Absurdist fiction

The Alchemist is a fiction novel by one of the best-selling and most influential authors all over the world, Paulo Coelho. It talks about Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy, who frequently dreamed about finding a treasure in the base of the Egyptian Pyramids. Santiago is a smart boy who was studying at the seminary to be a priest, but that was his father’s plan for him. In fact, Santiago wanted to be a shepherd because he values freedom a lot; he wanted to wander and discover. His desires in…

The book “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton is a great book to analyze. The narrator of the book is the main character whose name is Ponyboy Curtis. Ponyboy, his brothers, and their close friends are greasers and their enemies are the socs. They are divided by their socioeconomic status. Ponyboy is a 14-year old boy whose life has been turned upside-down after the death of his parents and having to live with his oldest brother, Darry, who is 20 years old. His life turned even worse when he ran away…

In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas’ development as a reader represents the historical transformation from a traditional, transparent and factual way of understanding the world (typical of the 1950s and the Cold War period) towards a reading related to the possibility of multiple meanings and the metaphor (characteristic of the 1960s). In particular, the paranoid perception of reality, questioning the appearance of the things and looking for their transcendental meaning, allows the acceptance…

In Karen Russell’s short story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” she uses the epigraph, which is based off a book named “The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock”, to show the reader what the wolf-Girls should be thinking or acting like during that stage. An epigraph is a quotation at the beginning of a text or a section of a text suggesting the text’s theme or central idea. In Stage One Karen Russell shows this by devolving the majority of the characters in this stage.…

The goal of my written task is further expand the reader’s understanding of Nector’s perspective in his decision to end his relationship with Marie for Lulu. In Erdrich’s short story, “Flesh and Blood,” the protagonist Marie recounts the time she visits the Sacred Heart Convent with her daughter, Zelda, to gloat about her success and power in the Chippewa tribe. When she returns home, her daughter finds a letter addressed to Marie from Nector. The letter in “Flesh and Blood” is short, and does…

In La Jetee, my interpretation of watching the film was a young man traveling in time as an experiment. Although as I continue watching, there are details within the film such as the background sounds, transitions of photos, and the still photos that give a deeper meaning than of a Sci-fi movie shown this year. In this essay, I will explain how La Jetee uses transitions as well as background sounds to emphasize the still images meaning of time and reality. Chris Marker creates an illusion of…

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is renowned for its manipulation of and commentary on language in the role of human psychology. As readers receive information on the Bundren family from the novel’s numerous narrators, their sanity and reliability increasingly come into question. Because the narrators of the story are active characters themselves, Faulkner uses indirect characterization to construct their personalities from multiple, subjective viewpoints. This indirect characterization comes…

The text I composed my questions and theories from is “Where are you Going, Where Have you Been?” Initially, this short story captured my interest through its strikingly, realistic scenarios stemming from the protagonist Connie’s attitude towards her mother and sister along with the secret dates with boys at the diner. This text struck me as an ideal choice because of the ambiguous antagonist, Arnold Friend, this character presents several theories of different meanings explaining what the…

The composer romanticises ideas of motherhood throughout this poem and expresses the hardships experienced. Her childhood home was a place of stories and songs, recounted to her by her mother and grandmother and her childhood had a pivotal effect on her writing. Everything she writes about has been infused with the radiance of those days in Brisbane growing up through the 1980s. The poem is about a daughter who has just faced the death of her mother. She is saddened about her last encounter…

Many novels and books can look to be compared to each other with simple comparisons, but can actually still be completely different once they are looked into further. In the film Rain Man, directed by Barry Levinson and written by Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass, and the novel, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, share many comparisons, but the comparisons themselves are too different to see an eye to eye overlapping comparison. Some comparisons are clearer than others, but the ones that stand out…