Childhood innocence and imagination are powerful elements and can shape a child’s life. In the story “Zolaria,” the author uses symbols and imagery to argue childhood innocence and imagination can be harmful. To fully experience life, one must grow out of childhood imagination and mature into adulthood. The narrator of “Zolaria” starts her tale as a young, wide-eyed girl and ends still naïve but as an adult.…
In Frank Baum’s book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, he presents the themes of colors to represent different roles within the novel. Within the last few chapters, colors have been prevalent in reading. The role of color is an important aspect in literature as it improves the reader’s understanding of the setting and theme. Authors often also use colors to symbolize a deeper meaning that can pull the reader into the story. Without the use of colors as symbolism, the readers can sometimes miss underlying morals or themes that they might not directly express.…
Gary Soto’s vivid imagery and religious allusions recreate an event where sin and guilt leads him to reflect upon his actions as a six-year-old child. In the beginning of A Summer Life, Gary Soto reveals that he has a religious background by quoting that “he knew enough about hell” and that he “was holy in almost every bone”. In addition to his religiously influenced statements, he also states “angels flopping”. The recurrence of allusions from the bible in the introductory passage emphasizes that Soto knew about God and therefore, the consequences of sin even at a young age.…
Chapter 22: He’s Blind for a Reason, You Know Main Idea: Foster claims in this chapter that blindness is never just a fact—it always has symbolic significance in a story. He furthers his claim by saying that most texts feature metaphorical representations of blindness and sight, even if the story doesn’t contain literal blindness. Two important things are that blindness can mean much more than just the physical act of seeing, and that usually a characteristic such as blindness, is important when introduced early in a story. Literary Example: Slaughterhouse Five Analysis: True sight is an important concept that is difficult to define for Slaughterhouse-Five. As an optometrist in Ilium, Billy has the professional duty of correcting the vision of his patients.…
Denial of Reality in a Separate Peace One large recurring theme in John Knowles’ A Separate Peace is the idea that refusing to confront reality causes people to suffer. With World War II as the backdrop for the novel, A Separate Peace pushes this ideology through a once innocent group of boys at a boarding school. In the novel, there are three dynmaic chracters: Gene Forrester, Elwin (Leper) Lepellier, and Phineas. Gene ends up accepting the realities of war, and grows and develops because of it.…
¨I felt that I was not, never had been, and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.¨ (Knowles 186) In a book the book A Separate Peace by John Knowles two boys Gene and Finny are supposed best friends, but there is a rivalry that lies between them. As the book goes on Gene expresses his feelings of identity and jealousy within himself and towards Finny. The book setting is right at the beginning of WWII. Along with the physical war taking place, there is a war between these two boys. John Knowles uses universal themes such as identity and friendship to demonstrate the struggle of keeping the peace within a relationship.…
Our nation categorizes each individual as a single race, and by dividing us, people of mixed race are consistently left out. This happens in both Mexican Whiteboy, by Matt de la Peña, and I Am Joaquin, by Rodolfo Gonzales. Both of the main characters, Danny and Joaquin, come from two different cultural backgrounds which makes it very hard from them to fit in and feel comfortable in their own skin. Danny, being both Mexican and white, struggles to fit in with the white kids at his elite high school, and struggles find a place with his Mexican cousins and their community. In a similar manner, Joaquin struggles to find a balance with being half Aztec and half Spanish.…
The opening of Act 1, and ultimately, this book, reflects Willy’s state of mind as well as the setting. The “angry glow of orange” reflects Willy’s exhaustion and frustration from overwork, leading to the “air of dream” representing his delusions and daydreams. These two descriptions consequently reflect the stark contrast between Willy’s delusions and reality.…
Denial is a familiar concept because it is how we shut out the unwanted in our lives. It appears to allow us the freedom to choose what our worlds are made of. However, once we begin to apply it to the shaping influences in our lives, it becomes a danger to our capacity for personal growth. In A Bird in the House, Margaret Laurence explores the necessity of willfully accepting and embracing the legacies of the dead in our lives. Through the use of tone and symbolism, we are able to observe the resultant growth that accompanies this acceptance.…
Ever since he was born, the protagonist in “Identities” has only ever experienced the suburban life. His childhood reminds him of “girls on plodding horses” and “salmon tins glinting with silver, set above hand-painted signs instructing…
Through their actions, values, and beliefs each character’s identity is thoroughly unraveled within their narratives. The most obvious way that a person’s identity is most understood is through that individual’s actions. For…
Families dependably have their share of issues. Some might be minor, for example, coping with a defiant adolescent or a rebellious child. Others might be more serious and once in a while unrecoverable, such as dealing with lack of communication, secrets being kept from each other or potentially a volatile father. A case of this broken family is found in the tragic play Death of a Salesman composed by Arthur Miller. The family displayed in this play is the Loman family, who suffocate themselves in each others lies and dreams in desire of taking care of their issues, just to bring about the decimation of their family.…
Andrew Niccol presents Gattaca as a world destroyed by the pursuit of perfection and raises the question of what it means to be human. Niccol explores how personal identity and happiness are destroyed by pursuing perfection through the characters of Irene, Vincent and Jerome. Irene and Vincent struggled with their personal identities because of their genetic imperfections and Eugene suffered from the burden of perfection. Nonetheless, Niccol shows that these issues with perfection and imperfection can be overcome through the character development of Irene, Vincent and Jerome. Personal identity is destroyed by the pursuit of perfection and Niccol demonstrates this through the characterisation and costuming of Irene and Vincent.…
The following essay will focus on the film Boyhood (2014) in attempts to explain how three significant events in the main character’s life story, Mason, exemplify developmental changes in the lifespan. There will be references to three developmental domains, cognitive development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources and perceptual skill, physical development referring to growth in the process of puberty and psychosocial development being the expansion of the personality, including the gain of social attitudes and skills particularly according to Erikson theory, the battle of identity vs role diffusion (Sigelman, 2013, p. 38). Boyhood is a story, based over a 12-year period, of growing up captured through the eyes of a…
Interacting with one’s surroundings allows individuals to obtain a better understanding of the world. Humans learn new information everyday just by having a conversation with another person. Communication between others is the key to discovering what they are like. Interactions not only help but can also create conflict. In literature, writers use connections with different characters to show conflicting motivations and thus bringing out a theme.…