Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Role of literature in personality development
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Role of literature in personality development
Every parent wants their children surrounded with the best of everything this world can offer and grow up to be well educated and instinctively knowing the basic moral rights and wrongs. But sometimes sheltering them with the goodness of this world can do them more harm than good. Daniel Handler seems to think that children are not terribly fragile and they can handle an unhappy ending. He did just that in his novel, The Bad Beginning, the first novel in The Series of Unfortunate Events. The writing style unmistakably sets a gloomy and dire world for his characters. It starts off with the three siblings Violet, Klaus and Sunny experiencing the great grief of their parents’ sudden death. The children, now orphans, have to go live with their distant relative, Count Olaf, who have no intention of treating them well. The readers soon learn that the children will battle more hardships by themselves. Since, Handler makes all the authoritative figures as incompetents and they are often blinded from Count Olaf’s schemes. Despite the uncomfortable stream of traumatic adversities the children faced, Daniel Handler’s The Bad Beginning challenges young readers to think objectively through the combination usage of narration styles and challenging moral messages.
Interestingly, A Series of Unfortunate Events: A Bad Beginning have Lemony Snicket on the cover as the author and when reading the book readers found that he is also the narrator. But the book was actually written by Daniel Handler and Lemony Snicket is more or less a character he invented. Consequentially, turning this novel into a complicated mixture of first person narrative and third person omniscient narrative. Johan Kullenbok wrote “The Shape Shifting Storyteller in Lemony Snick...
... middle of paper ...
...with tricking readers of the role the narrator plays, Handler also imposes the idea that the adults in the novel are not the same as the adults in the real world. He displays their characters as being useless and having no real power to protect Violet, Klaus and Sunny from Count Olaf. This will challenge the young readers’ natural expectations that the adults are there to help the siblings. Lastly, Handler presents the children, who are supposed to be the good guys, as having questionable moral codes to yet again make the readers abandon their pervious belief that a character can’t be both good and bad. The above example shows that Klaus stole from Justice Strauss to help his siblings escape the evil Count Olaf. Handler refrains from explicitly telling readers his opinions to let them think and decide for themselves whether the character’s action is right or wrong.
It was times throughout the book the reader would be unsure if the children would even make it. For example, “Lori was lurching around the living room, her eyebrows and bangs all singed off…she had blisters the length of her thighs”(178).Both Lori and Jeannette caught fire trying to do what a parent is supposed to do for their child. Jeannette caught fire at the age of three trying to make hotdogs because her mother did not cook for her leaving Jeannette to spend weeks hospitalized. She was burnt so bad she had to get a skin graft, the doctors even said she was lucky to be alive. The children never had a stable home. They were very nomadic and a child should be brought up to have one stable home. No child should remember their childhood constantly moving. This even led to Maureen not knowing where she come from because all she can remember is her moving. The children had to explain to her why she looked so different is because where she was born. They told Maureen “she was blond because she’d been born in a state where so much gold have been mined, and she had blue eyes the color of the
Children are seen as adorable, fun loving, and hard to control. Ida Fink uses a child in “The Key Game” to be the key to this family’s life. The setting is placed during the start of World War II; Jews all around were being taken. Fink uses a boy who doesn’t look the traditional Jewish, “And their chubby, blue-eyed, three-year-old child” (Fink). As they read on the emotional connection is stronger because there is a face to go with this character. Fink draws a reader in by making connections to a family member the reader may know. A blue-eyed, chubby child is the picture child of America. A child in any story makes readers more attached especially if they have children of their own. The child is three way too young to be responsible for the safety of the father, yet has to be. Throughout the story, we see how the mother struggles with making her child play the game because no child should be responsible like
After hearing a brief description of the story you might think that there aren’t many good things about they story. However, this is false, there are many good things in this book that makes it a good read. First being that it is a very intriguing book. This is good for teenage readers because often times they don’t willingly want to read, and this story will force the teenage or any reader to continue the book and continue reading the series. Secondly, this is a “good” book because it has a good balance of violence. This is a good thing because it provides readers with an exciting read. We hear and even see violence in our everyday life and I believe that it is something teenagers should be exposed to. This book gives children an insig...
This story makes the reader wonder, why must parents do this to their children, what kinds of motifs do they have for essentially ruining their child’s life. I believe
Children have often been viewed as innocent and innocent may be a nicer way to call children naive. Since children’s lives are so worry free they lack the knowledge of how to transition from being a child to becoming an adolescent. Their lack of knowledge may be a large part of their difficulties growing up, which could be a few rough years for many. In books like the boy in the striped pajamas the story is told from the point of view of a little boy, this way we get a full view of how innocent he is. In this book the writer shows the reader first hand how a child viewed the holocaust and how his innocence cost him his life. Then in books like the perks of being a wallflower Charlie is a teen whom is struggling with the transition from being a child to becoming an adolescent. In this book the writer gives a first hand look at how difficult it can be to transition into an adolescent. Charlie has many difficulties in this book; he is in search of his identity and how to fit in.
