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“The Selfish Giant” is Oscar Wilde’s story about a giant that is selfish to all the children in his village, but once the weather turned on him he changed his ways. The giant couldn 't handle the harsh winter and seeing a child upset so his heart changed and he was no longer selfish. At the end he was taken to heaven for being a non selfish giant. Wilde used imagery, setting, characters, and plot to make “The Selfish Giant” a marvelous story. Wilde wrote “The Selfish Giant” to tell a story about one man 's, giant’s, change of heart and acceptance. Wild starts his story with a happy scene where kids are playing freely and having fun, but suddenly a great giant comes home and ruins everything (**). When the giant comes home and walls off his …show more content…
“It was a large lovely garden, with soft green grass. Here and there over the grass stood beautiful flowers like stars, and there were twelve peach-trees that in the spring-time broke out into delicate blossoms of pink and pearl, and in the autumn bore rich fruit” (**). The giant’s garden is described to be magnificent and beautiful; the description helps readers understand why playing in the garden makes the kids feel happy and why the giant would be so selfish with it. A garden that was so soft and so beautiful would make it hard for anyone playing in it to have a bad time, therefore the kids are drawn forth to it. Wilde also does an exceptional job at describing the winter time in the giant’s garden. “The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. The North Wind roared all day about the garden, and blew the chimney-pots down” (**). With such a pristine depiction of what the giants wintery garden was like the reader could understand why he changed his ways and why he wanted the spring back so badly. With the descriptive words the readers could perfectly imagine the scene of events that happened throughout “The Selfish …show more content…
He does not care if he upsets people, nor does he mind building a wall to keep them out. "My own garden is my own garden," said the Giant; "any one can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself" (**). His selfishness plays into the plot of the story allowing there to be something to build off of. During the story the giant becomes more giving, so he knocks down his wall and lets the children come play. “And the Giant 's heart melted as he looked out. "How selfish I have been!" he said; "now I know why the Spring would not come here. I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children 's playground for ever and ever." He was really very sorry for what he had done”(**). Seeing the little boy in distress and seeing that the children rid his garden of winter he changed his ways and rejoiced with sharing his garden with everyone. Another key character in the story was the little boy, who was later recognized to be Jesus. The boy is the cause for the big moments throughout the story and he is the one who helps the giant change. “He was so small that he could not reach up to the branches of the tree, and he was wandering all round it, crying bitterly” (**). The little boy being sad and unable to climb the tree is what made the giant changes his ways and it created a turning point for the story. At the end of “The
From the beginning, the reader is confronted with the idea of a home that cares for its inhabitants, as opposed to the other way around. “They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them” (Bradbury “The Veldt”). This portion of the text creates images we are accustomed to, but instead of a mother or father taking care of these needs, it is their house. It is an unsettling image. The story proceeds with the parents inspecting the children’s nursery; yet this is no ordinary nursery. This nursery fulfills the children's wishes and shows them that which they would like to see. The nursery shows them an African grassland where death is in the air. Bradbury foreshadows their end when the wife suggests they lock the nursery for a few days and George responds with “You know how difficult Peter is about that. When I punished him a month ago by locking the nursery for even a few hours - the tantrum he threw! And Wendy too. They live for the nursery”(Bradbury “The Veldt”). With this statement alone, we know George and Lydia are already losing control of their children, and it is only a matter of time before they lose their control entirely. The days of picture perfect
Some people are selfish in such a way that affects only their own selves, but others’ selfishness can hurt those they care about. One of these such people is Brother in “The Scarlet Ibis”. In James Hurst’s “The Scarlet Ibis”, Brother is selfish and only teaches Doodle to walk to benefit himself.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby’s conflicts between passion and responsibility demonstrate that chasing empty dreams can only lead to suffering. Gatsby’s motivation to achieve his dream of prosperity is interrupted when his fantasy becomes motivated by love. His eternal struggle for something more mirrors cultural views that more is always better. By ultimately suffering an immense tragedy, Jay Gatsby transforms into a romantic and tragic hero paying the capital price for his actions. Gatsby envokes a deeper Conclusion sentence
One of the themes that was most prevalent in this short story was selfishness and
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. Peter Raby, ed. Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. London: Oxford University Press, 1995. 247-307.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a festive comedy. The play takes place in June and this is a bewitched time. In the spring the custom is to celebrate the return of fertility to the earth. During this time the young people spend the night in the woods to celebrate. Shakespeare uses the greenworld pattern in this play. The play begins in the city, moves out to the country and then back to the city. Being in the country makes things better because there is tranquility, freedom and people can become uncivilized versus when they are in the city and have to follow customs and laws and behave rationally.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Michael Patrick Gillespie, Editor. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007.
