Meditation Compare and Contrast FLE

784 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Franz kafka essays

Franz Kafka’s “Meditation” is a collection of short stories that allow the reader a glimpse into the narrators’ minds as they reflect on their life. Two of these stories are “The Wish to Be a Red Indian,” and “Rejection.” “The Wish to Be a Red Indian” uses structure, diction and symbolism to convey the narrator’s wish for physical escape and freedom. “Rejection” conveys a indecisiveness between adventure and routine through structure and diction. Both vignettes express a similar wish for escape while they use contrasting structures but similar styles.
The structure of “The Wish to Be a Red Indian” manifests the narrator’s wish for physical freedom. The majority of the vignette consists of short clauses that give the story a rhythm when it is read aloud. Repetitions of words, such as “quivering jerkily...quivering ground,” “no spurs...the spurs,” “no reins...the reins,” contribute the production of this rhythm. The repeating beat conveys a sense of rush, excitement, and freedom. Being the shortest of all of the vignettes in “Meditations,” “The Wish to Be a Red Indian” omits several pieces present in a conventional sentence. The sole sentence in “The Wish to Be a Red Indian” contains no independent clause, being merely a collection of descriptive dependent clauses. Additionally, clauses tended to omit their subjects, and parallelism between clauses is not preserved. The last section, “the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone,” shows Kafka’s usage of unorthodox style. This diversion from conventional writing reveals narrator’s wish for escape.
The symbolism of the Red Indian further suggests a desire for freedom from restriction. The Red Indian represents a freedom from restricti...

... middle of paper ...

...al norms to convey an escape from orthodoxy. Both vignettes use symbolism and diction to convey their message of escape. Both the narrator in “The Wish to Be a Red Indian” and the woman from “Rejection” wish for escape. However, woman also desires convention besides adventure and freedom, adding to the indecisive and contradictory tone of “Rejection.”
While “The Wish to Be a Red Indian” and “Rejection” are different in structure but similar in style, they convey the same desire for escape. The two vignette seem to belong in Franz Kafka’s “Meditation” because of they have this conception of escape. After all, to meditate is to escape the physical world in order to look within oneself. Entertainment in general, including the practice of reading novels for enjoyment, is a form of escapism that allows people to relieve themselves from the banal aspects of daily life.

Show More
Related

  • Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

    660 Words  | 2 Pages

    The most important part in writing a novel is to enable the audience to understand what is being communicated. Krakauer did so by clearly communicating his message to his audience. He wanted to share the story of McCandless, a young man who dreamt of conquering the wilderness alone. This conquest ultimately ended in failure and cast a feeling of sorrow upon his family and friends. With the exception of a slight difficulty to understand the story during certain chapters, Krakauer’s novel was full of thrill of emotion and life-lessons.

    Read More

  • How Does Sherman Alexie Overcome Stereotypes

    767 Words  | 2 Pages

    Growing up on a reservation where failing was welcomed and even somewhat encouraged, Alexie was pressured to conform to the stereotype and be just another average Indian. Instead, he refused to listen to anyone telling him how to act, and pursued his own interests in reading and writing at a young age. He looks back on his childhood, explaining about himself, “If he'd been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity” (17). Alexie compares the life and treatment of an Indian to life as a more privileged child. This side-by-side comparison furthers his point that

    Read More

  • Perma Red and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: A Comparison and Analysis

    1281 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the end, the stories of Perma Red and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian have their similarities and their differences. Both stories tell the tale of two young people from reservations in search of a better future. Whether they succeeded we will never know, but what we do know is that they both advanced as people because of the love they received, the losses they incurred and the trials they overcame.

    Read More

  • I M Not The Indian You Had In Mind Essay

    408 Words  | 1 Pages

    What do the works, “As Canadian as Possible under the Circumstances” and “I’m not the Indian you had in mind” have in common? The dissection of these writing pieces revealed that they do in fact have multiple similarities. Those ideas are the use of identity, stereotypes as well as double meanings.

    Read More

  • Analysis of The Hunger Artist by Kafka

    1699 Words  | 4 Pages

    Kafka, Franz. ?A Hunger Artist.? Literature and its Writers. Ed. Karen S. Henry. 3rd ed. Bedford/St. Martin?s, Boston/New York 2004. 255-262

    Read More

  • American Horse by Louise Erdrich

    661 Words  | 2 Pages

    Louise Erdrich’s short story “American horse” is a literary piece written by an author whose works emphasize the American experience for a multitude of different people from a plethora of various ethnic backgrounds. While Erdrich utilizes a full arsenal of literary elements to better convey this particular story to the reader, perhaps the two most prominent are theme and point of view. At first glance this story seems to portray the struggle of a mother who has her son ripped from her arms by government authorities; however, if the reader simply steps back to analyze the larger picture, the theme becomes clear. It is important to understand the backgrounds of both the protagonist and antagonists when analyzing theme of this short story. Albetrine, who is the short story’s protagonist, is a Native American woman who characterizes her son Buddy as “the best thing that has ever happened to me”. The antagonist, are westerners who work on behalf of the United States Government. Given this dynamic, the stage is set for a clash between the two forces. The struggle between these two can be viewed as a microcosm for what has occurred throughout history between Native Americans and Caucasians. With all this in mind, the reader can see that the theme of this piece is the battle of Native Americans to maintain their culture and way of life as their homeland is invaded by Caucasians. In addition to the theme, Erdrich’s usage of the third person limited point of view helps the reader understand the short story from several different perspectives while allowing the story to maintain the ambiguity and mysteriousness that was felt by many Natives Americans as they endured similar struggles. These two literary elements help set an underlying atmos...

