In his poem “In the Subway (2),” Aaron Leyeles introduces the image of a hand dropping golden money as a distinctive feature in both the third and last stanzas. This distinctive feature is a complex metaphor functioning to illustrate the struggle of the passengers in the subway cell against the influences of capitalist America.
The distinctive feature of a hand dropping golden money first appears in the third stanza when Leyeles says, “Suddenly -- from the ceiling -- a hand / Pours Streams of golden dollars / On the breathing wall in nightmare tunnel-land / The breathing wall -- / A tremor.” (Leyeles, 364). This represents the metaphorical poisoning of the subway passengers by the influences of American capitalism by the hand, and through the golden coins that it drops. Under closer analysis, the hand can be seen as a representation of the invisible hand, a concept introduced by Adam Smith to explain how consumer decisions are subconsciously influenced to choose certain things over others to help generate equilibrium between
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/ Pierced eyes. / Bloody mouths. / In dead holes -- / Golden coins, / Flashing blades, / Dropped by a hand / In a subway train / In the underground mad-mad-madness” (Leyeles, 364-365). This illustrates the death that results when people are overcome by poison. The placement of the coins in the mouths of the dead, the entry point for poisonous respiratory contaminants to enter the body revealing the author's belief that the people in the subway cell will be unable to hold on to their cultural values and will, in fact, be poisoned by the influences of capitalism and assimilate to a more American capitalist lifestyle. The overall message that the author communicates through his distinctive feature is that it is as bad for an immigrant assimilating their life to the standards of American capitalism as it is to surrender that life to
In this poem, “On the Subway”, written by Sharon Olds brings two worlds into proximity. We will identify the contrast that develops both portraits in the poem and discuss the insights the narrator comes to because of the experience. The author refers to several literary techniques as tone, poetic devices, imagery, and organization. The poem talks about a historical view based on black and white skin. It positions the two worlds the point of view of a black skinned and a white skinned. The boy is described as having a casual cold look for a mugger and alert under the hooded lids. On the other hand, based on his appearance the white skinned person felt threatened by the black boy. She was frightened that he could take her coat, brief case, and
Lying on the Couch by Irvin Yalom is about the therapeutic relationships and sometimes unprofessional relationships that can form. The primary focus is on Dr. Ernest Lash, whom works out of an office in a more privileged area of San Francisco under the supervision of Dr. Marshal Streider, a highly ambitious therapist who aims to be the president of the American Psychiatric Association, but is secretly pre-occupied by greed which ends up getting him into some trouble. Dr. Lash seems to truly enjoy his work and take pride in it. This novel opens up with Dr. Lash meeting with his one client Justin, whom after 5 years and many sessions has finally decided to leave his unhappy marriage. Justin then decides he no longer needs the help of Ernest
While reading the book Lying on the Couch by Irvin D. Yalom one would come to realize that there are ethical and legal issues that get in the way of numerous counseling sessions. The novel focuses on the struggles that any therapist can come across while working with their clients. Although with this storyline the boundaries and legal issues may have been taken to the extreme, it strongly depicts what could happen if one would choose to make unethical decisions. One must also have a sense of the true meaning of the counseling sessions
Coming from an “unconventional” background, George Saunders is readily able to relate to the circumstances the everyday working laborer goes through (Wylie). However, Saunders has an advantage to spread out his ideas and concerns about life in the U.S. via his short stories and novellas. Because of neoliberalism and capitalism and its correlation to the huge wealth gap in the U.S. Saunders focuses his protagonists’ view from a proletariat standpoint, allowing the reader to see the life of consumerism has impacted our society. Saunders does not use conventional methods to portray this reality. Instead, Saunders emphasizes on the “absence” of certain moral human characteristics in order to take the reader away from viewing into a hero’s looking glass— to set a foundation of a world where our morals become lost to our materialistic and inherent need of money (Wylie).
Jacob Riis’ book How the Other Half Lives is a detailed description on the poor and the destitute in the inner realms of New York City. Riis tries to portray the living conditions through the ‘eyes’ of his camera. He sneaks up on the people flashes a picture and then tells the rest of the city how the ‘other half’ is living. As shocking as the truth was without seeing such poverty and horrible conditions with their own eyes or taking in the experience with all their senses it still seemed like a million miles away or even just a fairy tale.
The public and the police, whom also see them as deviants, label them. They don’t live like we do in clean houses that have electricity and running water. They live a different standard that makes most uncomfortable. Toth explains how New York also has a high rate of substance abusers and mentally ill in the underground population (41). This proves that there is a broader problem here that reflects on how the structure of the U.S society. Based off of conflict theory, the reason the “mole people” are like this is because we secluded them from our society, with alienating them. They end up turning to drug use for an escape or some of them became this way because they were addicts and mentally ill and we didn’t supply the help needed to fix them. Our society is set for the individual and what we can do to improve ourselves that we often forget to help the less fortunate. In a capitalist system, the definition of alienation is defined as being unconnected to one’s work, product, fellow workers, and human nature. Reading the numerous accounts of people Toth has interviewed, we learn about the homeless that ended up there due to a poor upbringing or some who used to be somebody that sadly ended up homeless and seeking refuge in these tunnels. Some choose this life others are destined here because of the fault in the U.S
The pursuit of money and the corruption of those who aim wealth, are the main subjects of critique in books like: “The Great Gatsby” and “Motorcycle Diaries”. These books present different visions of the effects the use of money have, and the social condition of “wanting more than needed”. This condition has the power of turn one simple and non-important object, into something important that could even seem vital for us. In our society, and the societies presented in Fitzgerald and Guevara’s books, money means more than a piece of paper or metal that it is supposed to make easier the exchange of things. People do not control the money, is money the one who control us. Hard cash and capitalism work by the usage of our vanity to sell us different products. It works by telling us that, what we have is not, and may never be, enough. This ideas implant a need of establishing a perpetuation of our sense of superiority. In the books “The Great Gatsby” and “Motorcycle Diaries” the reader is able to realize the repercussions the...