Explore the presentation of loneliness and isolation in “The Great Gatsby”. In the course of your writing, make connections to “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”.
...conclusion, the characters ambitions that I described show how their ambitions can both lead to great harm to oneself and to the people around them and great success to themselves. Furthermore, the characters of Great Gatsby that I described went beyond what a normal person could do, in both cruelty and judgment towards one another and towards themselves. A good example of this would be how Gatsby, ruined his life by chasing a girl that was already married and seeking perfection in the real world, so that it could match his dreams. Furthermore, in the book it showed that the characters that followed their ambitions that I described ended up being heart broken and devastated at the end of the book. The ambitions of a person, can lead them to act in complete dispersion, which ends up hurting the ones around them, and themselves.
...hed everything he had ever dreamt of, only to die tragically in the end, with no one by his side. Good things only last so long, The Great Gatsby showed the darker side of the 1920’s, which was hidden behind false identity, and fake smiles. The corruption, the affairs, the abuse that most got away with, just so long as they could pay off their dues with their riches. The poignant, yet hopeful tone is about life and how it almost always ends in heartbreak or death. Life, no matter your accomplishments, ends in a depression, it sucks you down, and you either fight it or it kills you. The world is a dog eat dog world. You fight to stay alive, to make something of yourself, to survive, and in the end you usually always end up dead in a ditch somewhere, because the world took everything you had and so much more, and you have been drained of your ability to fight back.
Although imagery and symbolism does little to help prepare an expected ending in “The Flowers” by Alice Walker, setting is the singular element that clearly reasons out an ending that correlates with the predominant theme of how innocence disappears as a result of facing a grim realism from the cruel world. Despite the joyous atmosphere of an apparently beautiful world of abundant corn and cotton, death and hatred lies on in the woods just beyond the sharecropper cabin. Myop’s flowers are laid down as she blooms into maturity in the face of her fallen kinsman, and the life of summer dies along with her innocence. Grim realism has never been so cruel to the innocent children.
...cultivating the garden lets the group of characters keep away from the unfair world in which pessimism is present, while cause and effect are easily measurable in the garden.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is still the best representation of the Romantic Hero and his American Dream, despite efforts by interpreters like David Merrick in his film version to "usurp" it, for the author challenges the reader’s imagination through his brilliant narrative technique, unforgettable characterization, and use of symbolism, so that Gatsby’s experience becomes everyone’s.
The story of Gargantua and Pantagruel is basically a satirical story of the french writer Francois Rabelais. Francois tells of the adventures of two giants, father and son, Gargantua and Pantagruel. They make fun of the vices and foolishness of the people and institutions of Rabelais's time. His humor is at times so dark and his criticism of the Roman Catholic Church so telling that it is difficult to believe that for most of his life he was a priest. I believe that the sole intention of this work is to poke and dig at the people and intrest's that Rabelais disliked, which you can tell by him bringing real people into the story. I don't feel that there is any deep meaning to this work other than to express his dislikes for his world's ideals. In the next few paragraphs I will try to pick apart the work of Francois Rabelais and express my ideas on the meaning of the work, Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. Ed. Richard Allen Cave. New York: Penguin, 2000.