In Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, an officer in the Special Operations Executive known by her code name Verity is captured by German forces in the town of Ormaie, France. Also known as Julie and Queenie, Verity deserves the “Most Vivid Character Award” because of her passion and unreliability. The first half of the novel is set in Julie’s point of view as she writes about how she came to be captured in a manuscript to give to the Germans. Even though she narrates the story in 3rd person point of view, there are enough interludes of her dilemma in Ormaie that her personality and passion shines clearly. An example of this is at the beginning of the book when Julie proclaims in all capitals that being interrogated in her underwear is “SO
This book is about a girl name Ellen Foster who is ten years old. Her mother committed suicide by over dosing on her medication. When Ellen tried to go look for help for her mother her father stopped her. He told them that if she looked for helped he would kill them both. After her mother died she was left under her fathers custody. Her father was a drunk. He would physically and mentally abuse her. Ellen was forced to pay bills, go grocery shopping, cook for herself, and do everything else for herself. Ellen couldn't take it any more so she ran away her friends house. Starletta and her parents lived in a small cabin with one small bathroom. One day at school a teacher found a bruise on Ellen's arm. She sends Ellen to live with Julia the school's art teacher. Julia had a husband named Roy. They were both hippies. Julia and Roy cared a lot about Ellen. After Ellen turned 11 years old she was forced to go live with her grandmother. Ellen didn't want to leave Julia and Roy but her grandmother had won custody. Her grandmother was a cruel old lady. Ellen spends the summer with her grandmother. Living with her makes her very unhappy. Since her grandmother owns farmland she forces Ellen to work on the field with her black servants. Ellen meets a black woman named Mavis. Mavis and her become good friends. Mavis would talk about how she knew Ellen's mother and how much Ellen resembled her mother. Her grandmother didn't think the same. She thought that Ellen resembled her father. She also hated that man. Her grandmother would often compare her with her father. Her grandmother would torture her because she wanted revenge from her father. Her grandmother also blames her for the death of her mother. While Ellen was staying with her grandmother her father died. When her father died she didn't feel sad because she had always fantasized about killing her father. Ellen just felt a distant sadness. Ellen cried just a little bit. Her grandmother was furious because Ellen showed some emotions. She told her to never cry again. After that Ellen becomes scarred for a long time. One day her uncle Rudolph bought the flag that had been on Ellen's father's casket. Her grandmother turns him away. Later that day she burned the flag.
She’s just so weak. If she would stand up for herself, no one would bother her. It’s her own fault that people pick on her, she needs to toughen up. “Shape of a Girl” by Joan MacLeod, introduces us to a group of girls trying to “fit in” in their own culture, “school.” This story goes into detail about what girls will do to feel accepted and powerful, and the way they deal with everyday occurrences in their “world.” Most of the story is through the eyes of one particular character, we learn about her inner struggles and how she deals with her own morals. This story uses verisimilitude, and irony to help us understand the strife of children just wanting to fit in and feel normal in schools today.
Perhaps no other event in modern history has left us so perplexed and dumbfounded than the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, an entire population was simply robbed of their existence. In “Our Secret,” Susan Griffin tries to explain what could possibly lead an individual to execute such inhumane acts to a large group of people. She delves into Heinrich Himmler’s life and investigates all the events leading up to him joining the Nazi party. In“Panopticism,” Michel Foucault argues that modern society has been shaped by disciplinary mechanisms deriving from the plague as well as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a structure with a tower in the middle meant for surveillance. Susan Griffin tries to explain what happened in Germany through Himmler’s childhood while Foucault better explains these events by describing how society as a whole operates.
The third section of the story returns the reader to the calm security, but then quickly sends the tone of the story into a frenzy. These constant tone changes show the reader how strong and resourceful the woman is, but it also shows us how she can be thrown into a panic easily. We come to have little confidence in the main character's ability to react well if a dangerous situation arises.
In "Our Secret" by Susan Griffin, the essay uses fragments throughout the essay to symbolize all the topics and people that are involved. The fragments in the essay tie together insides and outsides, human nature, everything affected by past, secrets, cause and effect, and development with the content. These subjects and the fragments are also similar with her life stories and her interviewees that all go together. The author also uses her own memories mixed in with what she heard from the interviewees. Her recollection of her memory is not fully told, but with missing parts and added feelings. Her interviewee's words are told to her and brought to the paper with added information. She tells throughout the book about these recollections.
“As a writer of fiction Böll was interpreting history, creating patterns of meaning, ordering his material to enable his reader to make sense of it.” The experiences of Böll and his values that arose from these events have been influential on the content and themes of Böll’s novel, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. Böll experienced both the first and second world wars and the effects that these wars had on German society. Events such as the economic collapse in Germany post WWII, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the rise of student based urban terrorism in West Germany in the 1970’s and the increasing state controls to contain such alleged threats can be seen to influence the issues explored in The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. The novel is a comment on the press and the law, the labyrinth of social truth, the collision of fact and fiction and the power of language. Böll himself experienced the press first hand and this along with the experiences of Professor Bruckner, form the basis of his criticism directed at the powerful and hegemonic structures in society, in particular in relation to the police and the press and their corrupt relationship in the novella. Many of Heinrich Böll s views and attitudes, resulting form his context, are clearly visible in the novella through the portrayal of certain characters in positive or negative lights. The historical, social, economic and political context of Böll and West Germany at this time (1900’s) had a considerable effect on the issues Böll delves into in The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and greatly affected my understanding of the novel.
