Lanford Wilson’s The Rimers of Eldritch is a unique play which uses a lack of continuity between space and time to reveal a confusing and twisted story about a dark Midwestern town and its intriguing residents. From the very beginning, the play is set around the trial of a mysterious guilty party, and surrounded and interrupted by subplots that reveal the characters of Eldritch. The scene the story keeps returning to, amongst others, is the trial in the courtroom. At first it appears that Nelly Windrow is the one on trial, and because it takes awhile for the truth to be revealed, the play has to clarify that Nelly is not the one on trial but rather a man who can’t even show up to court because he was killed. This scene acts as somewhat of …show more content…
a steady throughline for the rest of the play, which weaves in and out of time, peeking in on various town residents. Another scene which frequently shows up is Martha and Wilma gossiping on their porch. They act as unreliable narrators with strong opinions about the other townspeople, and help transition to side plots like Cora and Walter, Patsy and Lena, and Nelly and Mary Windrow. Because all of these stories, along with the main trial, are so spread out and flip back and forth in time, it is initially very difficult to find out what is going on in any of the plots. While this can be useful and intriguing at first, being confused about the story for half the play can get tiring. The mysterious “he” that everyone refers to: “I don’t know how we let him hang around here like he did. Everyone was scared of him” (2), finally shows up. He is revealed as Skelly Manor, a creepy old drunkard who sees everything and everyone. Hints of the actual crime start to pop up as Robert gives his testimony, as well as Mary’s rather confusing rambling which turns out to be a dream she had. The first act ends with a rather moving scene of Cora discovering Walter has left her, and she collapses to the ground in tears. The second act helps clarify some of the original scenes by replaying them with context.
While this sometimes had a unique effect of making the audience realise what exactly they had been seeing before, often it made the play feel like a broken record. The repetition of scenes feels like watching the nightmare of a guilty criminal who is obsessing over how everything went wrong, but in a drug-induced sort of way. It also makes the scene of Eva and Robert walking in the woods less powerful. Just when the tension begins to build up the first time we see it, the scene abruptly shifts away. This happens again the second time we see it, so by the third time their conversation about flying and frost feels tiresome. However, the decision to gather all of the men on one side and all the women on the other during Robert’s harassment of Eva did achieve a profound emotional effect. Having the townspeople act as trees also helped give the feeling that everyone in Eldritch was implicit in the act, and allowed it to happen without interfering before things got worse, as the preacher points out in his sermons: “We took no action. The burden must be ours. We are all responsible for the shock of these two innocents” (10). Perhaps the most effective use of repetition in the play is when we again hear Robert’s testimony, but now knowing the truth we see him for who he really is, and not the helpless victim we assumed him to be
originally. While I did enjoy this play’s creativity and the spot-on casting of the characters, I feel like some of the scenes could have been taken out, not repeated, or cut shorter. A good example would be the sex scene between Patsy and Walter, which is as uncomfortable as it is useless for providing any new information and thus could be taken out. Skelly’s “she had beautiful tits” monologue could also have been shortened a bit, as the speech reached in emotional peak and then kept going, till it felt like sitting next to that uncle at the family reunion who you politely listen to even while thinking up an excuse to leave. Overall, the acting and directing of this play was amazing and helped carry a confusing and twisted plot. The genuineness of the characters gave the play its emotional impact that left me holding my breath during that last forest scene. I am glad to have seen all that talent together on stage, as it made the play truly worth it and special.
The figurative language expresses emotions. Words can only classify emotions. However they are unfathomable and can only be expressed through “exaggerations”. To compare one self to the author’s feeling is the only way for the emotion to be understood. The repetition is used to show the struggle of letting go of the past. O’Brien becomes a writer and finds that he can’t let go so easily. He writes stories more than once to find a point in why it haunts him and why he must move on.
the play. It looks at the person he is and the person he becomes. It
The scenes, which cover thirty years of the characters’ lives from eight to thirty-eight, each revolve around an injury that Doug has acquired through his accident prone life. The play progresses in five year intervals, jumping backwards and forwards, in a nonlinear progression. As they travel and run into each other’s lives, the two characters face new injuries. As the play progresses every five years, a new injury is added to one or both characters. Their lives intersect through these injuries, leading them to compare their wounds, both physical (Doug) and emotional (Kayleen), and drawing them closer together. With each new scene, old injuries and problems may have gotten better or resolved, but some became permanent. Yet, through these experiences, they are bonded together through bloodstains, cuts, and bandages.
When Roald Dahl used repetition to add to the scare factor in his short story, “Lamb to Slaughter”. Throughout the story he used repetition to emphasize things. Like when he repeats “They always treated her kindly.” and “The two detectives were exceptionally nice to her.” It was to emphasize that they treated her as the victim rather than a suspect. The repetition used made me curious when reading the story. Whenever I saw something repeated, I asked myself ‘Why would they do that?’ I became intrigued and wanted to read more and find out. By repeating, Roald created suspense and anticipation for the reader to get to the climax, prompting the reader to keep reading. In conclusion, repetition definitely made the story scarier.
