O. Henry Award

Katie Young Peyer ENGL 1302 15 11 2016 Research Paper: Cathedral Raymond Carver’s story “Cathedral” is about a blind man named Robert who visits a woman friend, married to another man. The protagonist in the story is the narrator himself. This story reveals the lives of two blind men, one physically and the other one symbolically blind. This story mainly focuses on the narrator. Narrator’s mesmerizes not only reveal his flaws, but also his perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes towards…

The texts “I Escaped A Violent Gang” and “Making Sarah Cry” have similar themes of courage. Each text shows the theme differently throughout the text. In “I escaped A Violent Gang” the author had to go through different events needing courage. In “Making Sarah Cry” Sarah shows courage while standing up to her bullies. While both of these texts share a common theme, the mood of the texts is completely different. The memoir “I Escaped A Violent Gang” has a mood of sadness and is a bit scary…

Metaphor and Symbolism in Langston Hughes’s My People My people is one of Langston Hughes’ poems which is about working class black African American people. In this poem, he compared the beauty of nature to the beauty of his people. My people is a very short poem, built in three stanzas which consist of two lines in each stanza. This poem was written in simple language, therefore, the readers can easily understand what he is trying to convey. I believe, beneath its simple words, this poem…

One's ability to see is often taken for granted as it is in "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver. The title suggests that the story deals with a cathedral, but it is really about two blind men; one physically, the other mentally. One of the men is Robert, the blind friend of the narrator's wife, and the other is the narrator himself. The narrator is the man who is mentally blind, and unknowingly describes his own prejudice. Carver writes the husband as a man with a very narrow mind. Two instances in…

The Giver One day a dog named Lucky was walking around his neighborhood looking to give help to the ones that need it. Lucky was a giver he as always, loved to give to fellow animals, he would go to the forest to pick out fruits to give to small animals that couldn’t go for them self’s because it was dangerous. So One that day Lucky walked into Old Lady Eve, she was an old cat that lived next to Lucky. When Lucky talked to her she asked “oh Lucky would you be a good boy and go and fetch me some…

Raymond Carver is known for writing minimal fiction; a style of writing popularized in the 1980s and heavily criticized for using new techniques. Carver’s writings are heavily influenced by his own life of alcoholism and abuse. When speaking on his past alcoholism Carver said, “It 's very painful to think about some of the things that happened back then. I made a wasteland out of everything I touched. But I might add that towards the end of the drinking there wasn 't much left anyway”…

After a dispute between Wilfred and his wife he plans to murder her with the help of his son, Henry. Henry, who also has harsh feeling for his mother after she told him how much she hated Henry’s girlfriend, is manipulated into helping Wilfred kill his mother. After the murder takes place Henry becomes mentally unstable and leaves his father and goes off with his lover and continues a life of crime. Wilfred ended up placing his wife’s body in…

“The Grasshopper and the bell cricket” by Yasunari Kawabata is a short story which is told by an isolated narrator who looks in on the situation before him and then communicates to us in the first person. Kawabata makes use of this narrator to communicate themes of alienation, lost love, deception and the nature of time. Themes such as these are very relevant in the lives of ordinary, everyday people and carry much weight in them. The fact that Kawabata is able to capture so much reality in the…

“Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos” writes Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel in his third volume of the Athenaeum. Many can tell that irony is something of the opposite than what a reader expects it to be. Irony leads to chaos in the end of the stories, an angel arriving, a father who left his family, and a family getting murdered. Sherman Alexie’s “Because My Father Always Said He Was The Only Indian who saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star Spangles…

Throughout many pieces of literature, one may evaluate several themes from a story. These themes may range from love, to heroism, to something completely different. In the stories “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant and “The Gift of the Magi” by O.Henry, several different themes are able to be named. However, both stories share one common theme, that being sacrifice. Not only did characters in both stories sacrifice their own happiness because they wanted other people to be happy, but they also…