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“Like springs, adaptations can only go downhill.”(John Simon) A Separate Piece written by John Knowles, tells the story of two boys whose friendship is in constant motion of changing, from best friends to rivals. There are many changes in the movie that show a different experience for the audience. The movie adaptation of A Separate Piece has a less personal engagement between the characters and the audience as well as placing less importance on the events and characters. This creates a less…

Chapter 1 - Pick Up Lines and Open(ing) Seduction Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front begins the chapter with Paul Baumer and his classmates replenishing themselves with dietary needs. According to Foster’s How to Read Novels Like a Professor, “...first sentence...It establishes the main family of the novel…” (24). With that in mind, Remarque has already implied that the time frame should be around a place of war: “We are at rest five miles behind the front” (1). Remarque…

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is an absurdist comedy that follows the Bundren family on their journey to the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi to bury the deceased matriarch of the family, Addie. Addie’s husband, Anse, and their five children of varying ages traverse the countryside to Jefferson to fulfill Addie’s dying wish of being buried alongside her family in town; however, each character has his or her own personal motive for going on the trip. Fifteen individual characters…

A Dictated Deviation from Autobiographical Tradition: An Analysis of The Book of Margery Kempe When readers observe the traditional styles of an autobiography, there is a presumption that the voice of the writer will demonstrate a first-person point of view into their life’s journey with chronological recollections that led them to a significant part of their lives. The Book of Margery Kempe can be described as a complete deviation from the traditional style of an autobiographical novel as…

I feel that Baldwin chose this excerpt as the epigraph for the Giovanni’s Room because, the line itself it alludes to many of the key themes explored throughout the novel like masculinity, sexual identity, and being present. Placing the excerpt in the context of “Song of Myself” reveals even more about the idea of self-acceptance that Baldwin also explores in the novel; Many of the lines leading up to the final couplet begin with “How he,” as if to present a sort of distance between the narrator…

In Toni Morrison’s, The Bluest Eye, the author uses point of view as a method to highlight her way of writing. To display a different view of the occurring events throughout the novel, an array of narrators are used. The basic intention of doing this is to give us, as the reader an insight, without denouncing anyone in particular. This technique also allows certain characters, such as Claudia and Pecola, to be much more intensely emphasized. Throughout the narration an accumulation of various…

The events in many stories follow a specific pattern in order to make the storyline interesting and relatable. Joseph Campbell calls this occurrence the monomyth or in other words, The Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey is separated into three parts: The Departure, Initiation, and The Return. Each of these sections consist of smaller events that mostly all happen within stories that obey the rules of the monomyth. One of the multiple movies that exemplifies this is Mulan. In this movie, the main…

As I am waiting to get back to Earth I think about all of the stuff that has happened. Will my bones be okay? Will I actually see Nana? I guess I don’t really know until I get to Earth. I then ponder about my parents. I wonder if they will be worried, or maybe they don’t notice because of their stupid Mars research. At least on Earth they have water. I hope I can see Nana again, and I hope she is okay. I’m satisfied that I’m going home but, I am also very concerned about my bones. We all have to…

This essay will explore the narrative perspective of Herman Melville’s’ ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ and Peter Carrey’s’ ‘American Dreams’ and how narration can affect the way in which a story is read. Both of these authors use the narrator to tell the story in a different manner, all with different perspectives. McCall states “narrators are unreliable by definition. Fiction told in the first person is inherently deceptive” (1989, p.106) and this biased point of view obviously affects the readers…

In writing a story, a certain level of theory and technicality must be applied to the narration. Narration is important as it controls the mood, direction and the "regulation of narrative information”, between the reader and the story (1980, p. 41). In the opinion of Gérard Genette, narration is essentially diegesis, in that it can achieve no more than an impression of mimesis by making the story appear real and alive to the reader. Narration can impersonate reality, it will always appear as…