“The Rattler” is a story that is written by Donald Beattie that expresses a survival and protective tone to persuade readers to side with the man that killed the snake in order to protect a larger community of animals and humans. Beattie is presenting the story to a large group of people in attempt to persuade them. Beattie uses imagery, simile, and pathos to develop a root of persuasion and convince the audience to reanalyze the man’s actions.
unkown to the rest of the town intill the end of the play. And because of her
Arthur Millers play is a creative dramatic and well-researched exploration into the hysteria that surrounding the 'perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom'.
The play begins at Reverend Parris' home, whose daughter Betty is ill. Parris is living with his daughter and his seventeen-year old niece Abigail. Parris believes that is daughters illness is from supernatural causes, so he sends for Reverend Hale. Betty first start to look ill after her father discovered her dancing in the woods with Abigail and his Negro slave, Tituba along with several other local girls. There are rumors going around that Betty's sickness is due to witchcraft. Parris doesn't want to admit to seeing his daughter and niece dancing in the woods, but Abigail says that she will admit to dancing and accept the punishment.
The play’s major conflict is the loneliness experienced by the two elderly sisters, after outliving most of their relatives. The minor conflict is the sisters setting up a tea party for the newspaper boy who is supposed to collect his pay, but instead skips over their house. The sisters also have another minor conflict about the name of a ship from their father’s voyage. Because both sisters are elderly, they cannot exactly remember the ships name or exact details, and both sisters believe their version of the story is the right one. Although it is a short drama narration, Betty Keller depicts the two sisters in great detail, introduces a few conflicts, and with the use of dialogue,
Every time the family comes to a confrontation someone retreats to the past and reflects on life as it was back then, not dealing with life as it is for them today. Tom, assuming the macho role of the man of the house, babies and shelters Laura from the outside world. His mother reminds him that he is to feel a responsibility for his sister. He carries this burden throughout the play. His mother knows if it were not for his sisters needs he would have been long gone. Laura must pickup on some of this, she is so sensitive she must sense Toms feeling of being trapped. Tom dreams of going away to learn of the world, Laura is aware of this and she is frightened of what may become of them if he were to leave.
In Part Two: “The Manburner”, chapter 7 of McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo, Lorena describes her fateful experience with Mox Mox as a captive to Goodnight. Goodnight tells her that Mox Mox, who they believed had been killed years before, had actually been hiding at sea and now has returned. Goodnight believes Mox Mox is alive because there is someone burning people in New Mexico, which is distinctive to his own personal M.O. Hearing the news from him made her apprehensive to the point where “she felt as if she might strangle” (221). Despite the fear that filled her, she told Goodnight her traumatic experience and the events that unfolded while she was a captive of Blue Duck. The passage that stood out to me is the following: “He wanted to burn
The theme of the play has to do with the way that life is an endless cycle. You're born, you have some happy times, you have some bad times, and then you die. As the years pass by, everything seems to change. But all in all there is little change. The sun always rises in the early morning, and sets in the evening. The seasons always rotate like they always have. The birds are always chirping. And there is always somebody that has life a little bit worse than your own.
The irony comes into play when the truth starts to unravel and Jack finds out what really happened to him as a child and why he does not know his parents. After some coincidental events, all the main characters end up in the same room. When Lady Bracknell hears Ms. Prism’s (the woman Jack hired as his nieces governess) name she immediately asks to see her. She continues to say that Ms. Prism had wandered off with a baby years ago and asks what came about of that. Ms. Prism continues the dialog to explain how she misplaced a baby that was in her bag at a train station. Jack, thinking he might have been that very baby, retrieves the bag he was found in as an infant in which Ms. Prism identifies by some distinguishing marks to have been her own. Jack realized the woman that had been teaching his niece was his mother. But then Lady Bracknell explained that she was not but Lady Bracknell’s poor sister Mrs. Moncrieff was.
Have you ever felt like you had to live up to an ideal that is just not in you to live up to? Have you been pressured to act a certain way because that’s what’s considered the norm? If you answered yes to these questions, fear not. Societal pressures and expectations have been around for centuries. People have been singing, writing, painting, and talking about these feelings of expectation for just as long. D.H. Lawrence’s “Snake,” and Langston Hughes’s “Theme in English B,” speak to the struggles of societies expectations. Though both poems are dissimilar in many ways, they share the common thread that the main characters are fighting what society deems to be the norm both internally and externally.
In addition to vocabulary, Poe’s use of repetition ensures that his audience will appreciate the deeper meaning of his writing and understand which concepts are important in his stories. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator, after stating that he is not insane, goes on to describe “how stealthily, stealthily” (Long) he proceeds when going into of the elderly man and blighting the room with the lantern. The repetition of “stealthily” demonstrates just how sneaky and narrator is, suggesting that he is crazy.