It is difficult for some people to go against the beliefs of the majority, especially when a topic is considered too controversial to challenge. In Margaret Atwood’s “My Last Duchess”, this happens to be the case for her female protagonist when her class studies a poem by Robert Browning that is also titled “My Last Duchess”, in which a Duke had his Duchess killed for his own selfish reasons. Unexpectedly, the young girl’s interpretation of the Duke is vastly different from the rest of her class…
can be inferred that O’Brien is trying to describe the horrors that he saw in both the My Lai area and Vietnam in his tour of duty there. The way the events that transpired in Vietnam are described in the book is there is a section of narrative,…
On the morning of March 16, 1968 in a small village called My Lai in the Quang Nai province of Vietnam, small families of mothers, young children, and elderly were naively enjoying their breakfasts and chattering amongst themselves. Not long after, soldiers of the Charlie Company commanded by Lieutenant William Calley Jr. invaded the hamlet in a search and destroy mission (Robertson 465). American soldiers relentlessly and mercilessly attacked unarmed, unresisting Vietnamese families. The air…
surmise believed it. I was exhausted; I grabbed all my bags and lay down on my bed and locked the door. I stayed there for a couple of minutes thinking about what would my life be in this new place. I looked out of the windows; I see nobody walking around the sidewalk, or kids playing outside or people chit chatting in the neighborhood. And I said to myself, "I 'm already feeling lonely, I wouldn 't get a chance to make new friends in this area". It took me a year to…
Separate from many other cultures and music scenes, teens are taught that the best way to deal with emotions is to keep them inside, to react with violence, or to make sarcastic jokes about them, which is completely different from the message of the Emo community (Bailey 7). This freedom of expression and emotion is a positive influence…
Is Success Tangible? Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman is a very powerful play that discusses not only the slow demise of Willy Loman, the aging salesman with two unsuccessful sons, but also highlights the different views that people can have regarding success. Willy Loman, the father of Biff Loman and brother of Ben, is a salesman who has dedicated his life to building up his reputation. His son Biff has spent much of his life trying to find a job he truly loves to do, but has…
“Death leaves a heartache that no one can heal and love leaves a memory that no one can steal”-Anonymous. In Arthur Miller’s play All my Sons shows that it is difficult to accept the death of a loved one. During the war Joe Keller and Herbert Devver ran a machine shop which made airplane parts Devver was sent to prison because the firm sent out defective parts causing deaths of many men. Keller went free and made a lot of money. The twin shadows of this catastrophe and the fact that the…
“My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning is a poem written in the form of a dramatic monologue. In it, the speaker describes the portrait of his late wife to the servant of a prospective bride’s father. Throughout the description, the speaker’s sociopathy is made increasingly clear, with the heavily implication that he was the actual cause of the wife’s demise. Browning reveals the prideful, control-obsessed, and sociopathic character of the speaker through self-boasting, caesuras in the monologue,…
prospective bride receives, being purposefully deprived of both gendered pronouns and choice of action as part of the arrangement. Plath uses metaphor and connotation in her work to demonstrate the unbalanced power dynamics in marriage itself. The best place to examine an imbalance is at the bottom, and what lower place of power exists than that which is not even human? Plath's descriptions of the girl as an object dehumanize her, reducing her status to below the status of her potential husband…
the events that have influenced the character to develop into the person that they present themselves to be in present day. For example, in the first flashback of Act I, Willy and his two sons are in the Loman House when Bernard, the son of Willy’s friend, Charley, enters. Bernard warns Biff that he is about to flunk math and the he won’t be able to graduate if that happens. This angers Willy and he launches into a speech to his boys about how “the man who makes an appearance in the business…