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Essay about loss of a parent
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Essay about loss of a parent
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It was some time before Louis Charles remembered the small lump protruding from his inner coat pocket. Moments before he and his mother had been separated, she had gifted him with a tiny, wooden soldier that she had kept for him to play with during their stay at the Temple. Its face was adorned with chipping paint, acrylic black eyes, and a splintered nose. A thin line was painted on for the mouth, and gave the appearance that the soldier was always heroically grimacing. Its body was composed of three cylindrical wood pieces, one intended for the head, one for the torso, and the last split in two for the legs. It was forever frozen in a position of solute, its right hand drawn to its forehead and left arm at its side, in respect of its commanding officer. Louis stuck his hand into his coat pocket and withdrew the small toy. As he cradled the soldier in his hands, Louis rubbed his thumb in circles over the worn wood, relishing its smooth surface. Below the soldier’s feet lay a circular, cracked platform, and once Louis crouched down to place his newfound toy onto the uneven floor, it toppled over and rolled away seeking refuge in the dark recesses underneath the bed. Before he had a chance to retrieve the tiny soldier, boisterous laughter coupled with thudding footsteps echoed off the wall and drifted into the cell at the end of the corridor. Louis Charles tensed, his breath hitching in his throat. The last time he had been visited by anyone, he was pried from his mother's arms and thrust into a place not even a dog could stand to inhabit. As the footsteps neared, his mind raced to concoct some sort of escape plan, some means of survival. He dropped to his hands and knees, squirming until he wedg... ... middle of paper ... ...riental rug covering the floor. “A little longer stay in sight.” Outside, he could see a small butterfly whose wings were the color of the sky. It perched onto a tree’s leaf, inching forward until it reached the edge. “Much converse do I find in Thee, historian of my infancy, float near me; do not yet depart.” The small insect fluttered, attempting to fly away but was unable to move its wings fast enough. “Dead times revive in thee: Thou bring’st gay creatures as thou art. A solemn image to my heart, my father’s family.” The butterfly, mustering all its strength, flapped its wings furiously. Before the creature could even leave its perch, a bird adorned with a yellow beak and a black crest flew into view. Louis eye’s never left the bird as it raced towards the butterfly before finally taking the tiny insect in between in its beak and flying back to its nest.
Although their physical loads did not weigh the soldiers down, they definitely became their necessities. Certain physical burdens became items that helped them escape from the reality of being at war. Even though these men had things they had to carry, they elected to carry more. The items they carried were intended to illustrate aspects of their personality. All of them carried great loads of memories, fears, and desires. These abstract objects were an essential part of them and therefore could not be put down. They continued to carry these emotional burdens along with them throughout the war. And as Lieutenant Jimmy Cross came to realize, “It was very sad…the things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to
Lennie appeared out of the brush by the deep, green pool of the Salinas River. He had been running. He knelt down quietly by the pool’s edge and drank barely touching his lips to the water. He finished drinking and sat down embracing his knees on the bank, facing the trail entrance. He became very skittish and jumpy. Every little noise prodded for his attention. He knew he had made a huge mistake and George would be mad at him. He had remembered though, that George told him to hide here and wait for him.
The violent nature that the soldiers acquired during their tour in Vietnam is one of O'Brien's predominant themes in his novel. By consciously selecting very descriptive details that reveal the drastic change in manner within the men, O'Brien creates within the reader an understanding of the effects of war on its participants. One of the soldiers, "Norman Bowler, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a Thumb. . .The Thumb was dark brown, rubbery to touch. . . It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen"(O'Brien 13). Bowler had been a very good-natured person in civilian life, yet war makes him into a very hard-mannered, emotionally devoid soldier, carrying about a severed finger as a trophy, proud of his kill. The transformation shown through Bowler is an excellent indicator of the psychological and emotional change that most of the soldiers undergo. To bring an innocent young man from sensitive to apathetic, from caring to hateful, requires a great force; the war provides this force. However, frequently are the changes more drastic. A soldier named "Ted Lavender adopted an orphaned puppy. . .Azar strapped it to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device"(O'Brien 39). Azar has become demented; to kill a puppy that someone else has adopted is horrible. However, the infliction of violence has become the norm of behavior for these men; the fleeting moment of compassion shown by one man is instantly erased by another, setting order back within the group. O'Brien here shows a hint of sensitivity among the men to set up a startling contrast between the past and the present for these men. The effect produced on the reader by this contrast is one of horror; therefore fulfilling O'Brien's purpose, to convince the reader of war's severely negative effects.
