Absalom

family, along with his impoverished community. Unlike Child seeking Mother in our last story, this time Father goes forth and seeks his Sister along with his own Son. Stephen Kumalo is the local priest in his South African village, he has a son named Absalom whom has ventured out to Sophiatown; a very large city in South Africa. He, nor his wife have seen their son in many years, and with all the injustice covering South Africa, they fear for their child’s life. Stephen also has a sister named…

Canterbury Essay Geoffrey Chaucer was very clear about the characters he admired and despised in The Canterbury Tales. The prologue was a huge clue in revealing who Chaucer's favorite groups of people were. He had extremely strong opinions of these people in which he expressed through his writing. There were two certain people that Chaucer specifically favored. These people were the knights and the women. Right from the beginning it was very obvious that Chaucer valued the feudal class. In the…

The Suffering Hero In Alan Paton’s historical fiction novel Cry the Beloved Country, he describes two men who are brought together by their similar journeys. It takes place in South Africa before Apartheid; a policy system which discriminated against non white South Africans in the late 1900s. The novel begins with a man named Steven Kumalo who travels to Johannesburg after he receives a letter from a priest who informed him that Kumalo’s sister is “sick” and desperately needs his help. Along…

It so happens that in the Bible, God asked his son Jesus to die in order to put an end to people’s suffering. Jesus embraced this request with forgiveness, for the ones who sinned against him, and gratitude, to God for his blessings and the ending suffering. Forgiveness and gratitude can strengthen and heal people from many afflictions or trials presented to them. Similarly, in his 20th century novel, Cry, The Beloved Country, Alan Paton employs the use of anaphora in order to emphasize how…

“Cry, the Beloved Country” by Alan Paton is a novel about priest Stephen Kumalo, and his discoveries concerning corruption, faith, friendship, change, and tradition in the dynamic settings of Ndotsheni and Johannesburg, cities in South Africa. The novel carefully details the effects of advanced European society on the tribal systems of South Africa; and Paton analyzes how these societies and their laws affect young black people and their rights. The desertion of Ndotsheni by Kumalo’s family and…

Dante’s Inferno is considered one of the best works of humanity. In Inferno, Dante literally puts all kind of men into hell for their sins; from great kings to slaves, from every type of ethnicity, race, country and anything else a man identifies by. Based on Christian doctrines of his time, Dante has taken revenge over all kind of figures that he knew by. Furthermore, Inferno is filled with allegories and represents a deep literature. In this essay, we will discuss about the uses and…

turns into widespread fear throughout the entire population, fear of the potential rebellion of the lower class and the detrimental effects that accompany it, such as a lower workforce and thus lower production rates. Although the presumable death of Absalom Kumalo remains unsaid, one can assume that he did die, as he kills Arthur Jarvis. An action, such as murder, represents the devastating effects of fear and how fear can drive individuals to perform such actions similar to that of Absalom’s.…

Kumalo, the village Parson, recieves a letter from Msimangu, a fellow man of god, asking him to journey to the city of Johannesburg to see his "sick" sister Gurtrude.} {Kumalo arrives only to find out that she is a prostitute and that Kumalo's son Absalom has killed James Jarvis's son Arthur Jarvis, both of which are wealthy white men.} In book 2, the roles are reversed and the reader is introduced to James Jarvis, father of Arthur Jarvis, who finds out that his son was killed by a young man…

In her book Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison discusses how American literature uses distorted representations of blackness to better make sense of its own (white) American identity. She refers these black characters and images endemic to American literature as the “Africanist presence” (17). Through Morrison’s theory of the Africanist presence, we can better understand how Buffy the Vampire Slayer employs characters like Kendra and larger themes of monstrosity and darkness to uphold the power,…

fights, one son killed the other. The people wanted her to turn in her only son because of this. She was asking the King for help in saving her only son. King David accepted to help her but he wanted to hear the truth, which she did. Because of this, Absalom was permitted to return but the King refused to see him…