The Virgin Suicides

What is death? The commonly shared definition of death is the moment a living object is no longer alive. But the definition of death is complex, and it is debated back and forth what death actually means. Published in 2016, Paul Kalanithi When Breath Becomes Air is the story of Paul himself, who is an upcoming medical student, and who aspires to find the true meaning of death. After earning a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Stanford, Paul is faced with the decision of whether to earn a…

Imagine that you are a regular teenage boy and then one day your little brother gets sick. Really sick. In the novel, Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie, Steven went through the five stages. Denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance, those are the five stages of grief that Steven went through. The first stage of grief Steven went through was denial. Denial is the act of declaring something untrue and refusing to believe that it is true. An example is, “ I bet Jeffy’s down there in…

Mary Roach's nonfiction book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, humorously outlines the ways the human cadaver has served the living since the ancient Egyptians. The acceptance of death is difficult to accept, but Roach's book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers manages to subjectively objectify the horrid experience of dying. Despite being nonfiction, Roach writes in a very opinionated tone that lightens the subject and makes her book a compelling and easy read as it describes…

crime for many people, but it is because although she wasn't present to kill him she was virtually present encouraging and forcing him to kill himself, she did not just encourage him to kill himself she also looked up for ways to help him commit suicide. Another case that relates to this is the case of Rosalie Avila, they bullied her so badly that she couldn't take it anymore, so she hanged herself. It’s so sad how some people use social media to do something so bad like end people’s live, but…

Mary Oliver reveals conjectures people make about other people and other cultures in her poem, “Singapore.” Oliver shares a woman’s experience in an airport bathroom. The speaker in the poem is inwardly conflicted, and her internal thoughts displayed throughout the poem alter. At first, the poem reveals the speaker’s thoughts towards a woman working as a custodian at the airport as degrading and poignant. The speaker judgmentally feels sorry for the woman and takes pity on her. The speaker’s…

Everyone makes poor decisions in their life that later has an effect on them. In three short stories by Kate Chopin, she explains how many people often make irresponsible decisions which eventually leads to dissatisfaction. With this in mind, the story Regret discusses how a woman rejected a proposal to live a life she later regretted. Including, Desiree’s Baby, which depicts how a young man decided to send his wife and child elsewhere because of their race. In addition to, The Story of An Hour…

Sylvia Plath is known for being a feminist writer before the women’s rights movement. She wrote numerous poems and books including The Bell Jar. The story is about a women that is slowly losing her sanity and includes all of her family and friends. The time frame makes the story more intense because treatment then was very harsh against mental illness. But they didn’t know how much more damage they were actually causing. Mental illness can’t be forced out of a human but it can be helped if the…

In the “Mirror”, by Sylvia Plath, shows the lack of confidence women face with image/reflection and the hours associated with aging through personification and metaphors. The author is accomplishing numerous forms of figurative language devices. Symbolism to show images only last for a very short time and resulting, the speaker’s attitude toward truthfulness. In the next couple paragraphs I would like to focus on the theme, tone/attitude and figurative language device used in this poem. The…

inspiration and leader in their lives, causing them to go into fits of depression and changing their way of life. Each reacts differently, Louis engages himself in business and poetry, Neville resorts to poetry and having multiple affairs, Rhoda commits suicide, Jinny decides to live every moment freely and happily, Susan tries to live her life as happily as possible, and Bernard gains insight on how death has stricken each one of them. Since childhood, each narrator has obsessed over death and…

The last stanza emphasizes that war destroys the soul of one being, and this is shown as the author uses abstract nouns such as: “strength,” “humanity,” and “entirety.” Overall, the hopeless tone and the use of vivid language deliberately creates a dark image of the society to the readers, conveying the message that the baby will lose its pureness once they come out into the real world and that it might be better if the baby elected death instead of life. Hide and Seek is thematically and…