The tile of the poem “Bird” is simple and leads the reader smoothly into the body of the poem, which is contained in a single stanza of twenty lines. Laux immediately begins to describe a red-breasted bird trying to break into her home. She writes, “She tests a low branch, violet blossoms/swaying beside her” and it is interesting to note that Laux refers to the bird as being female (Laux 212). This is the first clue that the bird is a symbol for someone, or a group of people (women). The use of a bird in poetry often signifies freedom, and Laux’s use of the female bird implies female freedom and independence. She follows with an interesting image of the bird’s “beak and breast/held back, claws raking at the pan” and this conjures a mental picture of a bird who is flying not head first into a window, but almost holding herself back even as she flies forward (Laux 212). This makes the bird seem stubborn, and follows with the theme of the independent female.
Billy was not dressed as a soldier should be, lacking a helmet, an overcoat, a weapon, and boots. In fact, “He didn’t look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo” (33). Much like other children sent into the war, Billy was not prepared for what he would face. To other soldiers he seems laughable, a joke on the face of the entire army, but all other soldiers are as unprepared as Billy. Billy’s comical appearance acts as a symbol of his placement in the war; in other words, a scrawny, unprepared soldier is absurd during wartime.
Trauma can be defined as something that repeats itself. In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, trauma recurs in soldiers for different reasons. However, although their reasons for trauma are different, the things they carried can symbolize all the emotions and pasts of these soldiers. One man may suffer trauma from looking through letters and photographs of an old lover, while another man could feel trauma just from memories of the past. The word “carried” is used repeatedly throughout The Things They Carried. Derived from the Latin word “quadrare,” meaning “suitable,” O’Brien uses the word “carried” not to simply state what the men were carrying, but to give us insight into each soldiers’ emotions and character, his past, and his present.
Written by author Tim O’Brien after his own experience in Vietnam, “The Things They Carried” is a short story that introduces the reader to the experiences of soldiers away at war. O’Brien uses potent metaphors with a third person narrator to shape each character. In doing so, the reader is able to sympathize with the internal and external struggles the men endure. These symbolic comparisons often give even the smallest details great literary weight, due to their dual meanings. The symbolism in “The Things They Carried” guides the reader through the complex development of characters by establishing their humanity during the inhumane circumstance of war, articulating what the men need for emotional and spiritual survival, and by revealing the character’s psychological burdens.
The weights of desires, fears, and responsibility place great amounts of pressure on an individual. The soldiers in “The Things They Carried” all around lug a great deal of heavy weaponry and equipment. But the heaviest items are intangible things such as their emotions, shame and reputations. These intangible items cannot be discarded and thus, the men continue to “hump” by enduring their weight for the remainder of their lives. Lieutenant Cross realizes that the men “carry these things inside, maintaining a mask of composure” (369) and that unfortunately, the only way to release these things is death.
She describes the September morning as “mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than the summer months.” She then goes on to describe the field outside her window, using word choice that is quite the opposite of words that would be used to describe a depressing story. She depicts the exact opposite of death, and creates a feeling of joy, happiness, and life to the world outside her room. After this, she goes into great detail about the “festivities” of the rooks among the treetops, and how they “soared round the treetops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air”. There is so much going on around her that “it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book.” Descriptions like these are no way to describe a seemingly depressing story about a moth, but by using these, joyful descriptions, Woolf connects everything happening outside to a single strand of energy. These images set a lively tone for the world around her, and now allow her to further introduce the moth into the story.
