Imagine endless parties, a girlfriend, a taste of stardom, and what seems like an endless rock and roll dream, and then you lose it all. This is exactly what happens in Tom Petty’s song “Into the Great Wide Open” when Eddie moves to Hollywood, California to try and make it big in the music industry. Tom Petty’s narrative poem “Into the Great Wide Open” has a shifting tone and tells the story of a realistic life of a rockstar.
Tom Petty’s “Into the Great Wide Open” is a narrative poem that tells the story of Eddie and his rise and fall as a rockstar. In the song Eddie finishes high school and decides to leave everything behind and move to Hollywood, California to start his new life. Eddie meets a girl and then decides to get a tattoo. Soon after he learns guitar from his girlfriend and starts working at a nightclub as a bouncer and they move into a nice place. Newspapers start charting Eddie’s rise to fame and success and claim he plays his music from the heart. Eddie gets an agent and a roadie named Bart and Eddie makes a hit record. Eddie is living the rock n roll dream. He starts sporting a leather jacket with chains. He parties and meets movie stars but when the A and R man doesn’t think Eddie will have another hit he fires Eddie and is left with no job and is clueless about his future.
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The tone of Tom Petty’s “Into the Great WIde Open” is hopeful, happy, and limitless in the beginning.
Towards the end the tone is bleak, unhopeful, and defeated. In the beginning the things seem to be getting better and better for Eddie. For example, he meets a girlfriend, gets a new place with her, and learns how to play guitar along the way. He also is noticed by the newspapers and they claim he plays from the heart and gains a following. Then he acquires an agent, a roadie, and makes a hit Record. Eddie is at the top! His dream had come true! Then, the tone suddenly shifts to being bleak, hopeless, sad, and
depressed. The rise and fall of Eddie is very realistic and happens to artists in the music industry constantly. This story is very realistic because many kids are just like Eddie. They graduate highschool and chase their dreams wherever they may be. When you turn eighteen you are legally an adult and it would be very easy to find a job especially one like Eddie’s which is being a bouncer at a nightclub. Also, most anyone can learn how to play a guitar. The guitar is one of the most popular and easiest instruments to learn. Many times rockstars of a young age are only able to produce one single, hence the name “one hit wonder”. The realistic life of a rockstar that includes shifting tones is Tom Petty’s “Into the Great Wide Open”. Similar to Eddie’s rise and fall is that of Janis Joplin. Janis Joplin wrote many hit song in the 60s and 70s and became a legend. As fast as she gained a following she fastly spiraled out of control and her career went downhill due to drug use. Ultimately Janis Joplin overdosed ending her own career.
During the summer of 1984, Calvin Johnson trudges knee deep through a swamp in the wetlands of South Georgia. As snakes brush past his legs, he marches in line with nine other men, each dressed in an orange jumpsuit, swinging a razor sharp bush axe in collective rhythm. His crew entered the swamp at dawn and they will not leave until dusk. Guards, armed with shotguns, and equally violent tempers, ignore the fact that the temperature has risen well above 100 degrees and push the men even harder. Suddenly, an orange blur falls to the ground and a prisoner from Wayne Correctional Institution lies face down in the swampy floor. As guards bark orders at the unconscious, dying man, Johnson realizes "the truth of the situation, and the force of injustice just incapacitates" him. It is then he decides he does not belong in the swamp.
Recently he met this girl who had knew a few answers to the question he is searching for. Eddie is on a dangerous path to his investigation,but he is determine to find the killer. After his cousin is killed, Eddie's aunt pressures him to avenge her son's death. Eddie drops out of City College and works odd jobs, all the while wondering about this, the latest of the senseless killings that have become a fact of life within the community. A run of unlucky breaks adds to his frustration as he is completely caught up in the violence he disapproves
Flannery O’Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. She was an American writer. O’Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories in her life time. She was a southern writer who wrote in Southern Gothic style. In the Article, Female Gothic Fiction Carolyn E. Megan asks Dorothy Allison what Southern Gothic is to her and she responded with, “It’s a lyrical tradition. Language. Iconoclastic, outrageous as hell, leveled with humor. Yankees do it, but Southerners do it more. It’s the grotesque.”(Bailey 1) Later she was asked who one of her role models was and she stated that Flannery O’Connor was one she could relate to. One of O’Connor’s stronger works was “Good Country People” which was published in 1955.
