The main idea that I got from reading The Red Cocoon by Abe Kobe was about homelessness. Not the kind of homelessness who literally does not own a home, the author was talking about being lost in a new environment or new society and being far away from everything that reminds him of home. The author, Kobe, lived in postwar Japan and was talking about how life changed drastically after the war and how it fundamentally changed life as he knows it. Being in a same country, same city and same people, yet he feels alienated by his own county. It doesn’t feel the same anymore and everything looked differently from what it used to be. The essay also seemed to jump from topic to topic but always going back to the main idea which is him being lost and …show more content…
Kobe wrote “Every day, night comes. When night comes, you have to rest. Houses are to rest in. If that so, it’s not that I don’t have a house is it?” (Kobe 1442). I interpreted this passage to how every one of us is looking for a family perhaps our soulmate to come home to and spend the rest of our life with. That whatever we do with our life at the end of the day we always want something we can come home to and call ours. Another reason I came up with this interpretation was because of this passage he decided to knock on the doors of one of the houses lined up in front of him, “the smiling face of a woman looks out of a half-opened window.” (Kobe 1442). If he wasn’t talking about looking for a wife then why did he mention that after seeing the woman’s face “hope blows through the neighborhood of my heart”? (Kobe 1442). To me this symbolizes how we feel when we meet someone new in our life or what we feel like dating a new person. The relationship makes us feel excited and hopeful that everything will go smoothly. But life doesn’t always go according to our plans. Just when we think everything is going in a right direction problems arise and we do not have a choice but to end the relationship. In the essay after having a short conversation with the woman asking her if this was his house, I interpreted this to are you the right person for me, and when the woman said no and shut the door to his face that is when we realized everything is not always what it seems to be and we get a real taste of
The signs plastered all over town creates an unpleasant atmosphere in the woman 's life which affects her psychologically in several ways. She was associated with the middle class as seen in her silk dress and white gloves. However, nine days after the evacuation notice, she still was not finished packing which left me to believe she and her family were not ready to face the unknown or unfamiliar events yet to come. During the Internment, all who were taken were called not by their own name, but only by numbers. The unnamed characters left a distinctive perception of how the woman
The tone in the first chapter is apathetic towards the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. “She read the sign from top to bottom...She wrote down a few words on the back of a bank receipt then turned around and went back home to pack” (3). The lack of adjectives to describe emotion makes the woman seem as if she has already accepted her fate and cannot even feel anything. “She had not seen her husband since his arrest last December” (10). Her lack of curiosity makes the woman seem as if she does not care for her husband or his fate. After packing to leave, the mother thinks about the day in which they will leave. She thinks,“Then they would pin their identification numbers to their collars and grab their suitcases and climb up onto the bus and go to wherever it was they had to go” (22). By having the sentence structure be a long, unbroken sentence, almost
Sappho, who is very well the speaker and author of the poem, clearly recognizes the substantial impact that love creates in relation to the amount of happiness people experience. Those who are successful in the game love, whether it be by giving it or receiving it, are far happier than those who confront despair and rejection. Finding love means finding the acceptance, companionship, and most of all, happiness that everyone strives to receive in their lifetime. As a result, love becomes a weapon for power, superiority, and control.
...his was the perfect day of his childhood. This day to shape the days upon.” This shows the simplicity of the man’s life and how something as simple as this memory can stay vivid and detailed in his memory. "… he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different." (pg 27). Many years after his wife committing suicide he would start to wonder what life would be like if she was around. For me this applies, as sometimes I question how life would be different for me if my parents had never broken up. The man would find it hard to confront his feelings about his wife as I find it hard to confront thinking about my parents. For us to think about our family it hurts but we still do it. I believe this is an important issue you have brought to the reader as it has made me think about things in my life.
...ne perfect other half for everywhere, but that each of us will find numerous loves throughout our lives which will suit us throughout different phases and different events (Nadel 29). It is exactly this resistance to love and the need to become immune to its unyielding power makes him such a melancholically charismatic figure. His women were all loved, all worshipped, but in the end, this Byronic hero remains with a forever broken heart, to speak the words of his heart through the lyre of his music.
This book teaches the importance of self-expression and independence. If we did not have these necessities, then life would be like those in this novel. Empty, redundant, and fearful of what is going on. The quotes above show how different life can be without our basic freedoms. This novel was very interesting and it shows, no matter how dismal a situation is, there is always a way out if you never give up, even if you have to do it alone.
