Three Cups Of Tea Literary Analysis

1147 Words3 Pages

Three Cups of Tea, written by David Relin and Greg Mortenson, is a story about Mortenson's mission to provide education to children in Pakistan and Afghanistan after he stumbles across a village during a climbing expedition. Supposedly this is a true story. However, Jon Krakauer, author of Three Cups of Deceit, writes to uncover the truth behind Mortenson's story. Although some of the events have been proven as true, Krakauer has found that several others have been exaggerated. The credibility of all three authors is determined by their sources, evidence, and ethics. Based on ethics, Mortenson seems to be the least credible and Krakauer is the most credible, with Relin’s credibility falling somewhere in between.
Mortenson is a former mountaineer who lives in Montana with his wife and two children. He is the director of the Central Asia Institute and he claims to spend several months per year building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Relin is a journalist who lives in Portland, Oregon. He has won more than forty awards for his writing. Krakauer is an author and mountaineer. He was featured during a 60 Minutes interview about Mortenson and Three Cups of Deceit.
Mortenson’s story seems believable, however his story is fiction that is presented as fact.
At any moment, Mortenson expected to find Scott Darsney, a fellow member of his expedition, with …show more content…

He writes Mortenson’s story as if it were factual, when it is actually fiction. When details of the book were called into question, he began having financial and emotional problems. This ended in Relin committing suicide. The stress from this situation suggests that Relin may have known that Mortenson’s stories were fake and he decided to write them anyway. This detracts from Relin’s credibility because he writes the stories as if they are completely true in order to get good reviews. Relin’s personal ethics are questioned for this same

Show More
Related

  • Capote/Krakauer Comparison

    846 Words  | 2 Pages

    description and characterization he creates an accurate portrait of the many intense events surrounding such a tragic story.

    Read More

  • Summary Of The Terror By Junot Diaz

    244 Words  | 1 Pages

    I felt emotional while on page 100, paragraph 7 where he stated: “I guess I should have told someone, but I was too humiliated”. The fact that his father had abandoned the family and his brother who is his No 1 confidant was down with leukemia didn’t give him the courage to speak out, he was scared to the point of losing his mind, he became depressed, irritable, hypervigilant and ashamed thereby hating

    Read More

  • Irony in Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story

    2118 Words  | 5 Pages

    In his short story, O’Brien unravels step by step the irony in the double meaning of truth, implied in this first statement, “This is true”, to the reader which is then woven through the entire story. By trying to characterize what constitutes a true war story, but never really achieving this goal, the true irony of his short story is revealed. Even though in some instances giving away his opinion explicitly, the sheer contradiction of honesty and reality becomes even more visible in an implicit way by following O’Brien’s explanations throughout the story while he deconstructs his first statement. The incongruity between his first statement and what is actually shown in his examples does not need any explicit statements to drive home his message.

    Read More

  • Distortion of Truth in Tim O’Brien's The Things They Carried

    743 Words  | 2 Pages

    One of the later entries in the book called “Good form”, helps alleviate the suspicion of dishonesty in the stories by bluntly telling the reader that all the other entries are a mix of both fact and fiction. O’Brien feels the need to make up parts of his stories due to the fact that he wants the reader to experience emotions as opposed to mental visuals. He describes these emotion-laden scenes as “story-truth” due to the fact that they are part story and part truth. The parts that are only for emotio...

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis

    1267 Words  | 3 Pages

    Poverty and homelessness are often, intertwined with the idea of gross mentality. illness and innate evil. In urban areas all across the United States, just like that of Seattle. in Sherman Alexie’s New Yorker piece, What You Pawn I Will Redeem, the downtrodden. are stereotyped as vicious addicts who would rob a child of its last penny if it meant a bottle of whiskey.

    Read More

  • Lord Of The Flies Literary Analysis Essay

    1004 Words  | 3 Pages

    Lord of the Flies is a novel written by William Golding in 1954 about a group of young British boys who have been stranded alone together on an island with no adults. During the novel the diverse group of boys struggle to create structure within a society that they constructed by themselves. Golding uses many unique literary devices including characterization, imagery, symbolism and many more. The three main characters, Ralph, Piggy, and Jack are each representative of the three main literary devices, ethos, logos, and pathos. Beyond the characterization the novel stands out because of Golding’s dramatic use of objective symbolism, throughout the novel he uses symbols like the conch, fire, and Piggy’s glasses to represent how power has evolved and to show how civilized or uncivilized the boys are acting. It is almost inarguable that the entire novel is one big allegory in itself, the way that Golding portrays the development of savagery among the boys is a clear representation of how society was changing during the time the novel was published. Golding is writing during

    Read More

  • Theme Of Storytelling In The Things They Carried

    1432 Words  | 3 Pages

    In much of The Things They Carried, stories are retold time and time again. One reason for this is the idea of keeping a story’s story-truth alive. In “Good Form,” O’Brien differentiates what he calls story-truth from happening-truth. Story-truth seems to give us a better understanding of O’Brien’s sentiment in a particular story even though the story itself may not be true at all. On the other hand, happening-truth is what actually happened in the story, but may not contain as much emotional authenticity as story-truth. According to O’Brien, story-truth is therefore truer than happening-truth. Relating back to storytelling, O’Brien retells stories continuously to maintain their sentiment and emotional value. Without this continuous repetition, this sentiment fades away and the emotional value of the story is lost.

