The Proud Tower, by Barbara Tuchman is a series of essays written to provide, as the cover puts it “A portrait of the World before the War, 1890-1914.” Each of the eight chapters is an essay and a story in and of itself, without reference to, or contingency toward the reading of any other chapter. Each essay focuses on a specific topic, setting a frame of reference for, and highlighting details of, a diverse range of political and societal realities of the fifteen years leading up to the Great War. While diverse in subject matter, points of view, geographical locations, and historical timelines, the essays are not altogether disparate in nature. Once read in its entirety, Tuchman’s Book can leave the reader with a newfound appreciation of the emotional reasons for the Great War. It can be difficult to surmise a specific purpose for an author to write this particular style of book because, unlike many other reads with a continuous point of view, it can be challenging to discern a beginning, middle and end; the end being where a reader can usually see …show more content…
The Proud Tower is a lyrical reference to a poem by Edgar Allan Poe entitled “The City in the Sea”. In this rare example of an allegorical poem by the famed author and poet, Poe personifies the apprehensive anxiety surrounding the notion of death and decay as the ruler over a city. The residents of which are alluded to have build the city on wealth and greed. Poetic analysts have interpreted the use of the inhabitants’ construction based on greed as a form of worship to the poem’s godly ruler, Death. The chapters in this book have a resounding common theme of the struggles to maintain or acquire power, status, and wealth. By playing off the contrasting points of view, Tuchman suggests that the world mentality at the time was analogous to that of the builders of Poe’s fictitious city. Like Death rules over the city in the sea, death would eventually come to rule over Europe as
The author uses many way of telling the story buy enhancing the reader understanding in rregrades to the point of view of the story line. The author, Jon Krakauer expresses and explains this stroy in many unique ways throughout the entire book using other authors quotes to tie in with his story, the constant change in the setting, and references the creates a unique structure to the book.
Everyone knows what war is. It's a nation taking all of its men, resources, weapons and most of its money and bearing all malignantly towards another nation. War is about death, destruction, disease, loss, pain, suffering and hate. I often think to myself why grown and intelligent individuals cannot resolve matters any better than to take up arms and crawl around, wrestle and fight like animals. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque puts all of these aspects of war into a vivid story which tells the horrors of World War 1 through a soldier's eyes. The idea that he conveys most throughout this book is the idea of destruction, the destruction of bodies, minds and innocence.
Typically, a novel contains four basic parts: a beginning, middle, climax, and the end. The beginning sets the tone for the book and introduces the reader to the characters and the setting. The majority of the novel comes from middle where the plot takes place. The plot is what usually captures the reader’s attention and allows the reader to become mentally involved. Next, is the climax of the story. This is the point in the book where everything comes together and the reader’s attention is at the fullest. Finally, there is the end. In the end of a book, the reader is typically left asking no questions, and satisfied with the outcome of the previous events. However, in the novel The Things They Carried the setup of the book is quite different. This book is written in a genre of literature called “metafiction.” “Metafiction” is a term given to fictional story in which the author makes the reader question what is fiction and what is reality. This is very important in the setup of the Tim’s writing because it forces the reader to draw his or her own conclusion about the story. However, this is not one story at all; instead, O’Brien writes the book as if each chapter were its own short story. Although all the chapters have relation to one another, when reading the book, the reader is compelled to keep reading. It is almost as if the reader is listening to a “soldier storyteller” over a long period of time.
...’ (21). These rhetoric questions force readers to stand on her side and to ponder in her direction. She compares the contents of the twentieth-century chapters in current books to ‘a modern-art museum’ (22), which ironically and humorously criticizes the fancy design of the current books. She also directly quotes the original texts to show the changes of current books such as a paragraph from Sellers’ book ‘As It Happened’.
The beginning of this book was somewhat confusing, we all wondered if the book was really the authors trouble of putting the book together that led to its structure or if it was meant to represent something else. We had
Set just after one of England’s worst tragedies, Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway is a vivid picture of the effects of World War I on London’s high society, often in glaring contrast to the effects of shell shock suffered by war veteran Septimus Smith. For members of high society, the War’s impact is largely indirect, mainly affecting their conversations at posh social functions. Although the war has had little impact on these people, some strive to develop a deeper understanding of the War’s main consequence: death. For Septimus, who has endured the direct impact of the War as a soldier, however, the memories and traumas of the War are more real than the peaceful life to which he has returned. At the urgent pleas of his wife, doctors unsuccessfully attempt to help him regain the blissful ignorance of war that he once had. Woolf illuminates a perpetual clash between those who merely understand the War as a continuing news story, and Septimus, who knows it as a frightening reality.
The effectiveness of this compacted novel is greater than those of a thousand paged. The story within this book is not entirely unfamiliar,
The manner in which Poe addresses the topic of class differences and the struggle for power with his fictional characters resounds of his own struggles in his personal life. However, unlike in Hop Frog and the Masque of the Red Death, he was never himself able to emerge wholly victorious over his adversaries, including the publishing industry. In addition, Poe’s characters appear to hint that while wealth may be the source of power for many, the correct use of information itself is the surest path to the acquisition of power.
The theme of a novel can change the complete meaning of the story for each individual reader. If one person reads a book and he/she thinks that the book's main them...
The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman condensed the opening drama of The Great War into 440 pages. “Europe as a powder keg” is easily described and articulated through analysis of the belligerents’ pre-war operations and alliances. Barbara Tuchman is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and journalist, her main focus centers around geopolitical affairs. Tuchman’s analysis of the first thirty days of the war demonstrates how inadequate each nation’s military was at the wars onset. The Guns of August present the reader with the primary factors of the disposition, political, and initial combat operations that shaped the First World War. However, the Author’s writing style was the forefront in conveying to the reader that Europe was foolishly
Stylistically, the book is arranged in rotating chapters. Every fourth chapter is devoted to each individual character and their continuation alo...
In the beginning of the story, with an extensive and vivid description of the house and its vicinity, Poe prepares the scene for a dreadful, bleak, and distempered tale. The setting not only affects Poe’s narration of the story but influences the characters and their actions as well. Both the narrator and his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, question w...
In every piece of literature Edgar Allan Poe has written, the reader can quickly pick up on his gothic style of writing. In his poem, “The City in the Sea” has not a realistic location but however a setting that quickly promotes a feel of mystery and loneliness. “The City in the Sea” was a revised version of his earlier poem,"The Doomed City", both in which give a feel of death and loneliness.
“In my estimation a good book first must contain little or no trace of the author unless the author himself is a character. That is, when I read the book I should not feel that someone is telling me the story but t...
Through imagery Poe teaches his readers that they are the ones that determine their life after death. In “The City of Sin” Poe describes the lives of the people who once lived in the city death