The text I choose to discuss was the seminal work of Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination, a book that went on to define science fiction and spawn the cyberpunk genre. The story follows the life of Gulliver Foyle, a generic worker with no ambitions, no friends, no semblance of a personality. After an attack destroys the ship he was working on, the NOMAD, Gully is forced to survive by living in an airtight locker the size of a coffin for six months. On the one hundredth and seventy first day, Gully sees the cargo ship VORGA fly close by and he sends out a distress beacon. The VORGA sees the beacon, yet decides to pass him by regardless. Fury and hatred for the ship consumes Gully and he becomes reborn as man with a single goal, find and …show more content…
The aesthetic and structural choices Bester took work so effectively to convey anger. Personally, I have always believed that books also have a visual aspect to them, as the image of the words themselves get burned into the mind sometimes, rather than the things portrayed by those words. The short, brutish sentences in the last paragraph create an image of his anger more effectively than the words themselves. Bester’s contrast of this rough section with the opening lines of the excerpt, which are smooth, long and complex, serve to illustrate the difference between “us” and “him”. Since the novel is in the third person, the narrator is someone removed from the story, behaving as someone watching the events unfold as the readers are. By contrasting the narrator/readers smooth sentences with Gully’s violent and torn sentences separates us from Gully and let’s us view him as we would an animal at a zoo or a phenomenon. Bester achieved this through sentence structure alone, without even relying on …show more content…
Bester’s writing style is one I’ve attempted to emulate in my own creative writing, one that stresses longer sentences heavy with carefully picked words. Words describing Gully, “slow”, “empty”, “lazy”, “brute”, ‘sluggish”, come rapid fire, one after another, pushing this idea of the most generic, boring main character to ever grace the page. Just as he had done with structure, Bester again separates the reader from Gully. The narrator uses complex words and a much more elevated vocabulary when describing what’s around Gully, but Gully himself speaks “gutter talk”, a dialect in the novel reserved for the lowest levels of society. The message Bester sends is clear. In every conceivable way, Gully Foyle is low-brow trash, and as he is mentioned several times to be a “common man”, the general population is also low-brow trash. Bester effectively and strongly infused this section with social commentary subtext without even having to build a world or a setting. He created social commentary out of a single person, isolated in
4. What two forms of figurative language does the author use in lines 20-23 of page 211 to make his writing more
In Under a Cruel Star, Heda Margolious Kovaly details the attractiveness and terror of Communism brought to Czechoslovakia following WWII. Kovaly’s accounts of how communism impacted Czechoslovakia are fascinating because they are accounts of a woman who was skeptical, but also seemed hopeful for communism’s success. Kovaly was not entirely pro-communism, nor was she entirely anti-communism during the Party’s takeover. By telling her accounts of being trapped in the Lodz Ghetto and the torture she faced in Auschwitz, Kovaly displays her terror experienced with a fascist regime and her need for change. Kovaly said that the people of Czechoslovakia welcomed communism because it provided them with the chance to make up for the passivity they had let occur during the German occupation. Communism’s appeal to
In the NonFiction book Every Falling Star by Sungju Lee and Susan McClelland, a true story of a north korean boy named SungJu whose father was disgraced by the army forcing them to move from a nice city to a poor town where you have to fight for food. Losing both parents due to them leaving to find work or food and never coming back. He was forced at just 12 to live on the streets and fend for himself. In order to survive, Sungju forms a gang with his close new friends and lives by fighting, thieving, begging, performing, and traveling around getting arrested and overcoming many obstacles just to simply survive the rough streets of their new home, making new friends and enemies along the away. While they slowly discover the truth about
Out of the Dust is a 1934 historical fiction novel written by Karen Hesse. The setting of the novel is in a struggling farm in Joyce City in Oklahoma. The novel talks of the challenges faced by Billie Jo a 13 year old girl and her family. It tells of Billie’s struggles a she grows up in Oklahoma Dust Bowl during the depression. Billie’s father was a farmer but his crops fail to nourish because of the drought but Billie is determined to make a better life for herself. Billie was a pianist and got a chance to travel around town with other aspiring performers but her mother never gave her the support she desperately needed. She decided to escape but her escape was halted by a horrific accident which let to her mother and her baby brother being bed ridden and later died. The accident left Billie Jo with severe burns on her hands until she could not play the piano the way she use to. However much she tried doing, she felt a lot of pain. She ran a way from home after she thinks that her father does not support her, later on she comes back home and mends her relationship with her father. She meets Louise who her father had met and she starts rebuilding her life. The family in Out of the Dust faces dust storms and an economic disaster resulting from the drought.
