The memory of september eleventh is still strong in my mind. I first found out about the attack in my second grade classroom, when my teacher abruptly stopped teaching to turn on a very large radio. Even though I was only a child, the body language and the hushed voices of the adults around me were enough to convince me that something was very wrong.. A serious sounding news anchor was giving over the fateful news report. Though his words went over my eight year old head, he still made me feel panicked. Even today the memory of the man on the radio is still my strongest memory of september eleventh.
I feel that this story is a good way to illustrate the way a child processes traumatic experiences. Estha and Rahel, the child protagonists in Roy’s The God of Small Things also experience trauma, though their’s is far worse than mine. It is significant that Roy made the main characters children. Because they are not weighed down with the prejudices that come with adulthood, Children have way of seeing things in a blunt simplistic way. Because this book deals with complex themes of post-colonialism in India, getting a child’s simplistic view of the situation can be a great advantage.
The book is as much about India as a whole as it is about a family in Ayemenem. Therefore many of the characters can be seen as symbols which reveal how Roy feels about postcolonial India. Of all the characters who can be seen as symbols the most fascinating one is Sophie Mol. The fact that Roy wrote a character who is a combination of Indian and English elements will be very important in understanding how she views postcolonial India.
Before we can understand Sophie Mol’s place in the story, we must talk about the story itself. The book follows t...
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...t their demons and seem to begin what will be a long healing process. Roy is ending with a slightly optimistic idea. That while the parents may have failed, the children can still learn from the mistakes of those who came before them.
Works Cited
Elwork, Paul. "The Loss of Sophie Mol: Debased Selfhood and the Colonial Shadow in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things." South Asian Review 25.2 (2004): 178-88. Web. 11 May 2014. This article helps introduce the concept of Sophie Mol being a metaphor.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997. Print.
Wang, Jonathan. “Narrative time and post-colonial perspectives in Arundhati Roy's The God of small things and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake”. Diss. Queens College, 2008. Print. This thesis helps show how the fragmented lives of the twins can be seen in the structure of the book.
He has endured and overcame many fears and struggles, but during this section, we truly acquire an insight of what the little boy is actually like – his thoughts, his opinions, his personality. Contrary to his surroundings, the little boy is vibrant and almost the only lively thing around. I love him! He is awfully appalled by the “bad guys” and shockingly sympathetic toward dead people. For example, when the father raided a house and found food, the little boy suggested that they should thank them because even though they’re dead or gone, without them, the little boy and father would starve. My heart goes out to him because he is enduring things little boys should never go through, even if this novel is just a fictional
Symbolism is a poetic and literary element that interacts with readers and engages their feelings and emotions. In Sold, thirteen-year-old Nepali girl, Lakshmi, is forced to take a job to help support her family. Involuntarily, she ends up in prostitution via the Happiness House; this sex trafficking battle forces Lakshmi to envision her future and possibility of never returning home. The very first vignette of the novel speaks of a tin roof that her family desperately needs, especially for monsoon season. At the brothel, Lakshmi works to pay off her debt to the head mistress, Mumtaz, but cannot seem to get any sort of financial gain in her time there. Both the tin roof and the debt symbolize unforeseen and improbable ambitions, yet she finds the power within herself to believe. How does Lakshmi believe in herself despite her unfathomable living conditions and occupation?
The bringing together of Sophie and Martine does not improve the lives of either one of them. Their discomfort with each other is foreshadowed by the nightmares Sophie has of her mother before going to live with her in New York. In the nightmares Martine has "arms like two long hooks" (Danticat, p. 28, ch. 4) and is chasing her, trying to catch her. Sophie's nightmares of her mother resemble her mother's nightmares of her father. Despite their differences, they are bound together by the sa...
This story makes the reader wonder, why must parents do this to their children, what kinds of motifs do they have for essentially ruining their child’s life. I believe
September 11, 2001 is known as the worst terrorist attack in United States history. On a clear Tuesday morning, there were four planes that were hijacked and flown into multiple buildings by a terrorist group named al Qaeda. This group, led by Osama bin Laden, killed nearly 3,000 people. Out of those 3,000 people more than 400 police and 343 firefighters were killed along with 10,000 people who were treated for severe injuries. Many lives were taken, and to this day, people still suffer from the attack. September 11th is the most influential event of the early twenty-first century because it made an increase in patriotism, it caused a rise in security throughout the nation, and it had a tremendous effect of thousands of lives.
