Stranger than Fiction

Too often do we take for granted the basic ability to speak in fear of critical judgment from our peers. The pressures of fitting into society as normal citizens brutally crushes the confidence and dreams of a happy life for Helen Keller in “A Word for Everything,” and “Living with Dyslexia,” written by Gareth Cook. In her early childhood, Helen Keller recalls standing on her porch feeling dumb and uncertain of what the future held for her due to being deaf and blind (Keller 145). Gareth Cook…

the Cerberus(Kerberus). However most of it is the same, for an example Hercules holding a club and the Cerberus with three heads and snarling in all directions.In this interpretation we see Hercules trying to use force to control the Cerberus rather than in the first interpretation where he is using passive means to tame the beast. In this interpretation he is showing his power as a god to control something that is beneath…

Is Satire Early Sarcasm? (An analysis of Chaucer’s use of satire to reach his intended audience in the three texts Pardoner’s Prologue, Wife of Bath’s Prologue, and Wife of Bath’s Tale) “His mood and sense of humor, we may guess, is the reason behind the many different angles of his writing. Perhaps this was a clever move on his part when he involved both, serious and sarcastic tales in his writing. This way no one will ever be absolutely sure about the meaning” (Garay). Chaucer is known for…

Aunt Moon’s Young Man, Incarnation, Mending Wall We start with a short story about an intelligent Native-American woman having non-traditional values that has found love In Linda Hogan’s “Aunt Moon’s Young Man”. The plot itself is relatively simple: A dark, lean, full-blooded Indian, who comes to town on an autumn day just as the annual fair is about to begin, he excites the women with his exotic good looks as well as the fact that the man is "alive in his whole body." It’s easy to see that the…

Name Professor Course Date One Need Not Be a Chamber by Emily Dickinson The poem indeed has a lot of relevancy to the lives of people in comparison to other poems. The use of metaphors and the precautious use of diction that meets all the purpose in conveying messages of how one is not capable of escaping from his or her mind but instead has an opportunity of escaping the people's presence (Dickinson 1). From this poem, Emily communicated messages more tangibly through the description of…

Tobias Wolff is the author of This Boy’s Life. Tobias, or Toby for short, writes this memoir about his own life when he was a young boy. Toby lived a difficult childhood and caused a lot of trouble because of it. He didn’t grow up with a father figure, and he was constantly moving around because his mother couldn’t stay put. Even though his childhood living situation was terrible, it doesn’t exonerate the juvenile acts he performed in his judgement. Based on what Toby went through when he…

On Necessary Endings Many of the world's most famous novels have controversial endings. Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Willa Carther's Song of the Lark are two of many. There is no ending, though, that is more controversial than Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn is set during Pre-Civil War and tells the story of a young, uncivilized, white boy named Huckleberry, or Huck Finn. While trying to escape his abusive father, Huck sets out on the…

in their sixties, Hirst and Spooner, are talking in Hirst’s living room. They have just met at a bar. They are both drinking, which is evident from the somewhat choppy dialogue. The encounter seems choppy as well. At first the two men seem like strangers but as the dialogue continues Spooner heckles Hirst about his wife and his manhood. These are seemingly strange topics for two men who had just met. Are they pretending to know each other? Why would they be doing this? Once again, reality is…

be on the search for a common theme; their identity. Throughout the whole novel, the characters had a longing to know their roots, which ultimately shapes their identity. As the novel goes along, the characters lose more of a sense of their identity than that of the previous characters. Knowing where you came from, what your purpose is in the world, and where they fit in, all helps shape who and what you are. Knowing what and who you are is my definition of identity. As I wrote about in my…

The Fiftieth Gate and Europa Europa There cannot be an absolute truth in the understanding of the event of the Holocaust as both history and memory are merely partial representations of the event. In the bricolage, Fiftieth Gate by Mark Baker and the film Europa Europa (1990) directed by Agnieszka Holland based on the autobiography of Solomon Perel, the representation of history and memory seeks not to find an absolute truth but to provide a deeper understanding of the past through the…