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Violence in literature
How violence is used as a tool in literature
Violence in literature
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In Roberto Bolano’s collection of short stories called Last Evenings on Earth and in the short novella Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya, both Bolano and Moya demonstrate implausible situations, horror, and violence throughout their stories. In Last Evenings on Earth, Bolano divides his stories into those that are recollections of a writer’s days or the accounts of a writer named ‘B’. These short stories explore the question of what it means to be an individual devoting one’s life to artistic expression. In Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness, he writes about a fugitive writer who takes on the job of copy-editing testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the massacres in Guatemala for the Catholic Church. In Moya’s novel, he uses the main character to explore the question of censorship within artistic expression and within life itself. Both Bolano and Moya express horror, violence and implausible situations with the focus on poetry itself. In Bolano, it’s a reoccurring theme in which his characters are either poets themselves or express their love for poetry in the situations they are put into. In Moya, poetry becomes the obsession of the main character as he obsesses over the testimonies and the voices of the victims. Bolano and Moya both define a vision of what it means to live in the present through the focus on the senselessness of life itself as well as the expression of art.
Bolano and Moya delve into the theme of senselessness through the lives of the characters they map out. In Bolano’s short story Gomez Palacio, Bolano does not name the main character itself but instead focuses upon the situation that the character is put into. The main character takes a job teaching a writing workshop at a “god-forsaken” ...
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...its and contextualizes each one, almost creating a contradiction as the beautiful prose becomes limited and constrained under the watchful eyes of the Church itself. It is the senselessness of life itself that inexplicably changes the art creating a contradiction within itself as the art describes the senselessness of life and violence experienced by the victims.
Moya and Bolano reach the conclusion that life itself is senseless; there is no explanation or way to plan out life. Instead one must aim to live in the present and to free oneself with the usage of art. It is within art that one can truly be free from the limits of society. In Bolano, it is the focus on the situations that the characters are put into that we see the senselessness of life itself. In Gomez Palacio it is the senselessness of a specific phenomenon of a green light in the middle of a desert.
Alfredo Corchado — is the author of the book named " Midnight in Mexico:A Reporter's Journey through a Country's Descent into Darkness”. We are, probably, all interested in finding out the facts, news, and gossips about Mexico. This country was always associated with something mysterious. For me personally, the title of the book seemed to be very gripping, I was interested in revealing the secrets of life in Mexico, thus I decided to read this book. I was really curious, what can Alfredo Corchado tell me about the life in this country, the country, where the constant massacre is the picture, people used to see. In his book, the author tells the reader about the real situations, which took place in Mexico, reveals the secrets of the people’s lives and tells the story from the “inside”. He describes the way he lives his life, and does his work. The " Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey through a Country's Descent into Darkness” is a memoir. Author tries to transform his own experience into the story line. Corchado shows the reader the darkest episodes of Mexican society, while relying on his own experience.
Miguel Castaneda is the narrator and main character of the story “We Were Here”. Miguel is a young teenager from Stockton, California. He is dark complected because of his Mexican background but he does not have the personality to do the work like that of his Mexican relatives. I know this because in the story it says, “Told us we might be dark on the outside, but inside we were like a couple blonde boys from Hollywood.” He is very different from the rest of his family in terms of being able to handle situations that are put in front of him and completing the task at hand.
In the essay "Joyas Voladoras", Doyle uses vivid imagery and descriptive diction to express the reality of life, the human heart and the pain that love can cause. Doyle’s essay gives the reader a sense of life and the pain a heart can go through. A message Doyle expresses is that a protected heart does not experience life to the fullest.
Sam Woods is a very important character in the novel In the Heat of the Night. He is a racist, and throughout the novel you will notice many changes in his attitude towards Negros.
Soto’s “Black Hair” is a perfect example of a poem that is effective through close analysis of certain concrete images which hold the key to the foundation of the poem and its underlying themes. In this poem, the universal themes of family and culture are hidden under the figure of Hector Moreno, the image of the narrator’s hair, as well as the extended baseball metaphor about culture. Although the title may seem ordinary at first glance, the challenge that the poem presents through its connection of concrete images and themes is very intriguing, and the themes are made clear through the effective use of certain poetic elements.
With assertive shouts and short tempers, the prominent character, Ricardo, is characterized as a feisty townsman, doing nothing except trying to protect his town and its members from the judgments of the western world. For example, the characterization of the “‘…quaint’” man is exemplified through the simplicity of his life and the fact that he is “‘…employed’” and is full of knowledge, not a “‘cow in the forest’” (55, 29, 32). Ricardo desperately wants to establish the notion that he is not a heartless, feebleminded man, only an indigent, simple man striving to protect his friends and family from the criticisms of callous cultures. Incessantly Ricardo attempts to make it clear to the photographer the irritation elicited by his prese...
