The gravity of guilt can gain weight as it rests on your shoulders. You can live your life with a perpetually growing weight upon your shoulders, and burdening your soul. Some choose to surrender themselves, but some disburden themselves of the weight. The get rid of the weight by disclosing their story to someone, and admitting the truth. Anita Shreve’s “the Weight of Water” reveals a character that has waited many years to tell her story, finally, alleviating her guilt.
The Weight of Water is set on Smuttynose Island, where Jean Jane, a photographer, has come to collect information about a never truly solved murder of 2 Norwegian women. Brining family and friends, Jean sets out to find out the legitimate story of Anethe Christensen’s and Karen Christensen’s murder. In her investigation, Jean discovers a journal from Maren Christensen/ Hontvedt that contains every single detail of the murder. Describing the before, during, and after of the murder that occurred on March 5, 1873. While learning about this murder, Jean faces similar challenges as Maren did, with her husband, family and friends. Not only are these challenges emotionally affective for the readers, the characters come to life, and tell you their story. Shreve manages to develop her characters well with excellent descriptions, as well as providing the reader with hints about the characters through their dialogue and actions. An example would be the introduction of Rich: “He gives me the impression that accepting the dampness, even taking a certain pleasure in it, is an indication of character.” (Page 5) Jean is describing her first perception of Rich; which is that he is an accepting person. The characters’ actions and dialogue also displays real life situations, maki...
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...ver, as the novel progressed in events, it became more interesting and suspenseful. By the end of the book, expectations were proven untrue, as the book is deemed interesting.
However the book’s interesting and suspenseful plot is decimated by Shreve’s monotonous way of presentation of the novel’s plot. In particular, proof to exhibit the interesting plot would be as Maren is watching Louis Wagner eat, found on pages 172-73. Shreve adds in some insipid paragraphs, having nothing to do with advancing the plot, nor adding interest. On the other hand, Shreve has created an alluring plot which keeps the readers captivated. As the story progresses more information about the murder is revealed and dramatic events take place.
The Weight of Water is a novel filled with mystery, romance, and suspense. A mystery never truly solved, but is revealed throughout the novel.
Kevlar (10) - synthetic fiber that is often used as a reinforcing agent in tire and other rubber products. I is made up of high tensile strength.
In, A Place Where the Sea Remembers, several events take place to describe the little city of Santiago, Mexico. This town is just south of the border by El Paso, Texas. The book focuses around a lady known as the Remedios. She is a very old healer that helps people with their problems of love, hate, etc. She is the "good" in the book, whereas El Brujo, the warlock, is the bad man in the book. This book's other strong point is that it has several short narratives that focus on one, or a few citizens of Santiago. A few examples are, Candelario (the salad maker), Marta (16 year old that's pregnant), Fulgencio (the photographer that loses all of his equipment) and Don Justo Flores (left his wife and kids and now it haunts him when one of his daughters die). In these stories, these people go threw hardships and ordeals that teach us, the readers, how to or not to deal with life when it isn't looking UP.
Overall, the use dual narration in this novel is very effective as it conveys the thoughts of both narrators. Furthermore, altering chapters also acquire momentum for the text, as well as foreshadow the events of McBride's life through that of his mother, plus suggest the similarities between them. Subsequently, by highlighting similarities between two stories due to the different narration, the novel, The Color of Water achieves complexity and nuance. While the parallelism of several issues and the rhetorical strategies further contribute to the meaning of the novel’s message, when Ruth and James finally came to terms with their past and when Ruth was able to help James understand his origin.
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.
“Black Power”, the word alone raises an abundance of controversial issues. Black power was a civil rights movement led by the black panthers which addressed several issues including segregation and racism. Black power had a different meaning to every member of the Mc Bride family, Ruth and James both looked at black power from a different angle. In “The Color of Water”, The author James Mc Bride admired the black panthers at first, but slowly he grew afraid of them after fearing the consequences his mother might face for being a white woman in a black community influenced by black power. James’ worries were baseless, black power’s motive was to educate and improve African American communities not to create havoc or to harm members of the white community.
The relationship you have with others often has a direct effect on the basis of your very own personal identity. In the essay "On The Rainy River," the author Tim O'Brien tells about his experiences and how his relationship with a single person had effected his life so dramatically. It is hard for anyone to rely fully on their own personal experiences when there are so many other people out there with different experiences of their own. Sometimes it take the experiences and knowledge of others to help you learn and build from them to help form your own personal identity. In the essay, O'Brien speaks about his experiences with a man by the name of Elroy Berdahl, the owner of the fishing lodge that O'Brien stays at while on how journey to find himself. The experiences O'Brien has while there helps him to open his mind and realize what his true personal identity was. It gives you a sense than our own personal identities are built on the relationships we have with others. There are many influence out there such as our family and friends. Sometimes even groups of people such as others of our nationality and religion have a space in building our personal identities.
