and one space…

    • 352 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Uncommon Ground Analysis

    • 948 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Is it the place for which we take responsibility, the place we try to sustain so we can pass on what is best in it (and in ourselves) to our children" (Cronon, 89). Here he argues that our homes, and in turn humanity, should be included under the umbrella of nature for the sake of environmental betterment. Unfortunately, he fails to account for those who struggle to identify with a “home,” and have been deprived of its benefits due to cultural erasure. In describing her childhood feelings of alienation in the face of cultural erasure, Savoy shares, “My parents’ muteness once seemed tacit consent that generational history was no longer part of life or living memory……

    • 948 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Mauro Senesi demonstrates and depicts the extensive contrast that is present in a child and an adult. Mauro Senesi precisely aims towards how they react and deal with change. The two sides are often seen intertwined with conflicts being so they value and view different ethics and beliefs. The child often is at a disadvantage as adults would overpower their viewpoints and adults are often unable to admit change. Within “The Giraffe”, Mauro Senesi enables his story to effectively utilize archetypes and symbols in order to represent the disparity among the adolescence and the mature.…

    • 657 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Our Town is clearly a representation - and largely a celebration - of small-town American life. Nearly every character in the play love’s Grover's Corners, even as many of them acknowledge its small-mindedness and dullness. Its sleepy simplicity, in fact, is its major point of attraction for many characters. Dr. Gibbs, for instance, who refuses to travel, thus cultivates his ignorance of life outside of Grover's Corners in order to remain content within it; his son, too, decides not to go away to college because everything he could want is available at home. Of course this staunchly conservative position creates some of the major problems in the play.…

    • 1293 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    Sherman Alexie's Flight

    • 1939 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Self-identity is a form of individuality that has been molded by the surroundings people enclose themselves with. Human beings are constantly interpreting who they are. The human mind is a stream of thought that is constantly churning in motion, while the evolution of the conscious awareness is a lifetime process of interpreting the world around us. Sherman Alexie, a Spokane-Coeur d'Alene American novelist, exemplifies the conflict of self-identity in his novel Flight, where he seeks to reveal the value of his ancestry from several tribes and render the importance of the daily challenges Native Americans face from within their history. Sherman Alexie was born on October 7, 1966, in Spokane, Washington.…

    • 1939 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Decent Essays

    In chapter seven of the book “Seedfolks”, the author Paul Fleischman presented two new characters: Virgil and his father. Virgil - a fifth-grade boy who was excited about his summer vacation. His father was a daydreamer person who always had some plans about the way how to become a rich man. The author described both characters as hopeful people who strived to make some changes in their life. Virgil father wanted a big farm, and Virgil wished about an eighteen-speed bike.…

    • 444 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    1) During his time at the Emergency Child Service, Marc Parent had to witness the horror of child abuse that would haunt him for years. The things he saw and experienced over the years took their toll on him and in return, causing him to doubt his own motives and abilities. It was also due to these experiences that had shaped how he named the title of his book. The phase ‘’Turning Stones’’ can have different interpretation according to the author. This phrase first mentioned in chapter eight, where Marc Parent was recalling the fieldtrip that he had with his classmates.…

    • 1130 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This passage from Last Child in the Woods written in 2008 by Richard Louv, explores the relationship between people and nature with the growing influence of technology on society. Louv attempts to inform his audience, primarily older parents, about a growing divide between new generations and the natural world, through questioning why “so many people no longer consider the physical world worth watching.” Louv uses examples and appeals to the logic and emotion of the reader in order to get his point across. Louv begins the passage very intentionally with an example of an experiment where genetic technology is used to change the colors that appear on a butterfly’s wings. By beginning with this example, Louv appeals to the logic of the reader…

    • 840 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Few artistic works can do justice to the intricacies of life. Of these rarities is the album the ‘Golden Age’ by Woodkid. The first song, ‘The Golden Age’, starts with the end of a childhood and the loss of naiveté. The album dips into key moments of the boy’s life, such as his first love, marriage, journey off to war, his trauma as a soldier, and his death away in a foreign land, recalling his naiveté as a child. Throughout the album, the boy changes from being ‘made of wood’ and transforming into a dying soldier ‘made of marble’.…

    • 152 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    There are events that tear at our heartstrings pulling us into action to combat our morality and compassion. Times where we are compelled to make a difference, to put in our best effort in moments that define who we are. In the story, “And of Clay are we Created,” the tone and theme of the story creates a dynamic that changes from destruction to the fight for survival through our journey with the protagonist Rolf Carle who is thrust into a struggle for life that rocks him to the very core. These 2 elements create the story and gets the reader emotionally involved while creating a dialogue peering into ourselves. The story teaches that even though we try and hide from our past like Rofl there will be something that changes us and that forces us to face our demons.…

    • 1161 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    During Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the theme of escapism reappears countless times to create the idea that both Sam and Joe use The Escapist, and their careers as superhero artist, to be able to escape from the obstacles and insecurities in their lives. The novel fleshes out this theme by using various important bug metaphors throughout the story. One way to make their significance more apparent is through the exposure of a distinction between the definition of escapism as we know it and the one present in the novel. As told in the form of Houdini’s magical stunts, escapism was never just about a question of escape, but also a question of transformation; accordingly, it was called ‘Metamorphosis. ’(Chabon, 4).…

    • 2001 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This also shows how our perspective is different when we're young: a place as far away as China or Calcutta can seem as different and exotic as something as close to us as Kansas City. It also shows how the road seemed as if it went anywhere when the speaker was a child; however, when the speaker aged and matured they only realized that the road does not have endless possibilities. The road only leads to the father’s final resting place. The experience of her father's passing humbled her. It made her realize that when we are young our lives do not actually have endless possibilities, and in reality, no matter how successful we were in our lives, we all end up in the same place, six feet under the…

    • 688 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Stretching across nearly all realms of Romanticism is the idea that individual freedom and experiences incite the imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge explicitly expresses this query of thought in his poem “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” In addition to Coleridge, many other members of the Romantic movement also engaged in imagination-centered writing. Conversely, the Enlightenment movement opposed this emphasis on imagination, and instead, the Enlightenment movement valued scientific conclusions brought about using rational and empirical thinking. Therefore, Romanticism challenged the preexisting Enlightenment beliefs in England during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.…

    • 1716 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The right words The stone lion (Wild and Voutila, 2014) begins and ends with the lion being a statue in front of the library. The journey taken through the beginning and the end of the story allow the readers to feel, dream, imagine and think about feelings of the lion and the feelings that he encounters. Margaret Wild and Rita Voutila allow the readers to embark on the same journey through the use of emotive language and pictures throughout the story. Humans are able to gain the information though the use of their senses, sight and sound (Tunnell, 2008).…

    • 1027 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Humans are continuously evolving with their surroundings, leaving the past behind. However, certain aspects of the past can cause mental pain to the extent that humans need to eliminate the thought of being defeated or taken advantage of using inhumane measures. The Cask of Amontillado written by Edgar Allen doe and Stone Mattress written by Margaret Atwood are two short stories based around the violent acts due to the distress caused previously in life. This distress affects one’s emotion, disturbing their moral and ethical thinking when resolving the issue. ‘Revenge’ is the natural human extinct when it comes to mending an unhinged past, and in order to take revenge, the idea of false ‘trust’ is applied to make the revenge as insufferable…

    • 949 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays