Anvitha Vadlamudi Doyle 7 The President Has Been Shot The title of this book is “The President Has Been Shot!” by James L. Swanson. This book is about the assassination of the 35th President of the United States.…
Smoke Signals Response A strong father-son bond is important for most children. In the case of Victor, the relationship with his father was only existent early on in his life. Arnold, Victor’s father, started drinking because of the tragic incident that resulted in Thomas becoming an orphan. Arnold became an alcoholic; his actions led to him being thrown out of the house by his wife.…
The narrative voice of Junot Diaz "Drown" depicts on how the protagonist has a collective amount of strained relationships who are physically and mentally drowning him. Having no father, to selling illegal substances in order to help his mother pay the phone and cable bill to address his engagement of homosexual activities with his former best friend Beto. The argument the protagonist illustrates indicates how it's preventing him from achieving success. The antagonist (Beto) distinguished everything he hated about the neighborhood to put everything in perspective for the narrator in which he "needed to learn how to walk the world he told me. There's a lot more out there."…
Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been? By Joyce Carol Oates is the story of Connie, a 15 year old Texan girl, and one fateful summer day. Through characterization and symbolism the author shows that often teenagers rush into the fantasy of adulthood, never expecting how real it can get. By using the summer to represent her fall from innocence, music to show how Connie feels, and her habit of checking her reflection to prove she’s still young and insecure- despite how she may act, Oates provides an intense look at how there is always more to what is going on than initially appears.…
Sonny’s Blues portrays the acts of brotherly love. Even though there are many struggles and conflicts that the characters go through with themselves and each other, the motive is all out of love. The narrator, who is unnamed, wants to look out for his brother Sonny. They have their differences which evolves in to huge problems in their relationship. The fact that they constantly want to be heard without hearing the other is the main cause of their conflict.…
Just a mere nine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most compelling and influential voices in American politics, Barack Obama published powerfully affecting memoir. Dreams from My Father reveals the story of Obama’s struggle to deal with his racial identity being that he is the son of a white American mother and a black African father. His struggle takes him from America to the African village of Alego where his great-aunt resided. The story begins in New York, where Obama discovers that his father, a man who was not present in his life has died in a car accident.…
J.R.R. Tolkien one of the well-known English writer and poet who once stated, “Not all those who wander are lost”, claims that people who wander are not lost, in reality, they are curious individuals who are true life seekers. In other words, people who wander around the world, like travel writers are not astray, instead they are people who are motivated to learn and experience the world from their own eyes. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, is one of the well-known novels written in 1951 but later published in 1957, explaining the life of people after the World War II. This novel gives a voice to a new generation known as the Beat Generation who were the counterculture to the culture before World War II in America.…
The relationship between father and son is something complex and fragile. It is generally built from childhood, a very tender point in life, and in some cases the father chooses to shirk his responsibilities rather than be an active presence in their child’s life. This is an incredibly popular topic in all facets of media, and is the subject of “All Over but the Shoutin”, by Rick Bragg. The narrator’s feelings in the piece are quite obviously complicated, and the reader sees him grapple with them and, in the end, come out of it more confused than when he started. This memoir explores the legacy of childhood animosity, and how that animosity can be a burden all the way into adulthood and trying to forgive and forget is much easier said than…
The Main character of the story is Stephen Quinn. Stephen is 15 years old and lived with his dad and grandpa ever since he was born. When Stephen is 15, his grandpa dies and it leaves him with his dad. When Stephen ends up in Settler’s Landing, the people learn to trust him and befriend him, but some people think that he is some kind of spy from another settlement that doesn’t like their ways.…
In 1971, she began teaching literature and creative writing at the State University of New York at Purchase as an associate professor. Morrison continued her successful emergence as a writer with the publication of her second novel, Sula (1973), it is a novel about a girl who lives in a small town in Ohio whose community is destroyed by World War I. It also shows the story of friendship between two African American women that begins in childhood and is damaged by the inability of the surrounding community and of the women themselves to recognize the primary significance of that relationship. The novel describes the racism that black experience in all aspects of life and it allows the reader to see how people in the situation of these characters…
Forgetting about the past is often a way for people to move on into the future. Erasure in life is something that many people will do in order to move forward but never really succeed in doing. In A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee’s character, Franklin “Doc” Hata, strives to cover up past events in his life through this process of abolishment of past events. He does this in the hopes of achieving a seemingly perfect lifestyle to the bystanders in his neighborhood. With this, Doc Hata builds a seemingly clean identity by neglecting the reality of his tragic past involving many of those he loved, and loses sight of who he really is as an individual.…
T. Caraghessan Boyle’s story, “Greasy Lake”, is a rite of passage story. This can be seen in the themes throughout the story. The story itself has coinciding themes in it. Right from the beginning the boys are looking for trouble.…
Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Once in a Lifetime” is about a girl, named Hema, talking to a teenage boy Kaushik about what happened when he entered her life again. The story is written like a letter by older Hema from a future time to Kaushik, who is not present. We don’t know what happened to him and she is writing this letter to him. The most important part of this story is that Jhumpa Lahiri uses the first and second person perspective to tell the story which helps the reader to feel familiar with the family and the culture, creates a nostalgia even if the story did not happen to the reader, helps the reader understand the relationship between “I” and “you” as well as feeling the “I”s emotions while reading, and the most importantly makes the epiphany…
The narrative streams seamlessly while keeping an animated stylishness that keeps the reader’s interest. However, one of the book’s main flaws is that it completely skips any kind of introduction. It begins immediately with a stream of consciousness between newspaper articles and writers that allocate the controversy and how rock music being integrated into American culture. Altschuler places an importance on music by asking, “What does music signify?” Altschuler exposes the fuming response to this question.…
Character and Point of View in “The Red Convertible” “The Red Convertible” is a short story by Louis Erdrich, in which two native American brothers named Marty and Henry decide to buy a red convertible Oldsmobile together. The two brothers spend much of the summer travelling around together in the car until the older brother, Stephan, is deployed to Vietnam. When Stephan returns, he is not the same and Marty tries desperately to recover their past relationship. The round, static, perseverant character of Marty in “The Red Convertible” is revealed through the first person point of view. The younger brother in the story, Marty, is round and static.…