Country music singer, Reba McIntire, recorded a song called "The Greatest Man I Never Knew." In the song, she speaks of how she never really knew her father. It exemplifies the way I feel about my own father. Everyone has a person who has made a deep impact on his or her life. For me, it was my father Donald Alexander. He was a great man with a wonderful sense of humor. He was the reason I wanted to become an attorney. He said I never lost an argument. I feel tormented that I was unable to know what a great person he really was.
Even though, a person likes to think they are in control, life will show them they are in less control than thought they were. In Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” the character Hulga is a person that wants to maintain control in every aspect of her life good or bad. To Hulga it seems she is in constant control of her surroundings and her life. However, she does not have control that she thinks has.
Through out his waiting and searching for Eddy he changes dramatically. He feels the need for his live to be fulfilled, and he strives for it by doing new things. He acquires a new load of friends and things from swapping, but he was sad for those who did not have what he could have and for other reasons.
Main theme: How a person deals with drug and alcohol addiction while in an institution
In the same scheme, both in the movie and the book, the father is presented as abusive and alcoholic on many occasions. In words, the book gives a detailed account of the damages inflicted on Eddie by his father’s violence: “he went through his younger years whacked, lashed, and beaten.” (Albom 105) In the film, t...
Straying away from life as a whole only to be alone, some may say is the strong way to heal themselves when dealing with extreme grief or a major crisis . In the book Wild, twenty-two year old Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost it all. Dealing with the loss of her mother, her family torn to pieces, and her very own marriage was being destroyed right before her very eyes. Living life with nothing more to lose, lifeless, she made the most life changing decision of her life. Strayed never seems remorseful on her decisions to up and leave everything behind while deciding to flee from it all. This being her way of dealing with life, it shows her as being strong; a woman of great strength and character. She shows personal strength, which is more than just a physical word. It is a word of very high value and can only be defined by searching deep within your very own soul.
The story, “Good Country People,” by Flannery O’Connor, is a third person limited narration which means the reader can only look into the mind of only a few of the characters. Those characters are Mrs. Hopewell and Hulga, or Joy. Schmoop discusses a deeper understanding about the narrator of the story.
The book “A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey is a heart wrenching story of James’ time in drug rehab. In this book Frey is trying to inform the reader about what it is like to go through rehab. He describes his entire time, from the day before he arrives until the day he leaves. He describes all his feelings and the routine life they give him at the clinic. The main themes of this book are holding on and love. He has trouble making any progress with the program until another patient, named Leonard, gives James a talk about holding on. He also falls in love with a girl named Lilly and finds a new love for his family. This book really illustrates a look at the drug culture and entails a history of James Frey’s stay at the clinic. He begins reading a Taoist book and learns to control his temper better. He sometimes has dreams about a bottle in one hand and a crack pipe in the other. He describes one girl blabbering on about nothing after smoking the rock. It focuses on his progression in his mind and his outlook toward life. In the beginning he hates himself and wants to die, but by the end of the book he is strong enough to smell alcohol and still choose not to drink it.
... lives incapacitated. Whereas it is Eddie's own chracter traits that are exposed by the characters and circumstances. His active role in his downfall caused "the situation slid inescapably toward disaster"₈ Both protagonists are victims of tragedy brought about by the individual characters themselves as well as external elements.
Everyone Eddie met in heaven taught him something about his life. They were all connected to him in different ways, whether it was someone close to him once, or a complete stranger. Somehow, all of their lives had crossed Eddie’s and helped make him the person that he had become. When you think about this lesson, you truly understand. One decision causes an effect, maybe on your life or maybe on someone else’s life. That effect will cause something else. It’s what I think of as a ripple effect. Everything happens for a reason, and all of the events that lead up to our “now” makes us who we are.
Eddie went into a depression stage in his life when his older brother returned home from
It is the story of a man named Eddie who for almost his whole life was the