George Saunders

A dystopian is the opposite of a utopia. A utopia is a perfect society where everyone has everything they need, everyone gets along, everyone is happy, and basically life is perfect. A dystopia is the exact opposite of that. People don’t have things they need, people are poor, not happy, not everyone is happy, people are dehumanized, and overall it’s a terrible society to live in. The dystopian world in Ready Player One is comparable to the Holocaust, because they both were dystopias, people…

Empowerment and disempowerment using the gaze is manifested as one of the fundamental themes in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) as well as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Written soon after the Second World War, Nineteen Eighty-Four was a novel which portrayed the experiences of Winston Smith, the protagonist and other significant characters who are bound to live within a totalitarian regime in which the powerful forces are punishment and fear. The Handmaid’s…

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. The Five Stages of Grief. They can be applied to various aspects of life. However, I believe that survivors guilt is one of the best ways that the stages can be applied. Denial leaves us questioning every little thing. It leaves us thinking that there isn’t a way the world can just go on. It makes it so hard to even make it through a day, nevertheless it is debatably the most important stage; it is where you first start and where you start to…

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon alludes to sources of power for both colonizers and colonized. Colonizers gain their power from both physical and psychological violence, whereas the colonized must gain power over the colonizers through physically violent rebellion. Hannah Arendt, in Crises of the Republic, takes a very different view of power. While she agrees that occasionally violence is used to exert power and control, true power comes from the concerted efforts of the group, not…

Exhibiting Ayn Rand’s voice the influential piece The Fountainhead, expresses the views Rand wanted shared. Ayn Rand, born in Russia in 1905, lived a normal childhood until Bolshevik soldiers took over her father’s store during the Russian Civil War forcing her family into poverty. The sudden change in lifestyle led to Rand developing strong feelings about the government’s involvement in people’s livelihoods. Rand continued to create new political, social and religious beliefs that led to her…

The Shadow Lines discusses the effects of fear on memory, the connection between the past and the present in narrator’s own identity, the life story of an Indian boy there and in London. The crucial and historical events like communal riots of 1963-64 in Dhaka, World War II, Partition of India, and Swadeshi Movement that occurred in 1980s are recalled by the narrator and these memories traumatize the narrator. The aspect of cosmopolitanism is found in the character of Ila. The protagonist is…

Imagine living in a society where individualism wasn't an acceptable concept. Picture a world where “I” wasn't a state of mind. This is the theme of Ayn Rand's Anthem, a dystopian novel set in the distant future. “We learned that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around it, which causes the day and the night. We learned the names of all the winds which blow over the seas and push the sails of our great ships. We learned how to bleed men to cure them of all ailments.” (Rand 23). This quote…

The movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is about a prisoner McMurphy, a disobedient free spirit crash into a mental institution and try to escape hard labour work in work farm. The character of McMurphy highly conflicted with the institution system and reveal the characteristics of total institution, including do everything in the same place, total control of inmate’s live and surveillance. Besides, his difference within the inmates and his impact on them allow us to picture the moral career…

Existentialism is a Humanism was a popular lecture given by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945 at Club Maintenant in Paris. Sartre is regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. This lecture was his most widely read of all his philosophical works. The goal of the lecture was to explain that Sartre’s philosophy was a form of existentialism. Sartre’s aim was to defend existentialism against a number of charges which had been made against it (Warburton). He believed…

the book have an end goal that they want to achieve. The characters Lennie and George have a goal and that is to own their own farm. This means that they want a farm and want to live off of all that the farm produces. Ultimately their goal of owning their own farm drives them to make better decisions and live a more fulfilling life with that goal in mind. This dream is so powerful in the story because it makes George and Lennie to make choices that they normally will not if they do not want…