While only one of the parents remain alive. Kokone had held her family in high regards with ought most respect. Her parents were always fair to her and her siblings. She would do anything in her power to protect them.
Geographically, her home town was located near Theymarsh. Until one night the family was forced to flee from their own domicile due to a tragic war that had overcome the area. Smoke filled their home while fire raged with a crackling hiss. Kokone woke in the middle of the night startled to the smoke blanketed room as the fire raged like a devil cracking its whip in front of every path she took to try and escape. She managed to crawl out a near by window and ran to her parents who had somehow managed to escape by their own means. Her two older siblings were not survivors of the fire, that part of the home had been collapsed in before the parents could attempt to rescue their children. However, they had to flee, the sounds of soldiers were still nearby pillaging the small town. Blood curdling screams eluded the night and the sounds of swords clashing echoed which was their soundtrack that night for a city that was lost.
While most of Kokone’s life was spent in Theymarsh the war torn girl’s mind was fragile. Many a daunting memory had plagued her to a breaking point of mental distortion. The illusive enemy that seemed to track her shadow by shadow was tailing her. But was she losing her mind she would continuously ask herself? Their new home in Essembra played no substitute for what was once their humble abode. All of her friends and siblings she once knew were now faces fading from a scroll of history written on a war torn travesty. She will never forget the faces of soldiers that her and her family had escaped...
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...ike a package of cut sausages. The blood had splattered across her face but she paid no mind to it at all. She saw what she had done through her vision of red. It was as if she was wearing bifocals with rogue tinted lenses. His face seemed to fade as she heard her mother cry out “Why have you done this to me? Why would you have forsaken your mother?.” Her voice was gargled and very distant. Kokone dropped the rapier as the face of the solider Transmorphed to that of her mother’s twisted face. This must be trickery of that of the evil shadows was all that had encompassed her mind as she stalked over her mother’s now corpse. She crawled out the window like she did on that night she lost all that she knew, but this time to never look back and to continue to protect the world from the shadows of evil that trailed her with her mind entangled between fantasy and reality.
All eight children had the same father, Paul, to whom LaJoe had been married to for seventeen years. The two had long ago fallen out of love. He lived at the home occasionally
However, instead of allowing the corruption and grief of losing a significant figure in her life completely consume her, Leah embraces a new culture and turns to another male figure, her husband Anatole, for guidance. With new surrounding influences, Leah encounters various forms of separation, whether it be from her birthplace, father, or husband, and accepts all the drawbacks and loses that come along with the isolation. At the same time, Leah also challenges herself to overcome the loss and succumb to the loneliness that could potentially bring her closer to a new aspect of life never explored before. Through it all, Leah turns her experiences with exile into bittersweet memories sprinkled across the time span of her life for each rift allowed her to obtain a sense of self identity during periods of time free of human contact or, in Leah’s case,
No one knows what will happen in his or her life whether it is a trivial family dispute or a civil war. Ishmael Beah and Mariatu Kamara are both child victims of war with extremely different life stories. Both of them are authors who have written about their first-hand experience of the truth of the war in order to voice out to the world to be aware of what is happening. Beah wrote A Long Way Gone while Kamara wrote The Bite of the Mango. However, their autobiographies give different information to their readers because of different points of view. Since the overall story of Ishmael Beah includes many psychological and physical aspects of war, his book is more influential and informative to the world than Kamara’s book.
Throughout the life of an individual most people would agree that dealing with tough conflict is an important part in growing as a person. In “The Cellist of Sarajevo” all the characters experience a brutal war that makes each of them struggle albeit in different ways. Each of them have their own anxieties and rage that eventually makes them grow as characters at the end of the book. Steven Galloway’s novel “The Cellist of Sarajevo” exemplifies that when an individual goes through a difficult circumstance they will often struggle because of the anger and fear they have manifested over time. The conflict that the individual faces will force them to reinforce and strengthen their identity in order to survive.
Another unique aspect to this book is the constant change in point of view. This change in point of view emphasizes the disorder associated with war. At some points during the book, it is a first person point of view, and at other times it changes to an outside third person point of view. In the first chapter of the book, “The Things They Carried,” O’Brien writes, “The things they carried were largely determined by necessity (2).
Imagine, for a moment, Marian Forrester in her kitchen preparing a tray for tea. As she works, her mind wanders to the letter she received in the post today from Frank Ellinger. "It's been too long since Frank has been out from Denver," she thinks as she glances out the window across the meadow, half expecting to see his form approaching. Instead, she sees in the distance an exotic form, a Spanish maiden, and in a cloud of dust a soldier approaches her.
The author targets the emotions of parents who are forced to think about losing their children as result of the war. Moreover, readers are overcome with sadness due to their emotional bond established with the character in the previous chapters. The passage relates to the author’s purpose in that particular chapter by providing a window into the hours after the Khost tragedy.
