Flash fiction is a type of literature known to have typically around 1,000 words. Limiting a story to 1,000 has some advantages and disadvantages. It allows for a quick and simple read; some are only a couple sentences long. Although they are all considered flash fiction, to be a good piece of literature a story needs to have depth, clarity and appeal. Providing all three elements in 1,000 words can be tricky but when done right they create a moving story. “The Dead Boy At Your Window” by Bruce Holland Rogers is an example of a good piece of flash fiction literature because it has depth, clarity and appeal as shown through the transfixing story of grief and loss. Depth is clearly illustrated within the flash faction through character development …show more content…
Clarity insures the reader is taking valuable life lesson from the story. In the Dead Boy at Your Window the important lesson is that love continues ever after death. Right in the beginning, the mother's love doesn’t end even though her newborn children is dead. The nurse informed her several times that her baby was not alive, yet the mother refused to give up loving and hoping to give her son the best life. She continues to care for him and give him the best life for “six winters” (Rogers 1). They spent quality family time, just as any other family would and stayed “up late practicing his letters and numbers” (Rogers 1). Even though the boy is dead, the mother and father’s love never changed; they loved the dead boy like they would have loved a living son. Once the boy reaches the land of the dead, he encounters even more love from beyond the grave. He meets several people who instruct the young boy to give messages to their loved ones. “The dead could not remember the names of their loved ones” (Rogers 3) yet their love still lived on even without names. Even after death, love continued on in the mother’s life as well as the dead people’s
Alexander Stowe is a twin, his brother is Aaron Stowe. Alex is an Unwanted, Aaron is a Wanted, and their parents are Necessaries. Alex is creative in a world where you can’t even see the entire sky, and military is the dream job for everyone and anyone. He should have been eliminated, just like all the unwanteds should have been. He instead comes upon Artimè, where he trains as a magical warrior- after a while. When he was still in basic training, and his friends were not, he got upset, he wants to be the leader, the one everyone looks up to.
Elements that make for the best literary short story are character, meaning, tone and tension. These four literary elements make your story have a plot. These elements also contribute to your story’s purpose and ambition. The short stories we have read this semester integrate these elements, making successful and literary filled works.
In Death of an Innocent, Chris McCandless goes on a memorable and tragic journey into Alaska, but for most of his expedition he was known, not as Chris McCandless, but as Alexander Supertramp. The reason that he changed his name for his journey was because he is running away from his past and wanted to become the person he believed he really was.
Summary and Response to Barbara Kingsolver’s “Called Home” In “Called Home”, the first chapter of the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year in Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver presents her concerns about America's lack of food knowledge, sustainable practices, and food culture. Kingsolver introduces her argument for the benefits of adopting a local food culture by using statistics, witty anecdotal evidence, and logic to appeal to a wide casual reading audience. Her friendly tone and trenchant criticism of America's current food practices combine to deliver a convincing argument that a food culture would improve conditions concerning health and sustainability.
A Child Called 'It' by Dave Pezler. Setting:.. 1-Russian River - "The Russian River" The Russian River is a place in California where Dave and his family usually go for vacation. He remembers this place as a quiet and peaceful place. He remembers how he and his brothers would play, how his mother would hug him, and how they would all watch the sunset together.
Perhaps no other event in modern history has left us so perplexed and dumbfounded than the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, an entire population was simply robbed of their existence. In “Our Secret,” Susan Griffin tries to explain what could possibly lead an individual to execute such inhumane acts to a large group of people. She delves into Heinrich Himmler’s life and investigates all the events leading up to him joining the Nazi party. In“Panopticism,” Michel Foucault argues that modern society has been shaped by disciplinary mechanisms deriving from the plague as well as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a structure with a tower in the middle meant for surveillance. Susan Griffin tries to explain what happened in Germany through Himmler’s childhood while Foucault better explains these events by describing how society as a whole operates.
A Stolen Life by Jaycee Lee Dugard is an autobiography recounting the chilling memories that make up the author’s past. She abducted when she was eleven years old by a man named Phillip Garrido with the help of his wife Nancy. “I was kept in a backyard and not allowed to say my own name,” (Dugard ix). She began her life relatively normally. She had a wonderful loving mother, a beautiful baby sister,, and some really good friends at school. Her outlook on life was bright until June 10th, 1991, the day of her abduction. The story was published a little while after her liberation from the backyard nightmare. She attended multiple therapy sessions to help her cope before she had the courage to share her amazing story. For example she says, “My growth has not been an overnight phenomenon…it has slowly and surely come about,” (D 261). She finally began to put the pieces of her life back together and decided to go a leap further and reach out to other families in similar situations. She has founded the J A Y C Foundation or Just Ask Yourself to Care. One of her goals was, amazingly, to ensure that other families have the help that they need. Another motive for writing the book may have also been to become a concrete form of closure for Miss Dugard and her family. It shows her amazing recovery while also retelling of all of the hardships she had to endure and overcome. She also writes the memoir in a very powerful and curious way. She writes with very simple language and sentence structures. This becomes a constant reminder for the reader that she was a very young girl when she was taken. She was stripped of the knowledge many people take for granted. She writes for her last level of education. She also describes all of the even...
