“The Girl in the Flammable Skirt”, by Aimee Bender, is a short story narrated by a young teenage girl. The story is metaphorically themed. It illustrates the burden of a man, experienced by the other. There are three governing images of the story. The first image is that of heaviness. It should be understood in existence of both the girl and the father. Coming home to see her father wearing a backpack made of stone makes the girl feel worried, the backpack is too heavy for her father. So she tells him to take it off, and he responds by giving it to her. She puts it on her own back leaving her father free to move around the house. She asks him what is in the very heavy backpack. He says it’s something he owns. She requests to put it down but he denies and says she must wear it, it is the law, leaving her confused wondering what law could this be. …show more content…
The girl goes to school wearing the heavy backpack.
The teacher and takes a seat next to her bringing her a tissue. It’s a surprise because the girl is not even crying. The teacher says she just wanted to bring the girl something light, feeling the load on her. This image illustrates lightness and weightlessness and serves as an image of the ideal condition that the girl attains only once, briefly. The girl then relates a joke she has heard about two rats, in which one rat is in reality a dog. This connects with her. The point of the joke is to illustrate resemblance, of two opposites. This proves to the fact that the girl, in carrying the stone backpack, has come to resemble her father. As a comparison of the dog and rat resembling one another, it is shown of the girl carrying the burden of her father, which is
unusual. The scene returns to the girl and her father. While she approaches her father, her hands sweat. “I love you more than salt” (p. 11), says the girl. He seems touched. He has a weak heart, due to his heart attack around two years ago. At the same time, his legs are weak and thus you can see him on wheelchair. A while back, he asked her to sit in a chair for a day to see what it was like. She sat in it but annoyed her father instead. She gazes out of the window standing at her high-rise apartment, and then wonders if there was a fire and there were no elevators allowed, how would her father get down? Would it be the girl herself taking the father down, through the staircase? She imagines dropping him. The father lies on his deathbed. The fact that this has happened many times before makes it hard for her to have empathy and sorrow for her father, she just knows he’ll be okay. She prays and prays for him. After she goes outside, she wonders where her father is, she wants to hand that knapsack, the stone backpack to him, and her back is breaking with it. She realizes she can’t take the burden alone of her father. She remembers a story she read in a paper, the one with the flammable skirt. The girl wore it to a party and while dancing, the candle lit up on her. She got third-degree burns. When her skirt was burning, what was she thinking? She wondered. Did she believe that her passion had arrived? A burning skirt can demonstrate the life on fire with itself, burning with passion of its own, neither with lightness nor heaviness. Therefore, through the images of stone, tissue, and burning skirt, Aimee Bender conveys three completely different states of the human mind and heart.
needs to make up his own ritual that he can do before running into a
The book “Dead Girls Don’t Lie” written by Jennifer Shaw Wolf focuses on a variety of different ideas and topics, mostly fixating the murder of the main character’s best friend Rachel. With this also comes gang violence, lost and found relationships, and the fact that some people will go to great extents in order to keep a lethal secret from the public eye. Rachel and Jaycee were best friends up until 6 months before where the book started. But, an altercation between them caused the breakup of their long lasted friendship. It is soon found out that Rachel was shot through her bedroom window, which is at first suspected to be gang violence. When Jaycee doesn’t answer her phone on the night Rachel was murdered, she received a text that circulates
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.
The short stories, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” by Fritz Lieber, “Bits and Pieces,” by Lisa Tuttle, “While She Was Out” by Edward Bryant, “Cold Turkey” by Carole Nelson Douglas, and “Lightning Rod” by Melanie Tem Historically, in literature, women are stereotypically placed in one of two roles, the doting wife and beloved mother, or the more outwardly psychotic, witch-like, temptress. As the feminist approach to the criticism of literature has blossomed over time, the need for empowered female characters has surfaced. To rectify the absence of this character, “wild women literature” has made many advances in the defiance of gender role stereotypes and gender norms. The women in the collection of wild women short stories are difficult to define because of society’s pre-conceived notions of how women should and do behave. The term “wild women” conveys a slightly negative and sometimes misinterpreted connotation of a woman’s behavior; however, in this collection of stories, the female characters are generally vindicated because of the motivation behind their actions. The motivation can be linked to the popular cultural phenomenon of women taking charge of their lives, making decisions for themselves, being independent, rising above their oppressors (most commonly the close men in their lives), and becoming empowered. Vigilante actions by the wild women in these stories are not entirely representative of madness, but also re...
Maxine Kumin?s, Woodchucks provides an interesting and creative perspective into the mind state of those influenced by nazi warfare. What begins as a seemingly humorous cat and mouse hunt, reminiscent of such movie classics as Caddyshack, soon develops into an insatiable lust for blood. Kumin?s descriptive language provides the reader with the insight necessary to understand to the speaker?s psychology as they are driven beyond the boundaries of pacifism.
