In an interview with The New Yorker George Saunders described his stories as “making a representation of good and representation of evil and then having those two run at each other at full-speed, like a couple of PeeWee football players.” One of Saunders’ stories published in a 1992 issue of The New Yorker pits a man’s character against the long-time mourning about his deceased wife. Through depictions of this struggle and a very old widow, he explores the profound topic of their integrity and status. In Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz George Saunders satirizes people’s undervaluing of experience and memories and their rejection of identity using the tone of the story and satirical devices such as farce and irony.
Throughout the story Saunders explores this theme through the modules and the protagonist’s decision at the climax. When “Mr. Bomphil comes in looking guilty and as always requests Violated Prom Queen,” he shows the dejection of having to resort to virtual reality in order to satisfy his hyperbolic homosexual or transgender fantasies (1). In this instance it seems that he acts more according to his genuine feelings as a sexually satisfied prom queen than he does outside of the module. Then, after offloading his own memories, the main character turns into “a
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When looking to sell his mind to continue funding the caretaker, Mrs. Ken Schwartz thinks “she can live without the sixties” (5). After removing more decades, she acts more senile than before the offloading. This underscores the way people underrate their memories as part of their character and mental health. The narrator then shows this same apathy when he claims “Memories shmemories… I’ll get some new ones. These old ones give me no peace” (6). His desire to start anew not only depicts his undervaluing of his identity, but also the regret and anguish of the narrator towards the status
Coming from an “unconventional” background, George Saunders is readily able to relate to the circumstances the everyday working laborer goes through (Wylie). However, Saunders has an advantage to spread out his ideas and concerns about life in the U.S. via his short stories and novellas. Because of neoliberalism and capitalism and its correlation to the huge wealth gap in the U.S. Saunders focuses his protagonists’ view from a proletariat standpoint, allowing the reader to see the life of consumerism has impacted our society. Saunders does not use conventional methods to portray this reality. Instead, Saunders emphasizes on the “absence” of certain moral human characteristics in order to take the reader away from viewing into a hero’s looking glass— to set a foundation of a world where our morals become lost to our materialistic and inherent need of money (Wylie).
Throughout the play Bennett reviles Doris’ character by showing her affection to the past, she talks to old photographs of her dead husband, Wilfred, and talks aloud to him. This indicates Doris’ apparent loneliness and how she feels “left behind” by the rest of her generation. When talking about the people she new in the past like Wilfred, she takes on there voice, this shows how she...
Good and evil exist in all things. In Herman Melville's novel Billy Budd, good is represented by Billy Budd and evil, by John Claggart. Together, they embody Melville's portrayal of opposing forces that run throughout all aspects of human experience. In addition, Melville provides for the possibility of a balance between good and evil through the character of Captain Vere. In Freudian terminology, I might view Claggart as Id, untamed instinct. Billy can then be seen as Ego, existing to contain and direct Id instincts in a productive fashion, Vere could be seen as Superego in his struggles with his conscience to decide between the letter of the law and his own view of Billy. This novel, Melville's final work, stresses his belief that good does not, indeed, can not, exist without evil, nor, since Adam and Eve, has either stood alone.
After a decade of not seeing his mother and brother, Howard returns to his hometown in Mississippi. It is evident how thrilled he is. As the train approaches town, he begins “to feel curious little movements of the heart, like a lover as he nears his sweetheart” (par. 3). He expects this visit to be a marvelous and welcoming homecoming. His career and travel have kept his schedule extremely full, causing him to previously postpone this trip to visit his family. Although he does not immediately recognize his behavior in the past ten years as neglectful, there are many factors that make him aware of it. For instance, Mrs. McLane, Howard’s mother, has aged tremendously since he last saw her. She has “grown unable to write” (par. 72). Her declining health condition is an indicator of Howard’s inattentiveness to his family; he has not been present to see her become ill. His neglect strikes him harder when he sees “a gray –haired woman” that showed “sorrow, resignation, and a sort of dumb despair in her attitude” (par. 91). Clearly, she is growing old, and Howard feels guilty for not attending her needs for such a long time period: “his throat [aches] with remorse and pity” (par. 439). He has been too occupied with his “excited and pleasurable life” that he has “neglected her” (par. 92). Another indication of Howard’s neglect is the fact that his family no longer owns the farm and house where he grew up. They now reside in a poorly conditioned home:
Through this short story we are taken through one of Vic Lang’s memories narrated by his wife struggling to figure out why a memory of Strawberry Alison is effecting their marriage and why she won’t give up on their relationship. Winton’s perspective of the theme memory is that even as you get older your past will follow you good, bad or ugly, you can’t always forget. E.g. “He didn’t just rattle these memories off.” (page 55) and ( I always assumed Vic’s infatuation with Strawberry Alison was all in the past, a mortifying memory.” (page 57). Memories are relevant to today’s society because it is our past, things or previous events that have happened to you in which we remembered them as good, bad, sad, angry etc. memories that you can’t forget. Winton has communicated this to his audience by sharing with us how a memory from your past if it is good or bad can still have an effect on you even as you get older. From the description of Vic’s memory being the major theme is that it just goes to show that that your past can haunt or follow you but it’s spur choice whether you chose to let it affect you in the
Hanson, Carter F. "The Utopian function of memory in Lois Lowry's The Giver." Extrapolation 50.1 (2009): 45+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Jan. 2014.