In “The Fortune Teller,” a strange letter trembles the heart of the story’s protagonist, Camillo as he to understand the tone and meaning. The author, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, attempts to make the reader believe that the letter is very ambiguous. This devious letter is a symbol of Camillo’s inability to realize that the treacherous deeds he has committed in the dark have finally come to light. This letter will ultimately change his life forever something he never expected. Not thinking of the large multitude of possible adverse outcomes, he reads the letter. Frightened that he has ruined what should have never been started, he broods over his decision to love a married woman. In light of this, Camillo continues his dubious love affair with his best friend’s wife, unconvinced that he will ever get caught. “The Fortune Teller” focuses on an intimate affair between three people that ends in death due to a letter, and Camillo will not understand what the true consequences that the letter entails until he is face to face with his best friend, Villela.
Short stories have particular settings to supplement their themes. The eerie catacombs during a carnival in “The Cask of Amontillado” supplement the themes of revenge, and deception, which the protagonist takes responsibility in; whereas in “Hills Like White Elephants”, the atmosphere around the Spanish train station emphasizes the themes of miscommunication between characters and their evasion of responsibilities.
Ronald Reagan once said, “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.” I read the book, Dancing in the dark by Morris Dickstein. This book was about the great depression, and the impacts it had on American life. The traditional thought of poverty, people dying of hunger and people lying in the roads, has been erased. America has abolished poverty by the traditional standards but the thought of poverty and what it is has changed. In America we consider poverty to be spending all your money on bills, so you have no money left for food to feed your family. We consider poverty to be just being poor. One-Third of our population makes less than $38,000. This is not enough to be able to be above the poverty line. Anything below this “line” is considered being poverty. How do they decide this line? They take the cost of a very basic diet, and they multiply it by three, for a family of three. That being said, One-half of the jobs in America pay below $38,000 a year, so no wonder we are losing the war on poverty.
Running and screaming. Burning and freezing. The survivors of the Holocaust have been through it all. Their stories describe each and every detail of the horrendous events they experienced. Although the book Nightfather is fiction, the stories described depict the actual Holocaust exactly. By dissecting the time period of Carl Friedman’s Nightfather, a reader can understand the elements of fiction and realize the impact of history on fictional literature.
Family is one of the most important institutions in society. Family influences different aspects of a person’s life, such as their religion, values, morals and behavior. Unfortunately, problems may arise when an individual’s belief system or behavior does not coincide with that of family standards. Consequently, individuals may be forced to repress their emotions or avoid acting in ways that that are not acceptable to the family. In the novel The Rain God, written by Arturo Islas, we are presented with a story about a matriarchal family that deals with various conflicts. One major internal conflict is repression. Throughout the novel the characters act in strange ways and many of the family members have internal “monsters” that represent the past that they are repressing. In his article, “The Historical Imagination in Arturo Islas’s The Rain God and Migrant Souls”, Antonio C. Marquez’s implicitly asserts a true idea that The Rain God is a story about repression. Marquez’s idea can be supported from an analysis of secondary sources and a reading of the primary text.
The novel Upside Down, by Eduardo Galeano depicts the injustices and unfairness of several branches of the global society. The differences between the colonized and the colonizer as Galeano writes is always growing and so is the gap between rich and poor. The author challenges western and eurocentric minds as to why on average, countries in the northern hemisphere have a higher standard of living than countries in the southern hemisphere. At first as a reader I thought the writer was whining about the unfairness of the world, but it is the social opiates such as the false idea of capitalism and choice that keeps us in check in this so called democracy. The author forces the reader to open their hearts to a concept that today's capitalist, power hungry society has almost forgotten
Don DeLillo’s ‘Videotape’ is a short story of man who is absolutely captivated by some footage on the news that can be described as both, raw and shocking. The footage is being repeatedly played over and over. It depicts a young girl with a camcorder travelling in the backseat of her family’s car who happens to be filming a man driving a Dodge behind them. She continues aiming the camera at the man and filming until, suddenly, he is shot and murdered. The man watching the tape at home is clearly mesmerized and fascinated with the footage to the extent that he was trying to get his wife to watch it with him. This story portrays society’s utter fascination of shocking and disturbing content relating to death and other horrible events unless they themselves are involved. This, along with other characteristics, clearly suggests that “Videotape” is a piece of postmodern literature. This report will analyze and describe why “Videotape” belongs to postmodern literature through the in-depth analysis of the selected passage and a brief breakdown of the story as a whole.
A person's ability to develop is due to two factors, maturation and learning. Although maturation, or the biological development of genes, is important, it is the learning - the process through which we develop through our experiences, which make us who we are (Shaffer, 8). In pre-modern times, a child was not treated like they are today. The child was dressed like and worked along side adults, in hope that they would become them, yet more modern times the child's need to play and be treated differently than adults has become recognized. Along with these notions of pre-modern children and their developmental skills came the ideas of original sin and innate purity. These philosophical ideas about children were the views that children were either born "good" or "bad" and that these were the basis for what would come of their life.
Though Poe’s fame did not come in his life time he has truly been an inspiration and his writing style a model for writers today (work – cited poe museum). Analyzing Poe’s work takes time to understand what is happening and why the characters has the motivations for the task they did, this becomes very apparent in Poe’s “most perfect short story”, “The Cask of Amontillado” (work cited – cliff notes).