Novellas

Being alone is one of the worst feelings in the world. When someone is alone, there’s nobody there to lift them up when they fall; no one to help them in their time of need. Well, in the story “Thank You Ma’am” by Langston Hughes, a story set in the 1920-30s, one of the characters, Roger, feels that exact way. Alone. That is, until he meets Mrs. Jones, who instead of turning him in when he tries to steal her purse, treats him with kindness and respect. This story is clearly meant to bring…

The Rabbits Written by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan, 'The Rabbits' is an allegorical tale of colonisation. First published in 2000 by Lothian Books, the book parallels the real life happenings of the British invasion and colonisation of Australia and the effects on the Indigenous Australians. Tan's illustrations open his audience's eyes with his peculiar, bold, semi-abstract style that conveys the anxiety and bewilderment of the possums as they bear witness to the mass destruction…

P.G. Wodehouse once said, “The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.” This quote embodies the internal struggle the narrator of George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” faces while deciding the fate of the elephant. I chose this piece because the title is very intriguing to me and I felt like it would be an interesting piece of literature, especially since Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 are considered cult classics among…

A pearl is an item that is glorified for its extravagant beauty, but how can a thing with such beauty cause such an ugly demise? “The Pearl” was written by John Ernst Steinbeck in 1947. Steinbeck was an author known for using experiences from his from his travels, the people he met during those, and his own life experiences, such as his marriages to inspire beautiful novels giving insight to the lives and struggles of others he hoped to better shape other’s lives. In this novel, Steinbeck takes…

When I was the second grade at the high school, I started to write a poem. Honestly, it was not enough level to show other people, at that time, I thought it was a very good poem, so decided to apply the one of the biggest writing contest for high school student in Korea. It was summer vacation, and the contest was held in a Buddhist temple located in Kangwon-do. Because I bad not prepared for the contest, understandably, I could not win at the competition. After that, I started to investigate…

As humans, people tend to look for a cure or a way to escape to enjoy everyday pleasures or create something new. Both Robert Stevenson and Mary Shelley write about this in their novels. Their works, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein, portray these issues and show how their characters go through with the issue. Their novels also show the archetype the fall, when a character starts at a higher state of being and then quickly fall to a lower state of being. In Stevenson’s…

American Dream: the ideal that every US citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative. As prodigious as that sounds, that dream cannot always be fulfilled. The American Dream is fantasized by predominantly lower class workers to mislead themselves into thinking that they can reach any goal that they set for themselves. In the novel, Steinbeck uses this delusion in the novel, Of Mice and Men, to distract the characters…

Of Mice and Men- Dreams “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality,” said John Lennon, the lead singer and songwriter for the Beetles. Sometimes dreams can be harder to believe when they aren 't shared, but if you share them with someone close to you they can be more comforting and convincing. The novel Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck and the song “Let Me Take You There”, by the Plain White T’s both send a powerful message about having a dream and pursuing…

A metaphor, according to Wikipedia, is “figure of speech that identifies something as being the same as some unrelated thing for rhetorical effect, thus highlighting the similarities between the two”. Now one might think that it’s impossible for a single book to brilliantly and metaphorically relate farm animals and Russian communist idealisms, but Animal Farm by George Orwell does just that. From the opening page of the novel, Orwell’ preface allowed me to formulate ideas and concepts before…

In the novel Of Mice and Men, the author, John Steinbeck portrays loneliness on multiple occasions. He shows the reader the effects loneliness can have on someone and how they cope with it. A few characters Steinbeck illustrates as being lonely are Candy, Crooks, and Curley’s wife. Candy is a character who is older than the rest of the guys on the ranch. He expresses his loneliness through his disability of having only one hand and when he lost his dog. Frist, while working on the farm, Candy…