In "Our Secret" by Susan Griffin, the essay uses fragments throughout the essay to symbolize all the topics and people that are involved. The fragments in the essay tie together insides and outsides, human nature, everything affected by past, secrets, cause and effect, and development with the content. These subjects and the fragments are also similar with her life stories and her interviewees that all go together. The author also uses her own memories mixed in with what she heard from the interviewees. Her recollection of her memory is not fully told, but with missing parts and added feelings. Her interviewee's words are told to her and brought to the paper with added information. She tells throughout the book about these recollections.
1. In the book, the father tries to help the son in the beginning but then throughout the book he stops trying to help and listens to the mother. If I had been in this same situation, I would have helped get the child away from his mother because nobody should have to live like that. The father was tired of having to watch his son get abused so eventually he just left and didn’t do anything. David thought that his father would help him but he did not.
From the opening sentence of the essay, “We are free to be you, me, stupid, and dead”, Roger Rosenblatt hones in on a very potent and controversial topic. He notes the fundamental truth that although humans will regularly shield themselves with the omnipresent first amendment, seldom do we enjoy having the privilege we so readily abuse be used against us.
The funeral was supposed to be a family affair. She had not wanted to invite so many people, most of them strangers to her, to be there at the moment she said goodbye. Yet, she was not the only person who had a right to his last moments above the earth, it seemed. Everyone, from the family who knew nothing of the anguish he had suffered in his last years, to the colleagues who saw him every day but hadn’t actually seen him, to the long-lost friends and passing acquaintances who were surprised to find that he was married, let alone dead, wanted to have a last chance to gaze upon him in his open coffin and say goodbye.
Imagine a time where every detail about your life (credit score, personality ranking, “hotness” ranking, etc.) was available to anybody around you through something similar to the present-day iPhone. Now imagine this world being reality. In Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, this idea is reality. Everybody in the world has an äppäräti, and everybody knows everything about one another. But is knowing everything about your friends and neighbors really a good thing, especially when the world around you is crumbling because of this knowledge? Perhaps it isn’t. As Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher, once said, “In all affairs, love, religion, politics, or business, it’s a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted.” The relationship between Lenny Abramov and Eunice Park, the main characters of Super Sad True Love Story, could have used a question mark on how culture, media, business, and technology impacted their personal relationships throughout the book.
In looking back upon his experience in Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote in 1988: ?It is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism (Nazism) sanctifies its victims. On the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.? (Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 40). The victims of National Socialism in Levi?s book are clearly the Jewish Haftlings. Survival in Auschwitz, a book written by Levi after he was liberated from the camp, clearly makes a case that the majority of the Jews in the lager were stripped of their human dignity. The Jewish prisoners not only went through a physical hell, but they were psychologically driven under as well. Levi writes, ??the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts? We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death?? (Levi, 41). One would be hard pressed to find passages in Survival in Auschwitz that portray victims of the camp as being martyrs. The treatment of the Jews in the book explicitly spells out the dehumanization to which they were subjected. It is important to look at how the Jews were degraded in the camp, and then examine whether or not they came to embody National Socialism after this.
There is plenty of opportunity for interpretation in Carter’s writing, particularly in her book ‘The Bloody Chamber’ which is commonly considered to be her masterwork, brimming with intertextualities and ambiguities. Some may find her work to be excessively violent or savage, perhaps even alienating. Yet others may have found this no-holds-barred approach to be exhilarating and refreshing in comparison to other authors of her time. In her re-writing of Perrault and Beaumont’s classic tales, Carter proposes a reading of several well-known stories with intent to unveil through a feminist perspective the ideological content they present. “The Bloody Chamber” is her take on the tale of Bluebeard; “The Werewolf” is her variation of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood; and “The Snow Child” is a very brief but equally powerful story based on the tale of Snow White. Whilst some may find her writing to be ‘grossly repellent’ and most certainly did at the time of its original publication, it remains clear that there are numerous aspects of intertextuality within her writing which delve beyond the face value of her work, that there is much latent content within every story in the collection.
Most people are very convinced that they have memories of past experiences because of the event itself or the bigger picture of the experience. According to Ulric Neisser, memories focus on the fact that the events outlined at one level of analysis may be components of other, larger events (Rubin 1). For instance, one will only remember receiving the letter of admission as their memory of being accepted into the University of Virginia. However, people do not realize that it is actually the small details that make up their memories. What make up the memory of being accepted into the University of Virginia are the hours spent on writing essays, the anxiety faced due to fear of not making into the university and the happiness upon hearing your admission into the school; these small details are very important in creating memories of this experience. If people’s minds are preset on merely thinking that memories are the general idea of their experiences, memories become very superficial and people will miss out on what matters most in life. Therefore, in “The Amityville Horror”, Jay Anson deliberately includes small details that are unnecessary in the story to prove that only memory can give meaning to life.