“The books that the world call immoral are the books that show the world its own shame,” famous author Oscar Wilde once said. In Lois Lowry’s controversial young adult novel The Giver, twelve-year-old protagonist Jonas lives in a dystopian world in which citizens in the Community have their career, spouse, and children picked for them by the Elders. The Community is dominated by the concept of Sameness where individuality, emotion, and color do not exist. In fact, everyone is assigned the same birthday. Once children turn the age of twelve, they are assigned their career path. Jonas learns that he is selected to become the Receiver of Memory, an honorary role, they call it. The Receiver is the person who holds all memories, good and bad, in order to maintain Sameness in the community; in short; the Receiver carries the burden of emotions and memories for everybody. The previous Receiver, who is now known as the Giver, transmits memories of pain and hope, loss and love to Jonas during his training, which changes the way Jonas views his Community. During the duration of his training, readers come across conflicts of euthanasia, sexuality, and suicide that parents and schools find too inappropriate and immoral for their children, leading The Giver to become number eleven on the American Library Association’s most challenged books of the 1990s (“Suicide Book Challenged in Schools”).
In Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Freud distinguishes ‘melancholia’ from ‘mourning’ and charges it with pathological implications. He states that unlike the physical manifestation of grief, in the form of lamenting over the lost object in ‘mourning’, the melancholic is in a perennial state of grief without any repercussive manifestation. Sally Bowles, the central character of Christopher Isherwood’s semi autobiographical novel, Goodbye to Berlin, almost immediately from the beginning, fits into this role of the melancholic. The introduction of Sally in Fritz’s apartment, is brilliantly significant in understanding her uncertain air of melancholy. Fritz broods over his unsuccessful love and Sally comes to his rescue with an assertion, ‘I believe the trouble with you is that you’ve never really found the right woman’. ...
George Saunders, a writer with a particular inclination in modern America, carefully depicts the newly-emerged working class of America and its poor living condition in his literary works. By blending fact with fiction, Saunders intentionally chooses to expose the working class’s hardship, which greatly caused by poverty and illiteracy, through a satirical approach to criticize realistic contemporary situations. In his short story “Sea Oak,” the narrator Thomas who works at a strip club and his elder aunt Bernie who works at Drugtown for minimum are the only two contributors to their impoverished family. Thus, this family of six, including two babies, is only capable to afford a ragged house at Sea Oak,
“The worst part of holding memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”(pg. 238) This quote shows that the person with all the memories feels lonely because he/she isn’t allowed to share their memories. No else is allowed to remember what life was like and how others societies are living. There is one specially assigned job the be the giver/receiver. That person is the only allowed to have memories and keeps every memory there has ever been. Once that person gets too old, he passes them on down to the next person chosen by the elders. In our reality, we get to keep our memories and we get to be who we are. Along with that, The government has cameras put up in the city to watch people to make sure everyone is behaving and no one is acting out. In our city, there may be cameras but the government isn’t going to come and take you for being who you
Ida Fink’s work, “The Table”, is an example of how old or disturbing memories may not contain the factual details required for legal documentation. The purpose of her writing is to show us that people remember traumatic events not through images, sounds, and details, but through feelings and emotions. To break that down into two parts, Fink uses vague characters to speak aloud about their experiences to prove their inconsistencies, while using their actions and manners to show their emotions as they dig through their memories in search of answers in order to show that though their spoken stories may differ, they each feel the same pain and fear.
Walker, Alice. "Remembering Mr. Sweet." The Harper Anthology of Fiction. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 1147-1149.
Identity is what makes people who they are. A spirit, individuality, and reminiscence are something that belongs to every individual. Someone might become different; however, profoundly we continue to be the same. “Wakefield” expounds the concept of the story in the shape of an ordinary imaginary- to leave his wife and his home and to realize the consequence that his nonappearance has in the loveliest person’s that he left without any knowledge about him.
The poem “Alzheimer’s” by Kelly Cherry explains how glorious a man’s life was before a brain harming disease became a factor within it. Alzheimer’s is a disease that slowly causes one’s brain to deteriorate, to slowly forget about the past, and can even cause people to forget how to breathe or walk. The setting of the poem takes place at a house in which a man, the main character, is returning home after suffering problems caused by Alzheimer’s. According to the poem “Alzheimer’s”, the man’s memory was becoming cloudy but fragments of the past stayed within his mind because he “remembers the walkway he built between the front room and the garage.” Cherry utilizes words describing the man’s life, making strong comparisons between the present
Often in literature, authors write about the theme of the conflict between good and evil. These statements are expressed in all themes in literature, and when they are broken down to their simplest forms, they are about a conflict between good and evil. Conventionally in conflicts, there are two sides that fight over one thing. One side is considered to be good, while the other side is considered to be evil. This is considered to be in every conflict when scrutinized. This verbalization is not valid because a conflict does not have to be about good and evil. A conflict can be internal, where the struggle takes place in the main character’s psyche. As once said “All conflict in literature is in its simplest form a struggle between good and evil". Throughout the course of literary history, this quotation has been proven true. In the novella Animal Farm by George Orwell, this conflict can be seen through the underlying themes of good vs. evil between the characters of Snowball and Napoleon. Likewise, in the novel Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger, we see the conflict through that Holde...