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More handpicked essays just for you.
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Recommended: Coming of age in literature
“Four Summers,” written by Joyce Carol Oates, is a short story describing four summers in which Sissie’s family stays at their lake house. This story is told from four different years of her life, as she transitions from a child to adult. Sissie encounters obstacles holding her back from her aspirations, such as her family background, and she must learn from her parents mistakes and move on with her
In the book “The Boys of Winter” by Wayne Coffey, shows the struggle of picking the twenty men to go to Lake Placid to play in the 1980 Olympics and compete for the gold medal. Throughout this book Wayne Coffey talks about three many points. The draft and training, the importance of the semi-final game, and the celebration of the gold medal by the support the team got when they got home.
King Solomon wrote wisely, and later was wisely paraphrased by the folk band “The Byrds”, “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven...” (Ecclesiastes 3:1,8). Seasons often represent the periods of a person’s life; birth, youth, age and death. In the short story “Summer” by David Updike, the lake provides an eternal and unchanging witness to Homer’s transition from season to season and from boy to man.
Imagine for a moment it is your big sister's 17th birthday. She is out with her friends celebrating, and your parents are at the mall with your little brother doing some last minute birthday shopping, leaving you home alone. You then hear a knock on the front door. When you getthere, nobody is there, just an anonymous note taped to the door that says Happy Birthday, along with a hundred dollar bill. You've been dying to get that new video game, and your sister will never know. You are faced with a tough decision, but not a very uncommon one. In both Fences, by August Wilson, and A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansbury, tough decisions have to be made about getting money from someone else's misfortune. But money's that important right?
When Hansberry was a child she did not like summer at all. When she thought of summer she thought of a hot room, too-grainy texture of sand, and really cold waters. Hansberry writes, “For the longest kind of time I simply thought that summer was a mistake” (208). Hansberry was not fond of summer, some nights the went to the park and slept on the grass because it was hot. Then one summer when she was seven or eight her mother took her to see her grandmother. She loved seeing her grandmother and she saw that she loved summer. Every summer that she spent with
Wintergirls is a book related to eating disorders. The author’s purpose of writing this book is to inform readers what a person with an eating disorder. It depicts the inner and outer conflicts that characters like Lia and Cassie face with disorder. It all began with a competition between two characters of who can be the skinniest. Cassie dies in the attempt of winning the game. Lia, the main character in this novel, always keeps track of her food consumption. For example, one breakfast morning, Lia said she didn’t want “a muffin (410),…orange (75),…toast (87),…waffles (180)” (Anderson 5). Lia constantly keeps track of the calories she eats. Unlike Cassie who follows the path of bulimia, Lia inhibits herself from eating, therefore not getting the proper nutrients. This allows the readers to know how a person with a disorder like Lia can restrain herself from eating foods that we’re used to eating in our regular lives. Her ultimate goal frequently change, getting lower and lower each time. Lia strives for a “five hundred calories a day” (Anderson 189). Her constant change of goals allows the readers to know the struggles a girl with such a mindset may feel.
One Crazy Summer deserves to be read more than once. The novel revolves around the tale of three young girls who are put on a plane from Brooklyn to Oakland, where they are to stay with the “mother” who abandoned them. The story takes place in 1968 when the American society is changing due to racism and Black Panthers carrying guns while roaming around and shouting about Black Power. But it's also a
unhappy man whose only wish is to make the rest of the world as sad as
Where Are You Going, Where have you been? is a short story written by Joyce Carol Oates. The 75 year old American author and professor at Princeton University, introduce the story of 15 year old Connie who is rebelling against her mother’s whishes. A very arrogant and selfish girl that in her world the only thing that matters is how many heads she can turn when walking into a room. Through the story life gives her a test, to confront Arnold Friend, the antagonist of the story; who possesses a nefarious power beyond her own experience.
The attack on the farmhouse that resulted in the rape of his daughter and his near-immolation penetrate every part of his life, even in his work as he subconsciously writes the character of Byron’s daughter Allegra into his opera. A character who he had not intended to incorporate, the voice of Allegra cries ‘Why have you left me? Come and fetch me!’ , eerily paralleling the voice of nightmare-Lucy, and thus he is unable to ignore his grief any longer. In American Pastoral the reader begins to criticise the strength of the Swede, his fatal flaw being that he is too caring. An example of this is when Merry asks Swede to kiss her the way he kisses her mother and after an initial refusal, her father kisses her passionately on the mouth. This transgression is highlighted as a crucial factor debated in the Swede’s mind as to whether it is the cause of the subsequent grief suffered, ‘he wondered if the strange parental misstep was not collapse responsibility for which he paid for the rest of his life.’ This becomes the centre of his mental hell, in which he agonises over how he could have ‘wounded’ Merry. The aftermath of the kiss leads the Swede to become more wary of his emotions and affections toward Merry. This reclusive behaviour adds to the fragmented mind-set of the Swede.