The first words of the book convey a parrot that spoke “a language which nobody understood”, and Edna’s husband “had the privilege of quitting [the parrot] when [it] ceased to be entertaining” (11). In the same light, Edna speaks of and wishes for a life that nobody apprehends. Her husband also possesses the moral, objectifying liberty to quiet Edna when she did not provide leisure, as one can turn off a song once it grows into a tedious nuisance. A further exemplification comes about when Old Monsieur Farival, a man, “insisted upon having [a] bird. . . consigned to regions of darkness” due to its shrieking outside (42). As a repercussion, the parrot “offered no more interruption to the entertainment” (42). The recurrence of the parrot evolves Edna’s state of stagnance as a consequence of being put to a halt by others despite her endeavor of breaking free. Ultimately, as Edna edges out towards the water to her death, a bird is depicted with “a broken wing” and is “beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water” (159). This recurrence parallels the beaten bird to a suffering Edna. She has “despondency [that] came upon her there in the wakeful night” that never alleviates (159). Dejection is put to action when Edna wanders out into the water, “the shore. . . far behind her” (159). Motif of birds articulates her suicide by its association with
“I probably would not have noticed it at all had not a butterfly, a yellow butterfly with dark spots like ink dots on its wings, not lit there. What had brought it there? …I watched it fly over the ditch and down into the quarter, I watched it until I could not see it anymore. Yes, I told myself. It is finally over.”
These seemingly negligible birds, symbols of the lyric voice, have intuited the Oven Bird's lesson and are the signs by which one is meant to divine Frost's acceptance of the linguistic implications of the fall from innocence. The Oven Bird, who watching "That other fall we name the fall" come to cover the world with dust, "Knows in singing not to sing." Instead, "The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing." The fall, in necessitating both birth and death, imposes a continuum of identity that compromises naming. The process toward death, begun with birth, transmutes and gradually diminishes form, thus adding to the equation - words are things before they become words and things again when they do - an element of inevitable, perpetual senescence. The birds of "A Winter Eden" say "which buds are leaf and which are bloom," but the names are always premature or too late: gold goes to green, dawn to day, everything rises and falls and is transformed. Thus the Oven Bird says, "Midsummer is to spring as one to ten," because a season - this or any other - may only be codified analogously. "Fall" takes on a series of identities: petal fall, the fall season, the first and fortunate fall, each of which bears, at the moment of articulation, the burden of a whole complex of moral, aesthetic, and literary valuations. This bird is a "midsummer and a midwood bird" that sees things at the moment of capitulation to the imperatives of fall. Loud, he predicts the inevitable, and his "language" reflects the potential meaninglessness of a world in which one is forced to define a thing by what it departs from or approaches rather than what it "is." To...
The poem introduces a dark and raw view of war by allowing readers to witness the thoughts of a soldier moments before and after his death inside a ball turret. The phrasing used in the poem and its lack of emotion paints the reality of the emotional effects of war on soldiers. The indifferent word choice ties in with the description of the ball turret as a womb of a mother to reveal the innocence of the soldiers fighting in the war. Randall Jarrell reveals the stark reality that war can dehumanize soldiers and expose the fragility of life through the use of strong diction and an extended metaphor.
...-like symbols are fading--“black once but faded now to that fierce muted metallic green of old peacock feathers”--revealing the length and magnitude of the struggle (142). The contrast is apparent by the mention of the peacock feathers, which in their natural state are lively and radiant. There is an inability for the woman to reconcile with the man because “the indomitable woman-blood ignores the man’s world in which the blood kinsman shows the coverage or cowardice, the folly or lust or fear, for which his fellows praise or crucify him” (123). One must follow the male characteristics to the roots of their southern heritage to acknowledge the full tragic beauty of the female.
With both hands resting lightly on the table to each side of his white foam cup, Otis stared into its deep abyss of emptiness with his head bowed as if willing it to fill again, giving him a reason to enjoy the shelter that the indoors provided. I could almost touch the conflict going on inside of him, a battle of wills as if he was negotiating with an imaginary devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. I sensed a cramp of discomfort seizing his insides, compelling him to flee, then a silent resolve, as if a moment of clarity had graced his consciousness.