“Shells” by Cynthia Rylant is a realistic short story about a boy that is scarred for life because of his parents death. In the beginning aunt Esther and Michael are fighting. Because aunt Esther keeps talking about Michael.Soon after that Michael gets lonely and gets a pet hermit crab and aunt Esther and Michael start to bond.
In the beginning aunt Esther and Michael are very angry for example, in paragraph 9,the author says, “can't you leave me alone.” In paragraph 10, for example, the character slammed down his glass scraped his chair back and ran out the door. But in reality Michael does not hate aunt Esther they just said that because they were mad.
Later on, Michael was feeling sad and lonely for example, in paragraph 24 the author
says he was looking for something small to buy so he had someone in his life to love. For example in paragraph 24 the character buys a hermit crab to keep him company. This explains in my words that Michael is lonely and sad. In the end Michael and aunt Esther start to bond. For example, in paragraph 44, the author says where is the store. in paragraph 45-49 for example the character goes to the pet store and gets many hermit crabs. In my own words this explains the example that Michael and aunt Esther start to bond.
Michael is lonely and sad. his parents died and his Aunt Esther has to take him in (74). Cause of Michael’s parents being dead he is lonely. aunt Esther and Michael do not get along. That causes them to be even more lonely.
Symbolism: When Michael describes the airplane crashing at a curve, I remembered that earlier in the chapter, he had asked himself if he genuinely loved Hanna, or he felt he had to love her because they made love. He said he would have felt guilty for not loving her. The metaphor of the plane symbolised that their relationship would end, but also guilt.
The theme that has been attached to this story is directly relevant to it as depicted by the anonymous letters which the main character is busy writing secretly based on gossip and distributing them to the different houses. Considering that people have an impression of her being a good woman who is quiet and peaceful, it becomes completely unbecoming that she instead engages in very abnormal behavior. What makes it even more terrible is the fact that she uses gossip as the premise for her to propagate her hate messages not only in a single household but across the many different households in the estate where she stays.
Michael changed drastically over the course of only a few weeks. He learned more about his friends, family, and himself than he ever wanted to know.
The character of Esther is widely criticized for her perfection as a character, both receiving positive acclaims and negative feedback. Esther’s reserved, quiet character illustrates the role of women during the Victorian period and what little impact on society women played. Critics of Bleak House generally praise the narration and Dickens’s use of Esther’s character, which gives direction to the novel.
In the novel, Esther Greenwood, the main character, is a young woman, from a small town, who wins a writing competition, and is sent to New York for a month to work for a magazine. Esther struggles throughout the story to discover who she truly is. She is very pessimistic about life and has many insecurities about how people perceive her. Esther is never genuinely happy about anything that goes on through the course of the novel. When she first arrives at her hotel in New York, the first thing she thinks people will assume about her is, “Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a
The snows of Stalingrad caused a lot of loss to him. Michael lost his brother Robert to the war but Michael managed to survive the war where he lost some of his fingers. Michael taunts himself asking why does he want to live and it starts to get to his head because a great deal of bad things happened to him as well as to the rest of his family and yet he still wants to live. “‘Why do I want to live? I shouldn’t want to, but I do” (Zusak 487) Since Michael kept asking himself why do I want to live his state of mind became to an unhealthy state and he just kept taunting himself until he died committing suicide. “Michael Holtzapfel knew what he was doing. He killed himself for wanting to live.”(Zusak 503) Michael took his Survivor’s guilt in a different route for the reason it completely shattered his state of mind tearing him into
The events in the novel are predicated upon the death of Joel's mother. The account of his mother's death and the upheaval it caused for him (p 10 ) is more poignant to a reader who has experienced the untimely death of a parent than to one who has not. The reader who has experienced the loss can identify with everyone “always smiling” and with the unexplainable changes in one's own behavior toward others as one adjusts to the emptiness.
Fox, Michael V. Character and Ideology In The Book Of Esther. Columbia, SC: University of
...ese kind of foolish acts take place every day in society. Michael and Frances obviously love and care about each other; this was just a small bump in the road that they have overcome. It could have been a fork in the road, and they could have gone their separate ways. But they stuck through it, just like most of relationships. This is important because it shows that most people can overcome any problem if they really tried.
... mourning of his father), an encounter with a ghost who claims to be his father and asks him to exact revenge on his own uncle, and an innate sense of overly analytical and indecisive qualities which likely stem from the upbringing of the character in his youth. These perils which plague the character, along with the long drawn-out soliloquies the character delivers, all create for a character which is by definition, depressed.
Throughout the novel, her mother has contributed to Esther`s problems. From Esther`s point of view, consequences of her mother's actions have lead to further problems for her. It was her mother who denied Esther the right to go to her father's funeral:
The beginning of the novel introduces the reader to Esther O'Malley Robertson as the last of a family of extreme women. She is sitting in her home, remembering a story that her grandmother told her a long time ago. Esther is the first character that the reader is introduced to, but we do not really understand who she is until the end of the story. Esther's main struggle is dealing with her home on Loughbreeze Beach being torn down, and trying to figure out the mysteries of her family's past.
This vision places him back in his jail cell with his old jail mate Charles, the one who died in the process of the escape. As Michael sits with Charles he apologizes to him for all the lies he told him and all the pain he caused with his plan to break Lincoln out of prison. Michael feels like everything he did to get his brother out of prison was for nothing because he is under The Company’s possession. He cannot take the guilt anymore and needs to tell someone. Charles asks Michael why he feels like everything he did was for nothing if he managed to save his brother’s life. Michael agrees with him, but then asks “At what cost though? How many other people lost their lives in the process?” Charles then turns and asks him if he regrets it? Or if he would do it all over again to spare his brother’s life? As Michael is about to answer he tells Charles he feels like a murderer because he would do it all over
Michael Henchard’s constant exercise of jealousy, pride, immature actions and overwhelming emotions bring him to his tragic end. Although Henchard might have you think he is a victim, the reader can see that his personality leads to the conclusion of his downfall and that Henchard’s inability to learn from his first mistakes takes him down a path no one wants to face. He might have been able to survive his mistakes had he not been so self-destructive. But because of the combination of his personality traits and the complexity of his character’s mind, he is eventually led to the nothingness that engulfs him.