Home is about a Korean War veteran named Frank Money who needs to save his sister from dying. The story starts with Frank describing a scene from his childhood with his sister. They were in a field with horses he describes the horses being beautiful and brutal, but on the other side some men were burying a dead African American in a hole. When Frank becomes an adult he is soon committed to a mental hospital after his time in the war. Frank soon gets a letter stating that his sister was in danger and could die if he did not hurry to save her. Then he remembers his family being evicted and not being able to take any possessions. Frank then escapes the bastion of the hospital on his way to save his sister from the mysterious person. On his way Frank Money meets many different people who offer their assistance to him because he is not wealthy. Frank makes his way to Atlanta to continue the search for is sister but is attacked by gang of thugs, who steal his wallet and hit him with a pipe. After trying to find his sister he finds his sister being an experimental patient to Dr. Beau, a doctor who conducted experiments on colored civilians. After Frank saves his sister he takes her to some friends to help her get better from the experiments. While there his sister starts to make a quilt while she got better, which they eventually laid over the man’s bones, who was lynched, when they were kids. They nailed a sign to the tree as a sign of respect showing that someone was buried there beneath the tree. Finally, after nailing the sign, Frank looks at the tree for a while thinking of everything that has happened, then his sister Cee walks over and tells him it’...
Nine patriarchs found a town. Four women flee a life. Only one paradise is attained. Toni Morrison's novel Paradise revolves around the concept of "paradise," and those who believe they have it and those who actually do. Morrison uses a town and a former convent, each with its own religious center, to tell her tale about finding solace in an oppressive world. Whether fleeing inter- and intra-racial conflict or emotional hurt, the characters travel a path of self-isolation and eventual redemption. In her novel Paradise, Toni Morrison uses the town of Ruby and four broken women to demonstrate how "paradise" can not be achieved through isolation, but rather only through understanding and acceptance.
Throughout many of Toni Morrison?s novels, the plot is built around some conflict for her characters to overcome. Paradise, in particular, uses the relationships between women as a means of reaching this desired end. Paradise, a novel centered around the destruction of a convent and the women in it, supports this idea by showing how this building serves as a haven for dejected women (Smith). The bulk of the novel takes place during and after WWII and focuses on an all black town in Oklahoma. It is through the course of the novel that we see Morrison weave the bonds of women into the text as a means of healing the scars inflicted upon her characters in their respective societies.
“Spinster” by Sylvia Plath is a poem that consists of a persona, who in other words serves as a “second self” for the author and conveys her innermost feelings. The poem was written in 1956, the same year as Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes, who was also a poet. The title suggests that the persona is one who is not fond of marriage and the normal rituals of courtship as a spinster is an unmarried woman, typically an older woman who is beyond the usual age of marriage and may never marry. The persona of the poem is a woman who dislikes disorder and chaos and finds relationships to be as unpredictable as the season of spring, in which there is no sense of uniformity. In this poem, Plath not only uses a persona to disclose her feelings, but also juxtaposes the seasons and their order (or lack thereof) and relates them to the order that comes with solitude and the disorder that is attributed with relationships. She accomplishes this through her use of formal diction, which ties into both the meticulous structure and develops the visual imagery.
Every historical period has its own hero of the time. It can be an active businessman or a sensitive aristocrat that fits the time best. In the poem I Sit and Look Out, Walt Whitman describes the horrors of the oppressive age he was living in. However, he does not try to change the situation and only "sits and look out". The question is whether being a spectator is enough to make the life of the oppressed better. The author is the mirror of the cruel 19th century reality, and this is a huge step towards democratization of the overall situation in the society. Even though such hero of the time does not fight for the rights of the oppressed, he makes the reading audience hear the lamenting choir of voices, who wait to be liberated.
“Dry September” transcends its text of a short story about a trivial situation in a small town to explore the tensions between race and gender that is a substantially widespread problem of modern day society. Through the creative use of irony depicted in the actions and attitudes of the characters, William Faulkner criticizes the outlived and immensely flawed social customs of the South, such as practices of racism, sexism, and violence. In addition to irony, symbolism is a significant rhetorical device in Dry September. One of the main symbols is the idea of dryness in which the novel’s depiction of a parched environment represents the dismal periods of the lives of the characters. In this way, Faulkner paints a background that is representative of his characters, who are buried in a conflict between conforming to social expectations and following their own justified conscience.