Dark side

According to some, love of money is the root of all evil. In some cases, simply being near money can cause moral groundings to erode. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in a time where money was shored up in rich houses and thrown about lavishly in big parties. This culture of wealth and pleasure was his modern world, and he wrote The Great Gatsby to comment about it. Within The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald posits that proximity to wealth causes vices such as carelessness, hypocrisy, and corruption,…

Morality of The Orphan Trains For the most part, American history is a story of triumph. Reaching the U.S.A. and achieving the “American Dream” are goals for many people. Christina Baker Kline's Orphan Train and the person that it follows portrays the failure of the American dream. Niamh’s story and the tragedy that she faces are tough, but through her hardships she manages to achieve a successful life and find her own “American Dream”. Through the orphan trains, many children like Niamh that…

The major conflict that takes place throughout The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is Mr. Gatsby himself trying to win over the love of his life Daisy Buchanan, even though she is married herself and he lets nothing get in his way of that. To start off, Gatsby buys an extremely lavish mansion in West Egg, that is directly located across the bay of Daisy 's home, in East Egg. While Nick himself lives next door to Gatsby, once he arrives back into town for the summer, he goes to East Egg to…

Marriages can Hold Hidden Secrets If marriage is a happily ever after, why do so many couples cheat on their spouses?Davis's story "Break it Down", helps clarify the false assumption that marriages will lead to happiness or satisfaction when looking through the text "The Storm", by Kate Chopin. In "Break it Down" by Lydia Davis, the narrator is obsessively expressing eight days of romance in which he spends $600 for. When breaking down the affair, he comes to a conclusion that the inevitable…

Utopias are an imagined place in which everything is perfect. Perfect, meaning being able to obtain all necessities, including love, which is not shown in the journey to El Dorado. This passage applies several literary elements in defining this idea. In Candide, Voltaire uses imagery and point of view in order to portray the idea that believing in a perfect world is less important than love. Voltaire depicts El Dorado as a utopia while using imagery to emphasize the exact look of a so-called…

Throughout The Great Gatsby the characters, events and themes also point towards the allegorical genre. The character Jay Gatsby represents the American dream because he started off poor but strived to make his life the way he wanted it to be. On the surface Gatsby’s death means that his dream of living happily with Daisy is dead. However, it also symbolizes the end of the 1920s and the end of the American dream. The overall theme of The Great Gatsby is the American dream losing priority among…

Two major themes of Wide Sargasso Sea are identity and image. Throughout Jean Rhys’s book, the identity of Antoinette, her mother, Annette, and every other character introduced are questioned either by themselves or another person. The book also narrates the growth of Antoinette and the finding, shaping, and losing of her identity. Many characters in Wide Sargasso Sea are concerned with how other people view them, and continually mock, make up, and misunderstand other people's images, while…

The Great Gatsby, although published nearly a century ago, continues to stay relevant in today’s society, and will likely continue for many years to come. It’s a timeless piece portraying themes of materialism, wealth, class, and love and loss in superficial relationships. In the roaring twenties, people are cheerful because of the end of WW1. Hence, the society in the novel becomes more concerned with material possessions, having affairs, attending wild parties and becoming exceedingly drunk.…

Batuhan Şen 15010003012 Lect. Esen Kara ENG113 They All Know It Is There "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is a short story by Ursula Le Guin which tells the story of a city called Omelas. The city is unique, because while the citizens dwell in wealth and prosperity, one kid must suffer and live in filth. The story questions whether can you live while an innocent kid suffers, or would you walk away? In this way, Scapegoating becomes necessity for the order of the Omelas society. In this…

Tuesdays With Morrie is a memoir written by Mitch Albom in honor of his favorite professor, Morrie Schwartz. Morrie Schwartz was something out of the ordinary. He never cared for climbing social ranks or becoming the richest man on Earth. Even so, he had been living for the same goal as everyone else around him: happiness. While everyone else sought after happiness through a bigger house or a new Ferrari, Morrie sought after warmth. He was a person deeply connected with the people around him and…