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis

    1232 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Often fear of one evil leads us into a worse”(Despreaux). Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux is saying that fear consumes oneself and often times results in a worse fate. William Golding shares a similar viewpoint in his novel Lord of the Flies. A group of boys devastatingly land on a deserted island. Ralph and his friend Piggy form a group. Slowly, they become increasingly fearful. Then a boy named Jack rebels and forms his own tribe with a few boys such as Roger and Bill. Many things such as their environment, personalities and their own minds contribute to their change. Eventually, many of the boys revert to their inherently evil nature and become savage and only two boys remain civilized. The boys deal with many trials, including each other, and true colors show. In the end they are being rescued, but too much is lost. Their innocence is forever lost along with the lives Simon, a peaceful boy, and an intelligent boy, Piggy. Throughout the novel, Golding uses symbolism and characterization to show that savagery and evil are a direct effect of fear.

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis

    685 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Fall of the House of Usher, the character Roderick Usher exhibits severe mental illness. Most of Poe’s writings are psychological in nature. The Fall of the House of Usher is a great example of this. Poe’s life was filled with many tragic events. The unpleasant outcome of his early years resulted in a great Gothic Romantic writer. He is a master of writing psychological thrillers, adding suspense and mystery in his stories. The topics of his writings are a concoction of unpleasant, austere, and grotesque things, thus the reader can be left feeling squeamish and susceptible. We are drawn into Poe’s stories by our intrinsic human nature of curiosity and intrigue. This paper gives examples of Poe’s literary style as we examine Roderick’s metal state through his words and appearance.

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis

    1635 Words  | 4 Pages

    This was by far my least favorite paper of all of them simply because "The Dubliners" is incredibly hard to understand when you don't have enough time to read back through it like I had previously to understand the other stories. "The Dead" and "The Sister's" are two different stories. "The Dead" is the longest story in "The Dubliners" and the most difficult to understand because of the many different themes running through it. While "The Sisters" is much shorter than the latter, with an easier storyline.

    Read More

  • Greg Mortenson's 'Three Cups Of Tea'

    802 Words  | 2 Pages

    Jon Krakauer, author and mountaineer, researched Mortenson's trip and found that his true journey was different than written in his book. Krakauer detects the truth behind Mortenson's book when he writes in Three Cups of Deceit, “Mortenson has lied about the noble deeds he has done, the risks he has taken, the people he has met, the number of schools he has built” (Krakauer 7). Like Krakauer, the national television broadcast 60 Minutes further investigated Mortenson's time in Pakistan and organization and arrived at the same

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis: Kew Gardens

    1205 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Kew Gardens, Virginia Woolf takes advantage of the liminal quality of the short story in order to highlight the suspended world that she creates in the garden. For Woolf, the lyrical short story’s subversion of traditional narrative structure allows her to focus on creating a world rather than a plot. Further, the short story creates a liminal space by the very nature of its form. Caught in a space where it is not considered a poem or a novel, the short story exists as undefined. The liminality of the short story, however, is both liberating and restricting. Woolf explores this feature in order to suggest the unsustainable nature of Kew Gardens. While Woolf utilizes the form of the short story to create a liminal, impressionistic space that eradicates the boundaries between human and nature, she also uses the transitory quality of the short story to suggest that such a space can only exist for a short duration due to the restrictions of the imposing outside world.

    Read More

  • Three Cups Of Tea Analysis

    1438 Words  | 3 Pages

    Imagine millions of Afghani refugees, emaciated families, and thousands of uneducated children all desperate for help. In the war that America has waged against terror, it has left in its wake millions of peaceful, starving, and struggling civilians. Both, Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini display the two different stories about the reality of living in the midst of war. Using contrasting brushstrokes, these two stories paint a vivid picture of the fragile and tumultuous society that millions of peaceful Afghani and Pakistani civilians claim as their own.

    Read More

  • lies save lives

    835 Words  | 2 Pages

    Tim O’brien uses his novel to share the stories he could not physically tell. It is only years after O’Brien comes back from war that he is able to write about his decision to go to war. He admits that he had never told the story “to [his] parents”, his “brother or sister” or “even [his] wife” (O’Brien 37). By“putting the facts down on paper”, even years later, O’Brien can “relieve at least some of the pressure on [his] dreams” (37). Since O’brien can not “[find] the courage” to talk to others about the way he is feeling, he writes down stories that capture his emotional essence in a way that provides a self-release (52). Likewise, when O’brien’s daughter Kathleen “asks [him] if he had ever killed anyone”, he cannot find a way to respond anything more than “Of course not” (125). Though he wants to “to tell her what happened, or what [he] remembers happened”, he cannot find a way to tell her. According to O’Brien “this is...

    Read More

  • Alice in Wonderland Critical Analysis

    1762 Words  | 4 Pages

    Alice in Wonderland belongs to the nonsense genre, and even if most of what happens to Alice is quite illogical, the main character is not. “The Alice books are, above all, about growing up” (Kincaid, page 93); indeed, Alice starts her journey as a scared little girl, however, at the end of what we discover to be just a dream, she has entered the adolescence phase with a new way to approach the mentally exhausting and queer Wonderland. It is important to consider the whole story when analyzing the growth of the character, because the meaning of an event or a sentence is more likely to mean what it truly looks like rather than an explanation regarding subconscious and Freudian interpretations. Morton states “that the books should possess any unity of purpose seems on the surface unlikely” (Morton, page 509), but it’s better to consider the disconnected narrative and the main character separately, since the girl doesn’t belong to Wonderland, which is, as Morton says, with no intrinsic unity. Whereas, there are a few key turning points where it is possible to see how Alice is changing, something that is visible throughout her journey. Carroll wants to tell the story of a girl who has to become braver in order to contend with challenges like the pool made by her own tears, or assertive characters, like the Queen.

    Read More

More about Three Cups Of Tea Literary Analysis

Open Document