Shame and guilt are often used interchangeably as they are often perceived to be the same or eerily similar. Yet shame is more associated with feelings of poor personal character and guilt is associated with what a person’s character does. Studies have shown that shame rather than guilt is a significant risk factor for the onset and maintenance of mental health difficulties and it has been further theorized that guilt is actually an adaptive response in which movement from shame to guilt represents a stage of mental health recovery (Dyer, et al., 2017). Though shame over particular events in the moment are not uncommon due to humanities imperfect nature, the problem resides in lack of shame resolution. May (2007) exemplifies this in that the
In The Color of Water, author James McBride writes both his autobiography and a tribute to the life of his mother, Ruth McBride. In the memoirs of the author’s mother and of himself, they constantly face discrimination from their race in certain neighborhoods and of their religious beliefs. The trials and tribulations faced by these two characters have taught readers universally that everyone faces difficulties in life, but they can all be surmounted.
When reflecting and writing on Eiseley’s essay and the “magical element”, I balk. I think to myself, “What magic?”, and then put pen to page. I dubiously choose a kiddie pool to draw inspiration from, and unexpectedly, inspiration flows into me. As I sit here in this little 10x30 foot backyard, the sky is filled with the flowing gaseous form of water, dark patches of moist earth speckle the yard, the plants soak up their scattered watering, and the leaves of bushes and trees imbue the space with a sense of dampness from their foliage. As my senses tune into the moisture that surrounds me, I fill Braedon’s artificial pond with water. I stare at the shimmering surface, contemplating Eiseley’s narrative, and the little bit of life’s wellspring caught in Brae’s pool. I see why Eiseley thought the most abundant compound on the earth’s surface is mystical.
In looking back upon his experience in Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote in 1988: ?It is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism (Nazism) sanctifies its victims. On the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.? (Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 40). The victims of National Socialism in Levi?s book are clearly the Jewish Haftlings. Survival in Auschwitz, a book written by Levi after he was liberated from the camp, clearly makes a case that the majority of the Jews in the lager were stripped of their human dignity. The Jewish prisoners not only went through a physical hell, but they were psychologically driven under as well. Levi writes, ??the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts? We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death?? (Levi, 41). One would be hard pressed to find passages in Survival in Auschwitz that portray victims of the camp as being martyrs. The treatment of the Jews in the book explicitly spells out the dehumanization to which they were subjected. It is important to look at how the Jews were degraded in the camp, and then examine whether or not they came to embody National Socialism after this.
book I was greatly troubled by its ending. I can see why it is an excellent novel, but at
Everyone has their own set of problems, and everyone has their own way of working them out. Some people solve their problems right away, and others procrastinate. Fred Trumper takes a very unusual approach to many of his problems, but then again he leads a very unusual life. Much like Fred "Bogus" Trumper's crooked urinary tract, his troubled life is in dire need of being straightened out as seen in The Water Method Man by John Irving.
The main characters of the novel are travelling into Canada. The non-established landscape was full of wild animals, Aboriginal people, and whiskey posts. This story of conflict is entwined tightly to the story of love. Three brothers known for different qualities, an intellect, ex-military officer, and an idealist all form different relationships with their father, Henry Gaunt, an English gentleman. Therefore the theme of the story has men with money and power come to Canada with a purpose which also stays true to the historical facts because men have a commanding influence in this times social arrangement and the treatment of women gets explained in this book as a less powerful position.
The plot is entertaining and suspenseful which allows it to hold up to the standards of the list. Foreshadowing maintains interest, and is a prominent part of the suspenseful nature of the plot. After the first murder of Mrs. Ascher, Hastings believed that the crime is a singular event, but Poirot stated, “This is only the beginning” (Christie 22). The author uses a delightful example of foreshadowing to hint to the later murders. This keeps the plot suspenseful which makes one want to continue reading. After discussing possible coincidences on the day of the murder with the victims’ friends and families, Poirot realized, “I tell you my friends, it cannot be a coincidence. Three crimes---and every time a man selling stockings and spying out the land” (Christie 211). The finding of clues allows the plot to continue, thus maintaining the reader’s interest and preventing the story from becoming too tedious to enjoy. While Monsieur Poirot finished pronouncing the name of the murderer, the narration stated, “Two detectives...
that the novel is a log of events and a tale of what might be in the