Literatures had always been the reflections of the world’s issues. These literatures showed the problems within society in the period of time. In the book, “The Natural”, by Bernard Malamud had developed how women were seen as an object to men that they did not have the equal rights and social status as men. Also, women in the novel were classified as the trophies to men, whom they were either gold diggers digging for massive fortunes for the future, or accomplishments for men to chase after them. The author had established several female characters to optimize these issues. In the novel, Harriet Bird, Memo Paris, and Iris Lemon were representing different figures of female in that period of time. Both Harriet and Memo were being the negative effects to the main protagonist, Roy Hobbes, while Iris was the positive hope for Roy. The author chose to use these few characters to criticize the stereotypes of women in that period, and how they affected the others around them.
September 11 is not just about mourning, it's about the community giving back hope. It is about police forces and firefighters in N.Y , the servicemen and females in the Pentagon, including the many passengers in the flights. September 11 was a day of disgrace, but it was also a day of bravery, and of integrity.
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a novel about how people’s pursuit of their own interests, influenced by the cultural and social contexts in which they live, ultimately determines their behavior. Through utilizing subthemes of self-preservation, the maintenance of social status/the status quo, and power, she portrays Velutha as the only wholly moral character in the story, who, because of his goodness, becomes the target of frequent deception. Roy argues that human nature is such that human beings will do whatever they feel is necessary to serve their own self-interests.
My thesis statement is that children’s innocence enables them to cope in difficult situations. Children generally have a tendency to lighten the mood in sad situations because of their innocent nature. They turn even the saddest situations to mild, innocent situations. This is evident when Marjane says “these stories had given me new ideas for games”, (Satrapi, 55). By saying this she refers to her uncle’s stories of how he and other prisoners were tortured in prison. Stories of torture have never been easy to hear even for adults but Marjane so innocentl...
Sophie was a Polish women and a survivor of Auschwitz, a concentration camp established in Germany during the Holocaust in the early 1940s. In the novel we learn about her through her telling of her experiences, for instance, the murder of her husband and her father. We also come to learn of the dreadful decision she was faced with upon entering the concentration camp, where she was instructed to choose which one of her two children would be allowed to live. She chose her son. Later we learn of her short lived experience as a stenographer for a man by the name of Rudolph Hoss, the Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. During her time there, Sophie attempted to seduce Hoss in an attempt to have her son transferred to the Lebensborn program so that he may have been raised as a German child. Sophie's attempt was unsuccessful and she was returned back to t...
basis of the plot and themes of this novel. The fond memories she possessed of her mother and the harsh ones of her father are reflected in the thoughts and
If Chantal tells the village, she may be making a choice that leads to the death of another villager. If she does not, the stranger will tell them she withheld the opportunity which will put her at risk of being the chosen victim. In her moment of fear, she says, “For that moment, all of our fears suddenly surface: the fear of setting off along a road heading who knows where, the fear of a life full or new challenges, the fear of losing forever everything” (Coelho). On the other hand, Sophie is faced with two fatal choices, one being which child is most likely to live and which will surely die. Another choice she must make after a long life of agony after losing her family is the fatal choice to take her own life as she constantly has flashbacks of the guard demanding, “Make a choice, Or I’ll send both of them over there” (Pakula
Before going into the theatre “to see The Sound of Music for the third time” (35), Estha “[completes] his first adult assignment” (93). He goes to the bathroom on his own, while Ammu, Baby and Rahel accompany each other to the ladies room. This little detail about going to use the restroom foreshadows another instance where Estha will be forced from being a child into manhood.
The God of Small Things, a novel, by Arundhati Roy unravels the secrets of a family in India. Arundhati Roy uses an intriguing technique to tell the story of Ammu, Rahel, Estha, Sophie Mol, Velutha, Mammachi, Chacko, Margaret Kochamma, and Baby Kochamma. Roy starts the story by in a way paraphrasing all the events that are to occur throughout the story. She then proceeds to tell about the funeral of Sophie Mol and Ammu, Rahel, and Estha’s trip to the police station. She begins the story at the end. The reader does not find out until much later who Sophie Mol is and why Ammu and the twins went to the police station. Roy continues the story by jumping from Rahel and Estha’s childhood to their adulthood. Every chapter jumps from past to present. In every chapter Arundhati Roy answers or creates more questions about her characters lives for the reader. She uses repetition throughout the story to make the reader pay attention, remember, and wonder what she is trying to get across. Roy also uses wonderful metaphors, similes, and figurative language to ...
Sophie Zawistowska, a gorgeous Polish woman living in the same house as Stingo, is a troubled survivor of the concentration camps during World War II. Throughout the book her story is revealed, through long monologues and stories Stingo, the narrator, tells. The title of the book is Sophie's Choice, but not until the last few pages is it told what Sophie's choice is. Sophie is shown as a vulnerable character, a lover of music and her boyfriend. Her passions also include America, the beach, and creative outfits. Everything in the world in which Sophie lives is the American Dream, the world after the depression.