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The impact of literature on an individual and a society
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In Jack Finney’s “Content of the Dead Man’s Pockets”, the setting takes place before the invention of computers and typewriters are still in use. Tom Benecke is a man who lives on the 11th story of an apartment on Lexington Avenue. One evening, while his wife goes out to attend a movie, Tom’s paper flies out the window. He then goes out on the ledge to retrieve the paper he is working on. Tom goes through a terrible experience trying to get his grasp on the paper. After he gets his paper, he struggles getting back in his apartment as his window closes. Tom Benecke changes from prioritizing his work to prioritizing his wife because of a near-death experience. Tom is a full fledged worker and is spending all his free time working for a promotion.
Lincoln’s Grave Robbers is a book by Steve Sheinkin published in 2012. This book talks about the attempted theft of the body of the 16th President of the United States Abraham Lincoln. Back in 1880s just 15 years after the Civil War ended and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. After he was killed he when on a month long train ride to Springfield, Illinois. They would stop in every town that they passed most of them having funerals at the train station. Later a monument was built in Springfield by The Lincoln Memorial Association and Robert Lincoln his oldest son.
In the story, “Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket,” the main character is Tom Benecke. As the story progresses, he is faced with many decisions. He is forced to act quickly and because of this, many things about him change. In the story, Tom is ambitious, self-centered, and impatient. These three traits change significantly throughout the story.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." 1892. The New England Magazine. Reprinted in "Lives & Moments - An Introduction to Short Fiction" by Hans Ostrom. Hold,
Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. "The Yellow Wallpaper"." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Concise Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. 1597-1609. Print.
Trapped in the upstairs of an old mansion with barred windows and disturbing yellow colored wallpaper, the main character is ordered by her husband, a physician, to stay in bed and isolate her mind from any outside wandering thoughts. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, describes the digression of the narrator’s mental state as she suffers from a form of depression. As the story progresses, the hatred she gains for the wallpaper amplifies and her thoughts begin to alter her perception of the room around her. The wallpaper serves as a symbol that mimics the narrator’s trapped and suffering mental state while she slips away from sanity reinforcing the argument that something as simple as wallpaper can completely deteriorate an entire identity.
According to Raymond Williams, “In a class society, all beliefs are founded on class position, and the systems of belief of all classes …” (Rice and Waugh 122). His work titled, Marxism and Literature expounded on the conflict between social classes to bridge the political ideals of Marxism with the implicit comments rendered through the text of a novel. “For the practical links,” he states “between ‘ideas’ and ‘theories’ and the ‘production of real life’ are all in this material social process of signification itself” (133). Williams asserts that a Marxist approach to literature introduces a cross-cultural universality, ensuingly adding a timeless value to text by connecting creative and artistic processes with the material products that result. Like Williams, Don DeLillo calls attention to the economic and material relations behind universal abstractions such as aesthetics, love, and death. DeLillo’s White Noise brings modern-day capitalist societies’ incessant lifestyle disparity between active consumerists and those without the means to the forefront of the story’s plot. DeLillo’s setting uses a life altering man-made disaster in the suburban small-town of Blacksmith to shed light on the class conflict between the middle class (bourgeoisie) and the working poor (proletariat). After a tank car is punctured, an ominous cloud begins to loom over Jack Gladney and his family. No longer a feathery plume or a black billowing cloud, but the airborne toxic event—an event that even after its conclusion Jack cannot escape the prophecy of his encroaching death. Through a Marxist reading of the characterization of Jack Gladney, a middle-aged suburban college professor, it is clear that the overarching obsession with death operates as an...
When he was eleven years old Theirry tragically lost his mother and found out in the most horrendous way. “The day that I found out about my mother I was at school,” he said, “I remember I was on the playground. Somebody came up and said ‘you’re laughing huh?’ from behind the gate. ‘Your mother is dead.’ The man said.” This was the start of his obsession with recording everything in his life, even if it went nowhere but into a box, never to be seen again.
The influence of 19th Century realism and the truthful representation of American life are evident in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” While her story is largely symbolic in the way she uses the yellow wallpaper to represent the oppression of women, and her portrayal of the husband being immensely protective of her, in an effort to depict him as more of a father figure than a lover; the verisimilitude of the allegory remains constant from the beginning to the end. One of the ways Gilman does this is by writing in a diary like sequence. This forces the reader to focus on the “here and now” of the story, and creates an environment where one feels as if the sequence of events happening are in the present. Additionally, this sets the tone for the story creating a dialogue that is vernacular, complimenting the diary like writing and furthering the story’s authenticity.
Under the orders of her husband, the narrator is moved to a house far from society in the country, where she is locked into an upstairs room. This environment serves not as an inspiration for mental health, but as an element of repression. The locked door and barred windows serve to physically restrain her: “the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” The narrator is affected not only by the physical restraints but also by being exposed to the room’s yellow wallpaper which is dreadful and fosters only negative creativity. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”
Upon reading more closely, the story is revealed to present a tragic journey of a man who has lost his sanity but seeks solace in the materialistic comforts of his old life. The story succeeds in making a number of statements about human nature: that wealth is the most powerful measure of social status and anyone without it will face ostracization; that denial of one 's mistakes and unfortunate circumstances only leads to more pain; that even the most optimistic people can hold dark secrets and emotional turmoil inside them. All of these themes compel the reader to ponder their real-life implications long after the story is
From the “gouged and splintered” floor to the chewed bedstead, each mentioned object contributes to the story’s eerie setting as well as to the narrator’s confinement (229). Objects such as the bolted bed and the bars on the window symbolize the narrator’s inability to do as she pleases, yet another factor which constrains her. At the center of it all is the yellow wallpaper. While the narrator at first regards the yellow wallpaper as “repellant” and “revolting,” she slowly becomes more and more entranced by it and, more specifically, that which lies behind it (227). She begins to imagine a woman inside the wallpaper, looking for escape behind the pattern which entraps her. Under close scrutiny, it is easy to see that the woman inside the wallpaper is a reflection of the narrator, while the wallpaper acts as yet another theoretical cage to entrap her. Just as with the setting, the author uses everyday objects to demonstrate the muddled emotions that the narrator subconsciously feels due to the pressures laden upon
“The Paper Menagerie” functions as Ken Liu’s cautionary tale. Trauma ebbs and flows through the lives of the short story’s characters, with as much ease as a poisonous snake to its unsuspecting prey. The misfortune endured by Jack and his family is heavy and bordering on sentimentalist, saved only by Liu’s evident meaning behind the extremism. Through intense and generational trauma, Liu invokes an inescapable quality to one’s own heritage.
Schopp-Schilling, Beate. "' The Yellow Wallpaper': A Rediscovered Realistic Story."' American Literary Realism 1870-1910. 8 (1975): 107-108.
Allen, Woody. Death Knocks. 1968. Approaching Literature: Reading + Thinking + Writing. 3rd ed. Ed. Peter Shakel and Jack Ridl. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 1066-1072. Print.
being the one for excitement that Tom was he derived a plan that would for