The New York City Subway is one of the oldest public transit systems in the world, and Manhattan has its fair share of it, especially in the form of abandoned subway stations.Subways are great mean of transportation, with great historical and geographical value. Interborough Rapid Transit company built the first subway in 1904. The subway consisted of what is today the IRT Lexington Avenue Line south of 42nd Street, the 42nd Street Shuttle and the IRT Broadway - Seventh Avenue Line between 42nd and 145th Streets. 28th Street is a part of the first IRT line of NewYork city. It a local station on the Lexington Avenue Line of the New York City Subway, located at the intersection of Park
As if to mock the crumbling principles of a fallen era, “The Just Judges” preside over a solemn dumping ground of earthly hell. This flimsy legion of justice, like the omnipresent eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, casts a shadow of pseudo-morality over a land spiraling towards pathos. But Albert Camus’s The Fall unfolds amidst the seedy Amsterdam underground--a larger, more sinister prison than the Valley of Ashes, whose center is Mexico City, a neighborhood bar and Mecca for the world’s refuse. The narrator and self-proclaimed judge-penitent, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, presides over his subjects every night to “offer his services,” although partially dissembled and highly suspect, to any who will listen. More artfully than a black widow preying on her unsuspecting mate, he traps us in his confessional monologue, weaving a web so intricate and complete that no one can escape its clutches.
Artists portray gruesome events in many ways including poems and videos. Gruesome events are portrayed in similar ways and also different ways including what is put in and what is left out. Whether it be leaving out who started the war, telling the whole story, or emphasizing elements in different ways the artist clearly portrays the Civil War of Spain as a gruesome and horrifying event. Both mediums clearly show how life was before the war and how people have been hurt. Both artists give the reader a sense of how the war affected everyone in Spain and eventually give the rest of the world a reason to “come and see the blood in the streets”(1/5 voices).
Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, written by Paul Schrader, both tell the same story about a man who is lonely and blames the world around him for his loneliness. The characters of Underground Man and Travis Bickle mirror each other; they both live in the underground, narrating their respective stories, experiencing aches and maladies which they leave unchecked, seeing the city they live in as a modern-day hell filled with the fake and corrupt. However, time and again both Travis and the Underground Man contradict themselves. While the underground character preaches his contempt for civilization—the ‘aboveground’—and the people within it, he constantly displays a deep-seeded longing to be a part of it. Both characters believe in a strong ideal that challenges that of the city’s, an ideal that is personified by the character of the prostitute.
Hazlitt’s use of figurative language allows the reader to reflect on their own views of money while also establishing his credibility as a professional writer amidst the chaos of the world. Although Hazlitt uses allusions throughout the text, the use of hyperbole is also evident within it. He writes on how a person’s fate is to be “an exile in one’s own country” as a result of lusting for money.
This poem sets out to expose the fact that we have the power to change the economy. We have the power to change how we think about money, making this poem a didactic poem. This means that it’s intended to teach, but in particularly having moral instruction as an ulterior motive. Walker’s poem also has no rhyme scheme, but uses imagery, alliteration, metaphors,
Patriarchal formations of familial angst and romance included, Vice City has been received again and again in the several orifices of the public body. Each time new techniques, purposes, and functions may be discovered in the rubble evidencing the occurrence, but the repeated encounter itself symptomatically mythologizes a special strain of the back, bearing out a stigmata proving again and again the omnipresence of Vice City in the spaces of media outlets, and thus collection and reflection. Back pain in the very dens and living rooms of America! The back is just the end of the issue, where it starts is in the hands, a twitching organism tied by lines of fluid, flesh, force, and faith to the human configuration. If what is violent in the game is the mode of interaction by which the protagonist’s narrative transgressions can be rendered progeny of a sick mind (akin to the Japanese Otaku), the hand is a thing of the psychological measurement of the central nervous system and the behavior of the favorite allopathic object. Gameplay is feedback, hand to computer to display to eye, and, like any such idealized circuitry, crossover is categorically denied. Honestly, hands are not their own and not even ‘yours’ in any romantic sense, but yours-insofar-as-you-are-humanized, and thus schematized into matrices of humanist pluralism of the population. A population of its instances. Aside these detachments in analysis, Vice City offers an anarchic confusion with implications for media theory by a methodological engagement of gameplay.
A train station can also be called as various forms that include depot, railroad station or railway station, which is a railway amenity where trains routinely stop to load or unload traveller or freight. It typically consumes at least one track side portal and a station constructing, offering such ancillary services as waiting rooms and ticket sales.