It is hard to find that one person in the world that you can always relate too. That one friend knows your personality and perspective. In the book Code Name Verity written by Elizabeth Wein, we see a unique and very special thing of friendship. This amazing friendship we get to see is between two girls, Maddie and Julie. Because of their job and missions, they are both required to have code names throughout the book. These girls know exactly what kind of trouble they would get into if any code name was given away and most importantly, the trust they would break from their friendship. The reason why we see Maddie and Julie have such a strong friendship is because of the time spent between them and the amount of care between the two. Julie is a double agent that does life threatening missions, and Maddie is a pilot that happens to fly her. When preparing to jump out of the back of the plane, Julie says one of the most unique phrases to go out on a bang with. From the beginning to the end of the book, my understanding of the friendship, the plot, and their culture has changed dramatically based on this one quote, “Kiss me hardy!”(68).
A woman in Berlin is a diary written by an anonymous author from the 20th of april 1945 to 22nd June the war has reached the outskirts of Berlin and the forces of Russia are pushing through the Germans. The Russians in their drunken stupor are aggressive and have crude ideas about the woman. The author has her friends which live together in an apartment she can speak Russian, which makes her a target for help by the germans and a companion for the Russians. The author has written her diary with literary techniques to really bring the reader into her shoes. She uses a range of literary devices, of narrative point of view, characterization
The tendency to establish rigid social codes of gender-determined behaviors is apparent everywhere--though specifically present in literary texts. Women are expected to, in essence, be women and act, dress, and behave in a manner that distinguishes them from men. While these constructs are rigidly defined, they are easily and recurrently transcended. In her, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Majorie Garber demonstrates the concept of "cultural binarisms", illustrating them to be the social and historical obsession with polarizing individuals, male or female, into either "one" group or the "other." In her essay, she concentrates her discussion on the importance of dress in the construction of gender and its power in undermining it. Garber writes that gender boundaries--which she defines as blurred social concepts--can be transcended by the cross-dresser. Additionally, the appearance of a transvestite character indicates that a "category crisis" is present, but not limited to gender identity. This "category crisis", is resultant of the "binarisms" which have been disturbed. Herman Mann's account, The Female Review: Life of Deborah Sampson, the Female Soldier, reinforces Garber's assertions about the cross-dressing figure in literature-- once Sampson puts on men's clothing, her identity is changed. She is, therefore, able to transgress the limited capacities of a woman and access her desires to see the world. Mann addresses several instances of "binarisms"--including gender, class, and status--throughout his text. Through his character of Deborah Sampson, he is able to display a separate, but relevant issue of a socially and politically ...
Reading is extremely underrated in our country today. Those who do read know what I’m
The color-coded uniforms that the women wear does more than just signify their functions. Along with the names/titles of characters, they symbolize the individual's loss of identity. No distinguishing mark of a woman is considered; rather, she is lumped with a group in which she is defined only by her social and reproductive function. Essentially, the color-coded uniforms strip each woman of her i...
Authors often use characters within their novels to show the consequences of challenging cultural boundaries and, in turn, display their own personal concerns. It is not uncommon for characters to reflect an author’s ideology regarding social groups in their contemporary time periods. It is clear that this is certainly the case with the 1975 novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, (also referred to as How Violence Develops and Where it Can Lead), written by the German Author, Heinrich Boll. The Lost Honour is, on the surface, an attack on yellow journalism and the damage it causes to the lives of the people reported on. However, with a more in depth analysis of the novel we are able to see that Boll is in fact using his characters to reflect his own personal views on the stereotypical social groups in contemporary Germany. Boll himself has described The Lost Honour as “a pamphlet disguised as a novel”. Through the use of the seemingly ‘objective’ third person limited narrator, we are shown the consequences of challenging and conforming to the expected gender requirements. On one hand we are presented with Katharina Blum, a woman who rejects the majority of expected stereotypically feminine traits that are place upon women and the resulting slander upon her name in doing so. In contrast however, Boll also demonstrates the consequences of abusing power, which is stemmed from being a male, through the character of Totges, an example of a yellow journalist. It is Totges’ own assumptions of Blum and his vulgarly masculine ways which ultimately leads to his murder. It is important to remember that these narrative developments reflect Bolls own personal views formed from his own contex...
Behn is remarkable because as a spy for the British crown and the first woman to make a living as a writer, she circumnavigated her gender and claimed an identity previously only thought possible for a man. In her 1677 play The Rover, Behn laments that her female characters are trapped w...
Today, I am going to discuss the bestselling, fictional novel, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. In her book, Annelise Marie – better known as Anne Frank, documents her experiences during the Holocaust and World War II (WWII). Readers are better able to get a feel for the suspense going on and emotion that Jews experienced, through a teenage mind. Anne Frank was only about 13 when she began writing about her book and 14 during hiding. She talks about the dangers of outside, bombings, shootings, and air raids of foreign enemies, as well as the “call ups” by Gestapo and the capture of her fellow acquaintances (including their experiences in the brutal concentration camps). The book is organized by diary dates and usually begin with “Dear Kitty,” From here I will summarize several sections of the book. Let us begin.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in 1890 about her experience in a psychiatric hospital. The doctor she had prescribed her “the rest cure” to get over her condition (Beekman). Gilman included the name of the sanitarium she stayed at in the piece as well which was named after the doctor that “treated” her. The short story was a more exaggerated version of her month long stay at Weir Mitchell and is about a woman whose name is never revealed and she slowly goes insane under the watch of her doctor husband and his sister (The Yellow Wallpaper 745). Many elements of fiction were utilized by Gilman in this piece to emphasize the theme freedom and confinement. Three of the most important elements are symbolism, setting and character.