“Orange Crush” by Yiyun Li is possibly the least exciting essay I have ever read. Intrinsically, her essay jumped from narration to description too many times for me to follow along. Although the description was creative, it was difficult to follow. The lack of chronology in her story disoriented my train of thought, causing me to re-read multiple portions of the narrative. Based on the confusing description and agenda, I would not recommend this read to
The story of this poem tells about a young boy that is lured in by the sensuousness of the moon, and then dies because of his own desire for her. The symbolic meaning is much more hidden and disguised by the literary elements of the poem. The storyline and aspects of the literal story add meaning when searching for the figurative meaning. The warning learned from this poem is that infatuation with anything can lead to a downfall. The moon seemed to offer a comfort that attracted him, but it was only a disguise to lead him to death. The passion the young boy felt for the moon can easily be modified to describe the passion a person can feel for anything. The young boy saw safeness in the moon that brought him closer to her. Any obsession will seem to offer the same comforts that the young boy also saw, but this poem warns that death can always disguise itself.
“.. . By day my limbs, by night my mind, for thee and for myself no quiet find.” This line is a summation of the problems faced by the speaker. From working hard all day long to only be faced with thoughts of his lover at night is torturous, and the reader can’t help but get a feeling that the speaker is obsessed.
Baseball Saved Us, by Ken Mochizuki, is a picture book about a boy living in a Japanese American internment camp during World War II. With its somber color scheme and illustrations, the book accurately portrays the harsh realities of life in an internment camp. The story centers on the boy’s personal struggle to maintain his family life and to find a group of friends under these bleak conditions. In order to create hope and restore their sense of dignity, the boy’s father creates a baseball diamond and sets up a league. The book’s accurate portrayal of life in an internment camp, coupled with its subtext of racial equality, sends a positive ethical message and is an effective way to introduce children to the events of this difficult time period.
...ld of art and literature. Since the "marriage", the parent generation, is already dead or dying, therefore every new creation is now also afflicted with disease and condemned to death. Consequently this means the end of hope for a renewal of society, but since the stanza begins with the word "how", this is also a voice of accusation and a demand for change.
Love is a big part of human life. Love in this poem can be described in two different ways. One way is the love of helping people. The other way is the love of a relationship. The love of a relationship is more than a feeling when it is real. It is a sensation, a connection, something that can not be replaced. In the poem the speaker is torn between the two types of love at first. It is shown in the first two stanzas that the speaker does not know what to choose. Either to let the stranger into the house and not make love to his new wife, or not let the stranger in and send him out into the dangerous night and make love to his wife. The last line of the poem shows that the speaker in someway have feelings for the stranger. The speaker wish he knew what would happen to the stranger after he sent him out into the night.
In Love and a Question, a stranger inquires about shelter for the night in the bridal house. The bridegroom is the one that has to make the decision whether or not he should be allowed inside. One reason why he would not want him inside is because this is somewhat of a honeymoon stay. The bride's face was "rose-red with the glowing coal and the thought of the heart's desire." At the beginning of the fourth stanza, he must make the decision whether to let this man in or continue the night of pleasure with his wife. Normally, the bridegroom is apathetic towards the rich and the poor, but as he "looked at the weary road," he placed himself in the shoes of that stranger. He tries to imagine how dificult it must be for this man to live without a home, especially tonight, when winter was in the wind. He stares back at himself, and how fortunate he is to have wedded such a woman. He "wished her heart in a case of gold and pinned with a silver pin." This means that he respects and loves her very deeply. He realizes that you don't know what you have until you lose it. He feels sudden sympathy with this deprived stranger, and wants to help him in some manner.
All the hope and love seems to have been ripped away from the author. The text says, “The night is shattered and she is not with me.”(1422) This line is also stated in the beginning of the poem; however, at this time, the words does not seem to evoke the same feelings. In the beginning, this phrase did not have the authors’ story of the lost love to relate to. Therefore, when read at first, it just seemed to readers a sad line. With the emotional strife connected to the night; it becomes something more. Typically, when someone has just had a breakup, words such as broken and shattered are used to describe the proverbial heart. Their heart has been shattered by this end in the relationship. Therefore, in this instance, readers can believe that Nerudo may be describing the night by also describing himself; he is the night now and he has been shattered by this loss of
Throughout time, mankind has forged stories and legends to explain the unknown. As years went along the stories and tall tales were passed down to each generation. Each recount of the inherited stories are always told differently, how the story was told usually depended on the person and their particular region of habitance. Thus leading to hundreds of different versions of a single story told throughout the world, written and told by different people. Not only are these stories told as pure entertainment, they serve as wise life lessons and set examples for children when they were eventually introduced to society. These stories are so prominent in human history that even to this day the same stories that were told to children centuries ago