John Updike

The short story, “Araby” by James Joyce illustrates a young boys’ unfortunate experience with first love. Throughout “Araby”, Joyce uses many terms which invoke sexual and religious connotations in order to portray the setting and illustrate the boy’s sexual affection for the girl. In addition, religion is a large part of the boy’s way of life but as sexual needs come into play, the boy realizes that his religious form of affection is much different from the normal way of life. Thus, showing him…

Araby 1a. While reading the story "Araby," the theme of innocence is one that I picked up early on. From what I understand, the girl in the story seems to be the very first girl, or at least one of the first, that he is interested in. Since he is not very experienced with these emotions, his actions reflect that. For example, he states that he would wait every morning watching her door, and when she came out he would quickly follow her. However, if the paths they were both taking ever…

especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life is a hero. A main character in a narrative that is characterized by lack of traditional heroic qualities, such as idealism of courage is an anti-hero. I believe that Sammy, the main character in John Updike's story "A+P" better fits the role of an anti-hero rather than a hero. To me, a hero tends in literary work tends to exhibits traits that society values, Heros tend to come out "on top" at the end of story. This does not happen to…

The short stories “Araby” by James Joyce and “How I Met My Husband” by Alice Munro have strikingly different tones established by the two authors. The stories both consist of a narrator with a love interest, however the authors’ use of diction, imagery, and setting create a difference in tone of the two stories. In “Araby,” Joyce begins the story in a setting with a very dark, gloomy tone. Joyce accomplishes this by mentioning how the priest, the former tenant of the house, had died in the…

The short story “A Mere interlude” written by Thomas Hardy makes effective use of narrative voice to reveal the intentions of Hardy in crafting such a story. The irony of the title, as what was supposed to be “A Mere Interlude”, Baptista’s short and tragic marriage to her ex-lover Charles Stow, eventually takes form as a major turning point in her life. It subjects her to much emotional turmoil and eventually leads her back to the one thing she hoped to escape from through her marriage to…

Introduction (Situation, Problem, Approach, Theme) John Updike’s story, A&P, takes place in a small, conservative New England town. The time of year is during the summer, sometime around 1960. Most of the story is set in a small, local A & P grocery store, where the narrator is the cashier. The narrator’s name is Sammy, and he is nineteen years old. When three girls in bathing suits enter the store, he watches them as they make their rounds through the aisles, judging them and making…

Leo Tolstoy and James Joyce both use the aspect of light and darkness as symbols in their stories to represent the characters and their feelings. In The Death of Ivan and Ilyich, one of the symbols Tolstoy uses is the black sack. This sack was a long narrow sack that was never ending and the character in the story, Ivan, experiences going through this black sack twice. The first time he experiences going through this sack was right after he was given a medicine, opium. Ivan falls into the black…

While reading the short story “Araby” by James Joyce, one should be aware that the author wrote this short story to go with his collection of short stories, called “Dubliners.” These short stories were composed to fit into a collection that had three categories: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. “Araby” was created to fit into the childhood category, and it demonstrated the loss of innocence with the added twist of vanity. In my opinion, the brilliant idea contained in “Araby” formed a work…

Matthew Vo IB HL English IV Johnson 23 October 2017 Analysis of Soap Suds In this short poem, a man is portrayed thinking back about a charming youth memory. After quickly remembering this experience he all of a sudden comes back to the present, apparently beset by what he recollects. In Soap Suds by MacNeice, he portrays the man's movement through a striking tactile ordeal of a youth memory to at last demonstrate that his adolescence is gone even with harsher substances of growing up. In…

“Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” (158). “Araby” is a story of initiation, which allows us to recognize that the short story, will without a doubt include a valuable life lesson. This story tells a story about a young boy who believes he has fallen in love with a girl who he has never really had a conversation with and has eventually created an image of her in his head that is unrealistic and foolish.…