Often barriers withhold us from pursuing what we truly love, however, our ambition allows us to overcome these barriers and achieve a sense freedom. This precise course of action occurs in Tess Gallagher’s short story “The Lover of Horses”. “The Lover of Horses" concerns a woman, the narrator, who responds to her mother 's request to help bring her father home; he is drinking and gambling beyond reason. Instead of stopping him, she assists and encourages him. His obsessive nature is compared with the history of mental obsession in their family, particularly her great-grandfather, who obsessed over horses and abandoned their family to follow a circus act.…
In Sandra Cisneros’ bildungsroman The House on Mango Street, we see the main character, Esperanza struggle to find her place in Chicago, as well as within her own culture’s idea of the “perfect” woman, the ideal woman of her community and the ideal woman of the 80’s. In Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, we see two girls’ journey after they are abandoned by their mother in a small town located in Northern Idaho. Set in the 1950’s, we see Ruth and Lucille develop as they find their place within their small community and within society’s restrictions of this era. Although these two bildungsroman novels are drastically different, Robinson’s Housekeeping and Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street both explore female oppression throughout history…
Morally ambiguous characters make it difficult for a reader to define them as either good or evil. These characters are found in several novels, one is found in All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. John Grady is the main character of this novel, and throughout the story, he varies from displaying good and evil characteristics. In the beginning Grady is a good character, but as the novel goes on, he leans more towards being evil, then in the end, he redeems himself.…
(McCarthy,6), what made this quote stand out in All the Pretty Horses, is the symbolism used about the horses being as men, or as similar traits. The use of symbolism and imagery in this book from the Border Trilogy, has been very average but it still provides enough details to describe the way McCarthy uses them into the book, making the book “Something that seems like a narrative function like a story with an impetus, a thrust, something that must be resolved. Something that could be seen as motivation.” (Bourassa, 104). The following quotes are found it McCarthy's works where they represent imagery or symbolism: “... horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war.”…
Lastly, Junot Diaz presents a counter narrative against the mainstream narrative that women are far more emotional than men and subsequently more prone to being negatively affected by change and new prospects than males. Diaz does this by presenting the character of Lola, Beli’s daughter and Oscar’s sister. Lola was forced to move to the Dominican Republic with her grandmother, La Inca, for a short amount of time as a form of punishment after she ran away from home. Lola described the way in which she had to learn to adapt to living in the Dominican Republic. She describes “I’m into my sixth month here and these days I’m just trying to be philosophical about the whole thing.…
It is very easy to fool oneself into believing that the world is shaded in bright and happy colors, especially at a young age when one has not experienced the hardships of life. As kids the world seems like a field of possibilities, it is often only after traumatic experience that one learns that the world can and will be cruel, unfair, and unpleasant. It is when we move away from once ignorant beliefs that we grow as individuals and see life for what it really is, constant ups and downs. Cormac McCarthy is famous for his melancholy novels that more often than not present the world in darks and grey shades. All the Pretty Horses details the travels of a sixteen year old boy, John Grady Cole who after knowing the house he grew up in is about…
Everyone has a dream, whether they acknowledge it or not; everyone has a longing deep down to do something or be something. Throughout John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, dreams are an play a quintessential part of the character’s lives and goals. They are able to give someone a purpose, but also affect them negatively, which can be seen in both works.…
It is developed through stories that Esperanza tells about many women in her Mango Street community. These stories include those of Minerva, who has an abusive husband; Rafaela, whose husband locks her away in her home and Esperanza’s great-grandmother who was reluctantly married and lived a life of despair. For Esperanza, defying gender roles and remaining independent is an act of nonconformity, and a source of…
In the couplet, Brooks revisits the overarching theme of the importance of dreams. By writing with the same subjects of bread and honey from the opening line, Brooks gives the poem a circular, completed effect, a response to “I am incomplete,” (Brooks 5). This is the narrator’s final goal, that they won’t be “insensitive” to their dreams, that they won’t forget despite their many distractions and delays in achieving them. The luster and purity of old dreams will never fade. In “My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell,” Brooks and the narrator know that dreams are important, even if they are repressed and locked up in cabinets of “will.”…
Born in a family of Mexican immigrants, Sandra Cisneros discovers her niche in the American literature by writing from her experience as an immigrant growing at the confluence of two cultures. Until her teenager years, Cisneros’ family moves back and forth from Chicago to Mexico, making her feel not integrated in either culture. As Robin Ganz declares, Cisneros “derived inspiration from her cultural specificity and found her voice in the dingy rooms of her house on Mango Street, on the cruel but comfortable streets of the barrio, and in the smooth and dangerous curves of borderland arroyos” (1). In her short story, “Woman Hollering Creek”, Cisneros describes the life of a Mexican woman, Cleofilas that marries a man from “el otro lado” in the…
In order to understand what dreams are, we must be able to understand how they occur while we are sleeping, the historical viewpoint of them, as well as the importance of their existence and symbolism. III. (Memorable Closing) John Lennon once said, “I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one,” and indeed he wasn’t. We are all dreamers, all people of diverse background, of varying experiences, and difference in ages experience dreams.…
She had to tell herself on a daily basis that her mother did indeed love her very much and the only reason she had accepted to go was to give them that big house they always dreamed of and that happily ever after they all so deeply yearned for. That dream is crushed when she takes her own journey to “El Otro Lado” and came to the realization that nothing was as she dreamed it would…
The passage from All the Pretty Horses unveils various different stylistic choices the author, Cormac McCarthy, develops and fabricates which gives the work it’s eminence. The quote exhibits various different examples of well written diction, organization, and syntax. The quote exemplifies McCarthy’s eloquent diction via several examples of imagery, allusion, and specific jargon. Images such as Perez lighting his own cigarette and “blowing a thin stream of smoke” and “snapping” his lighter to light John Grady’s cigarette show Perez’s authority.…
Through the collection of poetry from the works titled, When My Brother Was An Aztec, Natalie Diaz delves deep into her childhood trauma through very imaginative and often unexpected ways. This collection is broken up into three sections, the first section focuses on the racism and oppression that Diaz experienced growing up as a Native American woman with poems such as “The Gospel of Guy No-Horse” which approaches this topic through humor. The second section of poems emphasizes how Diaz was consumed by her bother and his drug habits through poems like “How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs.” While section three concentrates on Diaz’s life outside of her brother through poems such as “Toward the Amaranth Gates of War or Love.” Although…
This person finds out how harsh reality can be and how this brutal life is having a catastrophic impact on this individual. Additionally, through imagery, the readers are able to visualize how this man who’s been having a cheerful dream suddenly gets waken up and reminded of the cold and wretched life he’s unfortunately living. Similarly In Night…