The Great Unknown

After pre-reading the memoir, I now know that the writer, Olga Lengyel, is telling a horrific true story. A story that she herself experienced in the concentration camp at Auschwitz and Birkenau. The memoir paints a picture of a nightmare that the writer had to live through without being able to wake up. The cover of the book seems to be a picture of the concentration camp. A brick structure covers the majority of the picture with a gate in the middle of the structure. There appear to be train…

six-year-old me thought when I left my home country of Cuba to come to the United States. That was a time of emotional turmoil for me, feeling the pain of leaving everything and everyone I knew behind. There was the excitement and fear of coming to a new unknown place, but there was also a feeling of dread at this vast language barrier that I was facing, and finally accepting and adapting to this new life. Coming from Cuba was a difficult experience that helped me grow and learn. When I first…

Literary Analysis: Dulce et Decorum est & The Unknown Citizen Verbal irony is something that can be used in our everyday life. Auden’s poem’s title, “The Unknown Citizen” begins with a verbal irony. Owen mocks war in his poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est” by showing how sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country. Both of the poems use irony to present to the reader the pity of war, how there is nothing heroic about the “unknown citizen” and how the two poets have a similar intention on…

Hero, the word that everyone used a lot now a day. But what’s a hero, or who is qualify to be a hero. When think of a hero, everyone thinks of a person who possesses supernatural power, who can fly and do great things. Or someone who’s always stand up for the good, and fights the bad, and would sacrificed everything for the greater good. But, is that really a true definition of hero. Is that really what a hero must be? What if someone does not fit in those category? Is he or she cannot be a hero…

never mentioned his bitterness about his citizenship being taken away, and even though it was in fact taken away, Khan had made a million dollars by 1929, and still had his restaurant. Khan used the rest if his time buying stocks in the midst of the great depression. His expenses began to expand, and this led to him hiring people to help him with handling all the money, but not many people knew about Khan’s wealth. He rarely showed it, and if he did, it was through generosity. He knew everyone’s…

DEAD LEAVES SCRAMBLED ACROSS THE FOREST ROAD, scraping across the hard dirt like fingernails desperate to escape from a coffin. Young Scarlet Ryder skipped among those leaves, stomping on the strays and kicking her sturdy boots through the piles where they gathered. The bold eight year old girl had lived in the small village near the woods all her life. Despite the whispers of her neighbors and the tales from the other children, she had never been afraid of the shortcut to the town on the other…

As ancient Greek culture was afraid of the unknown, of what could happen after death, they feared a monster that could lure you in with promises of hope and then drag you into the great unknown. The idea that something so beautiful could end so horribly could horrify people of any century. I hope that these facts of Sirens throughout history will be both horrifying, as they were interesting as they were for me. In many stories Sirens were once beautiful women, and while their parentage can be…

these ideas are, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin and “The Unknown Citizen” by W.H. Auden. In both pieces the author brings out a situation where a person is unhappy with their life and how the people around them live. “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” tells an amazing story of a perfect city that gets all the great things in life at the cost of a little boy suffering. As well in the “Unknown Citizen” Auden tells a story about a government official reviewing a unhappy…

Statistics do reveal to the true identity of a man. In “The Unknown Citizen,” W.H. Auden presents a Big Brother like state that knows everything about its citizens except for what really matters; this state views individuality as irrelevant and judges citizens based solely on their relation to society as a whole. The bureaucrat leaves out important emotional events involving the unknown citizen that seem vital to the judging of his character. Auden uses a speaker whose viewpoints contradict his…

Exploring the similarities and differences in two poems, W. H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen” and Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory”, is done to demonstrate how both author’s subjects are assumed to be happy, yet each is isolated in a unique way. The poems individually present external facts about each character, and the authors use the different narrators in the poems to illustrate the viewpoint of someone slightly removed. This characterizes the separation between the protagonists and…