During times of war, man is exposed to the most gruesome aspects of life such as death, starvation, and imprisonment. In some cases, the aftermath is even more disastrous, causing posttraumatic stress disorder, constant guilt, as well as physical and mental scarring, but these struggles are not the only things that humans can take away from the experience. War can bring out the appreciation of the little things in life, such as the safety people take for granted, the beauty of nature, and the kindness of others. These universal consequences of fighting all contribute to what war is really capable of doing, sometimes bringing out the best and worst in people, and constantly shaping society. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien goes through this himself when he writes about setting up base camp in the Vietnamese pagoda, the return to site of Kiowa’s death, the story about the old poppa-san guide, and Mitchell Sanders’ “moment of peace”. When O’Brien includes these stories, it is not to insert joy into a tragedy, but rather to create a more wholesome and authentic feel into a tough, realistic war story. O’Brien’s’ “sweet” stories are there to show the hope he had during war, and also serve as a universal example that even in the darkest tunnels, it is always possible to find rays of light.
Louise Erdrich’s stories combine wildly dynamic characters with metaphoric language and elements of the supernatural to create tales that challenge the demarcations of cultural reality. In her stories “Plunge of the Brave,” “Scales,” and “Fleur,” Erdrich utilizes magical realism to help mystic elements seem more relatable to readers. The short stories, while otherwise straight-forward, are infused with touches of colorful language and mystic descriptions that, many critics claim, classifies Erdrich as a magical realist author. She uses magical realism in her stories to encourage readers to reconsider perceived ideas and question the determined realities of ethnic or cultural groups. By adding a few elements of the supernatural, Erdrich is actually inviting readers to expand their knowledge of different cultures and perceptions of the world.
Each of us human is alone in our hearts. It is the only place that we are afraid of letting anybody in. We rarely break through the ultimate solitude, but only to reach out to the miracles beyond our world of living, to find out that the strength of love and hope have not abandoned us. Writing about the spectacularity event of life, Marquez could not help stepping in between the magical world and the reality to tell us a tale about “The handsomest drowned man in the world”- the tale of a coastal village interrupted by a man washed up to the shore.
It is a long and unusual journey. I still wonder what it really is. I read the selections of four wonderful authors and I am still a little confused about the real history and theory of magical realism. I do know that before a person gets into this idea of magical realism, he or she really has to have a big imagination and willingness to learn about it. I guess what I am trying to say is that magical realism depends on who a person is and what a person is willing to believe.
“Every war is everyone’s war”... war will bring out the worst in even the strongest and kindest people. The book tells about how ones greed for something can destroy everything for both people and animals leaving them broken beyond repair, leaving them only with questions… Will they ever see their family again? Will they ever experience what it’s like to
Yusef Komunyakaa, the poet of war, vividly describes his vacillating emotions about the Vietnam War and his relation to it as an African-American veteran in the poem, “Facing It.” Komunyakaa, the protagonist of his narrative, reflective poem, contemplates his past experiences as he promenades around the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, struggling to conceal his ardent emotions and remain hard and cold as “stone.” He writes one stanza in a dark mood, and by using metaphors and visual imagery, he paints a picture with his words for all to see.
The idea of a genre of art that is called magical realism is less a trend than a tradition, an evolving genre that has its waxings and wanings, where each evolving form expresses an idea that may overlap another, yet at the same time branches off and creates something very different. What began in the visual arts has become a contemporary literary genre due to divergences. Contemporary Latin American writers of this mode include Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, and Majorie Agosin. At the same time there are many writers of the genre world wide, though every form may take one new meaning. The magical realist does not depend on the natural or physical laws or on the usual conception of the real in Western culture, and at the same time it uses these aspects to disrupt reality, to create a disproportionate view (Zamora 146-148). While the mode is one of disruption, a disruption within its own development is also present.
Why do we escape? Us human beings all belong in a place called reality. Reality seems to be a very neat thing to be in, but sometimes people need to escape. Reality can be a cold world, a scary place; this emotion filled consciousness of actuality can be very difficult to withstand and encompass in. Life is a constant pattern or ritual performed throughout each day. Starting from childhood we begin with school, wake up, go to school, and then back home for homework and dinner. No matter how old we get we receive more rituals and tasks to perform in repetition each day. Never growing out of it, once someone becomes an adult a new routine begins by having constant work. Work not only comes out to be one of the most dreadful things in ones mind, but it is controlsyour whole life. By controlling your whole life, things like fun do not exist. People enjoy escaping because there is a difference between reality and escape; escape is a wonderful state of ecstasy. Instead of being at your routinely job, escape gives you a feel that nothing else can, it makes you feel like you are flying out o...