    Read More

  • The Disappearance by Chitra Banerjee Divankaruna

    902 Words  | 2 Pages

    Divakaruni, C. B. (1995). "The Disapperance." Compact literature: Reading, reacting, writing. (pp. 584-589). Boston, MA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.

    Read More

  • Individuality vs Community in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

    1732 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...re many similarities when it comes to technique, characterization, themes, and ideologies based on the author's own beliefs and life experiences.  However, we also see that it appears the author herself often struggles with the issue of being herself and expressing her own individuality, or obeying the rules, regulations and mores of a society into which she was born an innocent child, one who by nature of her sex was deemed inferior to men who controlled the definition of the norms.  We see this kind of environment as repressive and responsible for abnormal psyches in the plots of many of her works.

    Read More

  • Loneliness in Metamorphosis and The Love Song of J. Arthur Prufrock

    995 Words  | 2 Pages

    Franz Kafka’s character Gregor Samsa and T.S. Eliot’s speaker J. Alfred Prufrock are perhaps two of the loneliest characters in literature. Both men lead lives of isolation, loneliness, and lost chances, and both die knowing that they have let their lives slip through their fingers, as sand slips through the neck of an hourglass. As F. Scott Fitzgerald so eloquently put it, “the loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly”. Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are both exceptional examples of such lonely moments. Both authors use characterization, imagery, and atmosphere to convey the discontentedness and lack of fulfillment in the life and death of both Samsa and Prufrock.

    Read More

  • Double-Awareness In Toni Morrison's Native Son And The Bluest Eye

    1279 Words  | 3 Pages

    Self awareness of a person’s identity can lead to a challenging scope of ascertaining moving forward: the moment he/she has an earth- shattering revelation comprehending, they of African descendant and they are a problem. The awakening of double-consciousness grew within the literary cannon sensing the pressure of duality in the works of Native Son and The Bluest Eye, Richard Wright and Toni Morrison respectively create two characters who deal with this struggle. It is illustrated through both text how society creates situations that impose the characters Bigger and Pecola encountering extreme measures in the mind frame of double consciousness in their pursuit of survival physically, the search for identity, the desire of self- expression and self-fulfillment.

    Read More

  • The Transition from Old to New South

    1288 Words  | 3 Pages

    Parker, Robert Dale. “Red Slippers and Cottonmouth Moccasins: White Anxieties in Faulkner’s Indian Stories.” Faulkner Journal 18.1-2 (2002-03): 81-99. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena Kristovic. Vol. 92. Detroit: Gale, 2006. 136-46. Literature Criticism Online. Web. 31 Mar. 2010.

    Read More

  • Franz Kafka's Use of Humor

    1617 Words  | 4 Pages

    Pascal, Roy. Kafka's Narrators: A Study of His Stories and Sketches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 189-230.

    Read More

  • Naturalism In Native Son

    1476 Words  | 3 Pages

    Richard Wright and William Faulkner both examine the psychologies of excluded members of society. While in Native Son, Wright studies someone oppressed and downtrodden beneath society, Faulkner looks at a family of outsiders cast far away from a common community in As I Lay Dying. For both, a central question becomes the function of their characters’ minds in relation to one another, and to reality. Through different approaches, both Wright and Faulkner conduct modernist explorations of the social outcast’s interiority. To accomplish this, each author’s narrative voice traverses the gradient from realism to experimental fragmentation, Wright constructing a vertical consciousness, articulate and omniscient regarding Bigger’s psychological world, and Faulkner accessing a horizontal one, mostly illustrating the Bundren’s surface thoughts and emotions.

    Read More

  • Hermann Hesse: A Classic Take on the Modern Age

    1459 Words  | 3 Pages

    Although Hesse concerns himself with the same issues of isolation and meaninglessness that Franz Kafka addresses, he utilizes a poetic writing style to bring out the beauty of his subject. The lofty style helps "with the construction of an ideal as an escape from his emotional crisis of the war years" (Ziolk...

    Read More

  • History Of Indian Poetry

    1315 Words  | 3 Pages

    Northeast is always placed outside the domain of studies of the Indian cultural history. This region had been unstable and also unpredictable since they had to face continuous conflict and bloodshed for surviving in the territory full of challenges. Despite these challenges, the Northeast Indian poetry has emerged as a major voice in the world of literature today. Most of these poems are marked by a kind of anxiety that forms the basis of all great poetry. It is at once categorized as the poetry of bloodshed and hostility, of torpidity and apprehension but it is also the poetry of the terrorized souls in search of peace.

    Read More

More about Meditation Compare and Contrast FLE

Open Document