In the poem “The One Girl at the Boys’ Party,” Sharon Olds uses imagery to convey pride in her daughter’s growing femininity. What would seem to be another childhood pool party for the girl turns into an event that marks a rite of passage to adulthood. Though the narrator is reluctant of her daughter’s search for an identity, she ultimately sees her daughter’s transformation to womanhood as admirable. Olds’ pride is first shown when the girl begins to lose her innocence from the unfamiliar surroundings of masculine men. The narrator says, “They will strip to their suits, her body hard and indivisible as a prime number” (5-6). The girl’s stiff and confident stature that this image conveys suggests that she is anxious yet willing to progress
Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate is the story of an African boy, Kek, who loses his father and a brother and flees, leaving his mother to secure his safety. Kek, now in Minnesota, is faced with difficulties of adapting to a new life and of finding his lost mother. He believes that his mother still lives and would soon join him in the new found family. Kek is taken from the airport by a caregiver who takes him to live with his aunt. It is here that Kek meets all that amazed him compared to his home in Sudan, Africa. Home of the brave shows conflicts that Kek faces. He is caught between two worlds, Africa and America. He feels guilty leaving behind his people to live in a distant land especially his mother, who he left in the midst of an attack.
In the poem pride, Dahlia Ravikovitch uses many poetic devices. She uses an analogy for the poem as a whole, and a few metaphors inside it, such as, “the rock has an open wound.” Ravikovitch also uses personification multiple times, for example: “Years pass over them as they wait.” and, “the seaweed whips around, the sea bursts forth and rolls back--” Ravikovitch also uses inclusive language such as when she says: “I’m telling you,” and “I told you.” She uses these phrases to make the reader feel apart of the poem, and to draw the reader in. She also uses repetition, for example, repetition of the word years.
Diamant has Dinah effectively tell her story from three different narrative perspectives. The bulk of the novel is related by Dinah in first person, providing a private look at growing up and personal tragedy: "It seemed that I was the last person alive in the world" (Diamant 203). Dinah tells the story that she says was mangled in the bible.
In the short story, "Two Kinds" by Amy Tan, a Chinese mother and daughter are at odds with each other. The mother pushes her daughter to become a prodigy, while the daughter (like most children with immigrant parents) seeks to find herself in a world that demands her Americanization. This is the theme of the story, conflicting values. In a society that values individuality, the daughter sought to be an individual, while her mother demanded she do what was suggested. This is a conflict within itself. The daughter must deal with an internal and external conflict. Internally, she struggles to find herself. Externally, she struggles with the burden of failing to meet her mother’s expectations. Being a first-generation Asian American, I have faced the same issues that the daughter has been through in the story.
“Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield tells a story of a lonely, English lady in France. Miss Brill is a quiet person who believes herself to be important. The whole afternoon at the gardens, Miss Brill does not converse with anyone, nor does anyone show any inclination to talk with her. She merely watches others and listens to their conversations. This provides her with a sense of companionship; she feels as if she is a part of other people’s lives. Miss Brill is also slightly self-conceited. She believes that she is so important that people would notice if she ever missed a Sunday at the park. It does not occur to her that other people may not want her to be there.
The novel, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (2011) written by Sherry Turkle, presents many controversial views, and demonstrating numerous examples of how technology is replacing complex pieces and relationships in our life. The book is slightly divided into two parts with the first focused on social robots and their relationships with people. The second half is much different, focusing on the online world and it’s presence in society. Overall, Turkle makes many personally agreeable and disagreeable points in the book that bring it together as a whole.
The Woman In White, by Wilkie Collins, is a successful gothic novel of the 19th century. It is a 3-volume novel; each volume (epoch) finishing with the reader eagerly waiting to read the next one, therefore there are many unanswered questions, in or... The Woman In White, by Wilkie Collins, is a successful gothic novel of the 19th century. It is a 3-volume novel; each ‘volume’ (epoch) finishing with the reader eagerly waiting to read the next one, therefore there are many unanswered questions, in order for the reader to continue reading. There is a lot of mystery involved up until the very end of the whole story, where everything is then revealed; ‘The Woman In White’ is a good example of how mystery and suspense are used by the cliff-hangers that are present. The contents for a gothic novel conventionally contain an innocent heroine (Laura Fairlie/Anne Catherick), villain (Sir Percival Glyde) and a hero (Walter Hartwright/Marian Holocomb).
The short story, “Unlighted Lamps,” by author Sherwood Anderson is about a relationship between a father and his daughter. Their relationship is a stressful one because neither of them talk to each other, nor show their emotions. Throughout the story, you find out why their relationship is the way that it is, and why it is hard for her father to talk to her. The unlighted lamps in the story represent flashbacks of memories wherever light dances across something.
The Doll’s House is a modern short story because it uses subtle characterization rather than a face paced plot. In the story she described two sets of sisters and in detail how they act towards each other. For instance “The Kelvey’s never failed to understand each other.” Mansfield describes another set of sisters in the short story as well, the three Burnell sisters. The eldest sister in the Burnell family was bossy and rude. Over the entire story you draw the conclusion from reading in between the lines that Mansfield brings more attention to the two sets of sister relationships rather than the plot.