In spite of this, this novel proves that civilization has the power to keep one’s innate cruelty under control. The instance of a society running rampant with evil is seen when the group of boys abandon the civilized behaviors of the adult world, and predominately begin to take in Jack’s vicious influence on them. Thus, as the boys began to act more barbaric and savage, they do not feel the need to listen to Ralph's wisdom and guidance anymore. If they had listened to him, Piggy and Simon, in all likelihood, would not have had to die, and many wise plans would have been followed. Overall, the author reveals that due to the savage and violent nature of humans, qualities of physical power are more prominent than the often under looked qualities of civility and common intelligence in
To achieve this I wrote a short summary of the book in order to introduce the parenting aspect to people who perhaps had not read the book yet and to try to give an explanation to why Ben was the way he was instead of just describing him as evil. I have tried to keep a serious tone but not overly so, which could perhaps bore the readers/listeners and by using words such as neglect, stigmatised, freak, monster in order to capture the essence of the text and perhaps show how the projection of evil and the expectations of others can affect someone; I believe I have achieved this.
story as the corruption of evil takes a prominent role in the story of the two children. The
When life turns into a living nightmare, a child may not know what is real nor what is fake, life may become confusing. In the excerpt A Death in the Family by James Agee, this is the unfortunate sequence of events. A Death in the Family follows the events and internal conflicts that are happening inside the 6 year old, Rufus when he finds out of the unfortunate and untimely death of his father. Rufus cannot believe that “My daddy is dead.” (Jewkes 88) and is seen in denial throughout; but the child is only thinking about his own feelings, and does not know how to cope. James Agee, the author of A Death in the Family also had the unfortunate series of events
In the spring of 1861 tensions exploded in America, the tension was started over slavery, westward expansion, and states rights. Abraham Lincoln became president angering the south because Lincoln was a republican who opposed slavery. 7 states in the south chose to leave the north and form the Confederate states of America. After the first shots of the Civil War were fired four more southern states joined the Confederate forces, the Confederate forces all together formed the Confederate States of America. The biggest battles of the Civil War were the battles of Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Bull Run, Antietam, and Chancellorsville.
The adult world is a cold and terrifying place. There are robberies, shootings, murders, suicides, and much more. If you were to be a small child, perhaps age 5, and you were to look in at this world, you would never know how bad it actually was, just from a single glance. Children have a small slice of ignorant bliss, which helps to keep them away from the harsh of reality. It isn’t until later, when they encounter something that opens their eyes and shows them, that they truly start to understand the world we live it. Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird shows the many differences between the simplicity of being a kid and the tough decisions and problems that adults must face every day.
Oates creates a vision for the reader of a powerless child in need of mental help and reacting violently to a tragedy. The emotional distress Aaron struggles through his entire life demonstrates how severely his life is im...
Norton, D. E., & Norton. S. (2011). Through The Eyes Of a Child. An Introduction To Children’s Literature. Boston, MA, 02116: Eight-Edition Pearson Education
Having inherited the myth of ugliness and unworthiness, the characters throughout the story, with the exception of the MacTeer family, will not only allow this to happen, but will instill this in their children to be passed on to the next generation. Beauty precedes love, the grownups seem to say, and only a few possess beauty, so they remain unloved and unworthy. Throughout the novel, the convictions of sons and daughters are the same as their fathers and mothers. Their failures and accomplishments are transferred to their children and to future generations.
The kids innocence, and them being naive leads them to believe that most everyone is good, because they have never really encountered evil before. When they are encountered with evil, the evil of racism and things being so unfair, and whirls them into an adulthood state of mind. They both have to balance the ideas of good and evil that are in a person, they used to believe you could only be one or the other, but in reality, the good is within the evil and vice versa. Even the good main character, Scout, has some evil within her, she constantly gets into fights. The theme is displayed heavily through Boo Radley, a man who they believed was evil, bt really was misunderstood and showed himself to be good. Then Tom Robinson, a man who is believed to be evil based off his skin color and the evil accusations made about him, but who is reality is good. The kids can see he is good, because the ideas of racism haven’t infected their innocent brains yet. But they encounter evil when an innocent man is punished, and the evil man who is racist and lying gets away with