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Role of Epiphanies in literature
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Recommended: Role of Epiphanies in literature
In "Train", Joy Williams uses the idea of the "epiphany" to make the reader feel a sudden sense of understanding the underlying tones that are presented within the text. This event happens in the last few paragraphs of the story, after Danica asks Mr. Muirhead if Jane and here will be friends forever: "Mr Muirhead looked surprised. "Definitely not. Jane will not have friends. Jane will have husbands, enemies, and lawyers...I'm glad you enjoyed your summer, Dan, and I hope you are enjoying your childhood." With this line, Williams is giving us a dose of reality in that every one must growup apart from their childhood friends and start living an adult life, which can be drab and monotonous compared to the life of a young child, exploring the
world with wide eyes and open spirits. Throughout the entirety of the text, Jane is outgoing and because she had once lived in Manhattan, she had "certain attitudes". Williams makes this clear in how she treats her friends and those around her, lying and calling others names just because that's how she talks. Perhaps by this, Williams is inferring that this is the reason that Jane will have no friends and only people to live off of as she grows older. The seemingly outgoing and playfully sarcastic attitude may be the main cause of her problems in the future.
This week I read the short article on Alan Locke’s, “Enter the New Negro”. This article is discussing the Negro problem in depth. “By shedding the chrysalis of the Negro problem, we are achieving something like spiritual emancipation”. Locke believes that if we get rid of whatever is holding us back we would gain something renewing and beautiful.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is about the cross-cultural ethics in medicine. The book is about a small Hmong child named Lia Lee, who had epilepsy. Epilepsy is called, quag dab peg1 in the Hmong culture that translates to the spirit catches you and you fall down. In the Hmong culture this illness is sign of distinction and divinity, because most Hmong epileptics become shaman, or as the Hmong call them, txiv neeb2. These shamans are special people imbued with healing spirits, and are held to those having high morale character, so to Lia's parents, Foua Yang and Nao Kao Lee, the disease was both a gift and a curse. The main question in this case was could Lia have survived if her parent's and the doctors overcame the miscommunication, cultural racism, and the western way of medicine.
For my reading assignment I read “Car Trouble” by Jeanne Duprau. The story takes place in many cities in the United States. Some are real places like Richmond, Virginia, St. Louis, Missouri, and Los Angeles, California. The book also has some fictional towns like Sunville, New Mexico, a town built completely off of solar power and other natural resources. There are many more real and fake cities throughout the story, but the ones mentioned are the most written about and most important to the story.
In “The Finish of Patsy Barnes” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, readers can agree on the message of the book being that love for family can do amazing things. In the book, a young black boy named Patsy Barnes and his mother Eliza are living in Tennessee during the time shortly after slavery has nearly ended. After Patsy’s father is killed by a horse they moved North to an area called little Africa. Shortly after, Eliza falls sick with pneumonia, and the city physician can not help her and Patsy needs to find a way to afford a new doctor.
Frantically reliving and watching her previous life, Emily inquires to her parents, ““Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” (Wilder, 182). Emily is terrified on Earth because she knows her future. She is not disappointed with the actions she made on Earth, but she is disappointed that she didn’t appreciate the little actions in life. She carried herself through life like it would never end and she never needed to acknowledge the importance of those little actions. Being an example of the theme that life is a series of thoughtless events that make up one impactful life, Emily wishes she appreciated her small actions instead of taking them for
Communication is cited as a contributing factor in 70% of healthcare mistakes, leading to many initiatives across the healthcare settings to improve the way healthcare professionals communicate. (Kohn, 2000.)
This book addresses one of the common characteristics, and challenges, of health care today: the need to achieve a working knowledge of as many cultures as possible in health care. The Hmong population of Merced, California addresses the collision between Western medicine and holistic healing traditions of the Hmong immigrants, which plays out a common dilemma in western medical centers: the need to integrate modern western medicinal remedies with aspects of cultural that are good for the well-being of the patient, and the belief of the patient’s ability to recuperate. What we see is a clash, or lack of integration in the example of the story thereof. Lia, a Hmong child with a rare form of epilepsy, must enter the western hospital instead of the Laotian forest. In the forest she would seek out herbs to remedy the problems that beset her, but in the west she is forced to enter the western medical hospital without access to those remedies, which provided not only physical but spiritual comfort to those members of the Hmong culture. The herbs that are supposed to fix her spirit in the forest are not available in the western hospital. The Merced County hospital system clashes with Hmong animist traditions.
This results in a change of perspective and outlook on life. The first mate had believed in the ship Sally Anne so much that he did not think that anything could happen to it. He believed that the ship was stronger and studier than it was. After the accident the mate is forced to begin to see the truth about the ship and his life. He finally began to see that the thing he dedicated his whole life to was not as great as he thought. By the end of the story his outlook on life changes and he starts to think about what is next and working on the next step in surviving. The truth is something that people hide from and try as hard as they can not to face, however there are something’s that you cannot ignore as much as you try and one
Traditions, heritage and culture are three of the most important aspects of Chinese culture. Passed down from mother to daughter, these traditions are expected to carry on for years to come. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, daughters Waverly, Lena, Rose and June thoughts about their culture are congested by Americanization while on their quests towards self-actualization. Each daughter struggles to find balance between Chinese heritage and American values through marriage and professional careers.
Throughout a lifetime, one can run through many different personalities that transform constantly due to experience and growing maturity, whether he or she becomes the quiet, brooding type, or tries out being the wild, party maniac. Richard Yates examines acting and role-playing—recurring themes throughout the ages—in his fictional novel Revolutionary Road. Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple living miserably in suburbia, experience relationship difficulties as their desire to escape grows. Despite their search for something different, the couple’s lack of communication causes their planned move to Europe to fall through. Frank and April Wheeler play roles not only in their individual searches for identity, but also in their search for a healthy couple identity; however, the more the Wheelers hide behind their desired roles, the more they lose sense of their true selves as individuals and as a pair.
Untage writes about how she was never a very social person and can relate the movie back to herself that way. I wrote about how John Mayer’s song “Stop This Train” is about how life is moving too fast, and how life can move by very quickly for a first year college student. We have a similar way that we can relate back to our lives but with completely different topics, and that is the same for every person we all have different back grounds but can all relate to
Who is the birthday party a rite of passage for, the birthday boy or his mother?
... not as they conceptualized. As adulthood is commonly linked with age, the shift from adolescence to maturity arises with experience. In Joyce’s “Araby”, the emotional journey for the narrator, begins with the infatuation with his best friend’s sister, and ends with his disillusionment for love. In Mansfield’s “The Garden-Party”, Laura acts as a tie between the brightness and wealth of the Sheridan’s contrasted with the darkness and sorrow of the Scotts. While struggling with inner confusion, she attempts to build a unique identity for herself. Her emotional journey culminates with the viewing of the deceased man, and her powerful realization of life, where her life is put into perspective of life on a universal level. Both main characters experience major changes in their personality, as well as their psychology, and these insights change both of them incredibly.
Richard, Cicely. “Literary analysis: The role of epiphany in the stories of James Joyce.” Helium: .
Both characters are shocked by a disjunction between their world and the other like most of living organisms would. Encountering an epiphany could be either a brutal experience but still that would allow one to gain a different view of looking at the world from their previous