Dresden

In “The Colour out of Space” the first-person narrator arrives at a place described as “West Arkham” where he discovers five acres desolated and covered in ash and dust. There he asks an old man nearby, Ammi Pierce, what had happened there. From then on the narrator retells what Ammi tells him. Back in his earlier days there lived a family, the Gardners, on the farm there and Ammi was a close friend of the father, Nahum. Then someday a meteor fell onto their property close to their well and was…

With the concept of Schittny’s Invisibility Cloak, a feat as marvelous as that of using extreme distortion to simulate invisibility follows a very strict regime for it to actually become reality. And despite the irony of it, any individual needs an algorithm to cause chaos. The Cloak for instance, is the result of two large electromagnetic fields actively valancing atomic particles in the vicinity of the desired object to move constantly so that light that is directed at them passes through them…

A Metaphor for War: Schwarzschild Radius and Black holes Connie Willis communicates that a black hole is akin to war through the use of a number of metaphors in her story Schwarzschild Radius. Schwarzschild Radius is about a World War One veteran, Rottschieben who is recounting his time in the war to a curious college student who wished to know about his time working alongside the physicist that is attributed with the discovery of the Schwarzschild Radius. Willis uses comparisons such as…

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is a great hostile to war novel that presents the character Billy Pilgrim who is a wannabe in the novel. Billy Pilgrim gets himself lost in the wake of battling in World War Two when his mental solidness is diminishing. Billy recounts the tale of being stole to an unusual planet and meeting Tralfamadorians, the planet's life. These outsiders know each minute that their life will experience; in this manner, they are with the exception of their destiny. Through…

Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros written in 1959 is one of his most famous works forming a part of the Post War Avant-Garde Drama of the Theatre of Absurd. Rhinoceros demonstrates Ionesco’s anxiety about the spread of inhuman totalitarian tendencies in society. Inspired by his personal experiences with fascism during World War II, this absurdist drama depicts the struggle of one man to maintain his identity and integrity alone in a world where all others have succumbed to the beauty of brute force…

Over the course of two decades, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, edited, rewrote, and revised the now classic ‘anti-war’ novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. While much of the fiction about WWll was romantic, and remained so well into the 50s’ and 60s’, Vonnegut refused to approach the war in this manner. Instead, Vonnegut decides to explore the life of Billy Pilgrim, and in doing so, criticizes the banality of the war through the banality of Billy’s ensuing trauma. Vonnegut primarily does this by switching between…

Civil Disobedience Essay Civil Disobedience is an essay written by Henry D. Thoreau in 1849. In his essay he uses rhetorical question to engage his audience, and he uses those questions to make a statement how a government should be run. Thoreau is quoted in the paper saying “I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least". Using this argument, Thoreau uses rhetorical questions to prompt the reader into thinking of the idea of rebellion. They are used well in the…

Billy the Kid is an historical figure from the Old West whose story has eluded historians and has created controversy among biographers. One thing is sure; he has truly lived. However, most of his story told is part of a myth. The author Michael Ondaatje, in his novel The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, has improvised a story about this historical figure, with as the only starting point, his imagination. In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the author Michael Ondaatje uses the medium of…

3. Introduction to the Slaughterhouse-Five The ways we deal with our everyday life are different, some of us choose to deal with our problems and fight for the things which we want to achieve, but sometimes the reality in which we find ourselves is extremely cruel, perhaps each of us would have chosen to leave this reality through imagination. Fleeing from the cruel reality of war and the invention of a fictional planet is more or less the situation in which the main character of…

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut is part science fiction and part an autobiography telling his story of the war. Kurt Vonnegut uses the bombing of Dresden as a central setting that everything revolves around. The bombing is what makes this book part autobiography because Vonnegut was present during the bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war during World War II. The time travel part of the book makes it part science fiction. The setting of Slaughterhouse-5 is wide ranging because this book…