"Constant Star" by Tazewell Thompson is a play which sticks out in my mind as being one of the best I have ever had the priviledge of watching. The play is centered around the life of Ida B. Wells, a black woman who stands up for equality at all costs. Although the content of the play is moving and very interesting, the lighting, songs, costumes, props, and special effects are what made the play so extraordinary.
During 1910 and 1970, over six million blacks departed the oppression of the South and relocated to western and northern cities in the United States, an event identified as the Great Migration. The Warmth of Other Suns is a powerful non-fiction book that illustrates this movement and introduces the world to one of the most prominent events in African American history. Wilkerson conveys a sense of authenticity as she not only articulates the accounts of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, but also intertwines the tales of some 1,200 travelers who made a single decision that would later change the world. Wilkerson utilizes a variety of disciplines including sociology, psychology, and economics in order to document and praise the separate struggles but shared courage of three individuals and their families during the Great Migration.
The book, “The Light in the Forest” is a book written by Conrad Richter. This book is about a young man named True Son. He was a young white boy that was captured by Indians. True Son was only four years old when he was captured, and eventually adopted as one of their own. True Son, at the time was way too young to fully understand what was going on. All’s True Son knew was that he had a family, an Indian family that loved him very much. To True Son, he was pure indian.
In Craig Lesley’s novel The Sky Fisherman, he illustrates the full desire of direction and the constant flow of life. A boy experiences a chain of life changing series of events that cause him to mature faster than a boy should. Death is an obstacle that can break down any man, a crucial role in the circle of life. It’s something that builds up your past and no direction for your future. No matter how hard life got, Culver fought through the pain and came out as a different person. Physical pain gives experience, emotional pain makes men.
“The Great Escape” came out on July 4th, 1963. It is based on a true story of a group of Allied prisoners who managed to escape from an allegedly impenetrable Nazi prisoner of war camp, Stalag Luft III, on March 24, 1944. Directed by John Sturges, it follows the true account of the escape very accurately. With a perfect balance between comedy and adventure, “The Great Escape” keeps you on the edge of your seat.
Life is a complicated process. It’s filled with many things that keep it interesting but at the same time, very dull. Life’s what you make it and for many, it’s something we all strive for. In the story, The Space Between, the author takes full advantage of the premise as there’s rarely a dull moment- as in life. The book is filled with many literary devices that work nicely with the plot and dialogue. These include; metaphors, similes, irony, personification, and many more. We follow a young man who is finding his way in the world. He has only a week to change his life for the better. But he will face many obstacles on the way that brings the readers into a startling and fun journey.
In the first two lines, an aural image is employed to indicate a never-ending anger in the girl's father. Dawe uses onomatopoeia to create a disturbing and upsetting description of his enraged "buzz-saw whine." An annoying, upsetting sound, it gives the impression of lasting ceaselessly. His anger "rose /murderously in his throat." Because "murderously" begins on a new line, a greater emphasis is placed on it and its evil and destructive connotations. An image of a growling lion stalking its prey is evoked in the reader, as it threateningly snarls from its throat. The girl is terrified as it preys on her persistently "throughout the night." Furthermore, because there is no punctuation, these few lines are without a rest, and when reading out aloud, they cause breathlessness. This suggests that the father's "righteous" fury is ceaseless and suffocating the girl.
Edward Bloor takes on a challenge when he attempts to make the reader empathize with people that he had intentionally tried to make the reader dislike earlier in the story. This is a challenge because i...
Character list Annemarie is one of the main characters in this book. She is a 10 year old German girl who lives in Copenhagen, Denmark with her mom, dad, and young sister Kirsti. Annemarie tells the story from her point of view. “It was only in the fairy tales that people were called upon to be so brave, to die for one another. Not in real-life Denmark” Annemarie struggles to find the definition of courage, but with the big journey that awaits uphead she soon finds out.
What can I say about "Empire of the Sun" other than it is a brilliant book, "Empire of the Sun" is not about the end; it's all about the journey. Knowing that's going to happen is irrelevant, it's how things happen that's important and how people react to the events.
The language used in the first two paragraphs outlines the area to which the book is set, this depicts that it is almost perfect and an. an idyllic place to be. The mood is tranquil and takes the reader to a place “where all life seems to live in harmony”. In the first two paragraphs. Carson uses language of melodrama to inspire the reader’s.