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The effect of world war ii on american literature pdf
The effect of world war ii on american literature pdf
With copious references, discuss the reflection of the world war 1 and world war 2 on modern literature
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The book I chose, What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell, stood out to me immediately. The first thing that caught my attention was the setting, as it is based in 1948. This is peculiar because it is right when World War II ended, which is a time period that I am not too familiar with. I was eager to discover whether the setting would play a role in the plot of the novel or not. Furthermore, a basic description of the plot also persuaded me to select the book because it was described as a coming of age story for a young girl and those types of novels always allow me to obtain the deepest insights and connections. What I Saw and How I Lied is about a girl named Evie who has just had her father return home from the war. Evie’s family and …show more content…
her went back to a normal routine until her father suggests they take a vacation to Florida. On the vacation, Evie meets people in the hotel that impact her life greatly.
First, she meets a glamorous couple, in which she becomes close with the woman who is named Mrs. Grayson. This couple is later revealed as being Jewish and are kicked out of the hotel, opening Evie’s eyes to reality. She also encounters a soldier who served under her Father during the war, and immediately begins falling for him. But, there are lots of secrets that surround him as he is much older than her, making the girl and her parents fight about youth, adulthood, and the importance of family and trust. Mainly, the book focuses on the theme message of the loss of innocence. Evie, who in the beginning of the book wants to grow up as fast she can, realizes the pureness of youth after being faced with the true reality of adulthood. She experiences this after witnessing a hotel manager throw out Mr. and Mrs. Grayson for being Jewish, in which Evie says “‘They’re leaving in the morning. Peter you don’t understand, the manager. He enjoyed it. I don’t get it’” (Blundell 144). This quote expresses Evie realizing the cruelty of the world. She did learn information about World War II and the Holocaust, but it was different than her actually observing it before her
eyes. It appears that Evie was unaware of any discrimination that existed around her, and it forces her to question whether others were as oblivious to it as she was. Peter responds to Evie’s rant, saying “That’s a good thing, a good thing that you don’t get it” (Blundell 144). Peter perceives Evie’s innocence , as she doesn’t know the brutality that awaits her when she gets older. He knows that Evie should hold on to that pureness as long as she can, because she can never get it back. But, Evie learned later that the hotel she was staying at had banned Jews from vacationing there, explaining why the Graysons were told to leave. This forces her to finally uncover the truth about what it really means to grow up. It intrigued me that Anti-Semitism was still occurring in the book, even after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed. I became curious to know whether the Holocaust had any effect on the treatment of Jews, even in modern day, leading me to my GRQ. The topic is interesting to me because I never recognized how poorly Jew’s were treated, even after the way. I was always under the assumption that people disagreed with Hitler and the propaganda that spread about any person not qualified for his Aryan race. It surprises me that even in the United States, the Anti-Semitism that swept Germany and influenced citizens to view Jews differently, also came across seas and most likely to other parts of the world. I anticipate to discover about my topic that a lot more people mistreated Jews after the war then I expected. I believe I will find lots of propaganda that was spread not only in Germany, but across the world. Hopefully, I can find specific examples where Jews were mistreated. I predict the research will reveal about my topic that the Germans aren’t the only ones to blame for the genocide that occurred. Although they enforced it, other people viewed Jews just the same as Hitler did, and should be held accountable for their views of inequality.
The Orphan Train is a compelling story about a young girl, Molly Ayer, and an older woman, Vivian Daly. These two live two completely different yet similar lives. This book goes back and forth between the point of views of Molly and Vivian. Molly is seventeen and lives with her foster parents, Ralph and Dina, in Spruce Harbor, Maine. Vivian is a ninety-one year old widow from Ireland who moved to the United States at a young age. Molly soon gets into trouble with the law and has to do community service. Molly’s boyfriend, Jack, gets his mom to get her some service to do. Jack’s mom allows her to help Vivian clean out her attic. While Molly is getting her hours completed, Vivian explains her past to her. Vivian tells her about all the good times and bad in her life. She tells her about how she had to take a train, the orphan train, all around the country after her family died in a fire. She told her about all the families she stayed with and all the friends she made along the way, especially about Dutchy. Dutchy is a boy she met on the orphan train and lost contact with for numerous years, but then found each other again and got married and pregnant. Sadly, Dutchy died when he was away in the army shortly after Vivian got pregnant. When Vivian had her child, she decided to give her up for adoption. Molly and Vivian grew very close throughout the time they spent together. Molly knows that Dina, her foster mother, is not very fond of her and tells her to leave. Having no place to go, Vivian let her stay at her house.
Setting expatiates the theme of loss of innocence. For example, the four major characters in this story are sixteen and seventeen years old, which is the age when teenagers prepare to end their childhood and become adults. Also, the Devon school, where the story takes place, is a place where boys make the transition to full adulthood, and so this setting shows more clearly the boys' own growth. Finally, World War II, which in 1942 is raging in Europe, forces these teenage boys to grow up fast; during their seventeenth year they must evaluate everything that the war means to them and decide whether to take an active ...
Holly Janquell is a runaway. Wendelin Van Draanan creates a twelve year old character in the story, Runaway, that is stubborn and naive enough to think she can live out in the streets alone, until she is eighteen.She has been in five foster homes for the past two years. She is in foster care because her mother dies of heroin overdose. In her current foster home, she is abused, locked in the laundry room for days without food, and gets in even more trouble if she tries to fight back. Ms.Leone, her schoolteacher, could never understand her, and in Holly’s opinion, probably does not care. No one knows what she is going through, because she never opens up to any one. Ms. Leone gives Holly a journal at school one day and tells her to write poetry and express her feelings. Holly is disgusted. But one day when she is sitting in the cold laundry room, and extremely bored, she pulls out the diary, and starts to write. When Holly can take no more of her current foster home, she runs, taking the journal with her. The journal entries in her journal, are all written as if she is talking to Ms.Leone, even though she will probably never see her again. Over the course of her journey, Holly learns to face her past through writing, and discovers a love for poetry. At some point in this book, Holly stops venting to Ms. Leone and starts talking to her, almost like an imaginary friend, and finally opens up to her.
At the end she risks her life and becomes a pretty to become and experiment to David’s moms to test a cure to the brain lesions created when they go ... ... middle of paper ... ... o save them from going through a transformation that will change them forever. The moral of the book is you don’t have to get surgery to look a certain way.
...inds love along the way. She makes rash decisions in bad situations, faces the truth that she has been avoiding, and finds her place in the world. While her journey takes some unexpected twists, Lily learns to make the best of what she has, and go for what she wants. She learns to move on from the past, and make a brighter future. But most importantly, Lily learns to accept that life is unpredictable and that by doing her best Lily is living life the way she wants to.
Recovering from an identity crisis that lasted most of her childhood, Janie realizes who she wants to be with the help of a pear tree, but her grandmother disapproves of her dissimilar feelings and forces her to cast away her horizon. With no parents there to raise her, Janie loses her sense of identity. She spends her childhood under the care of her grandma and the white people Nanny works for, and as a result, she spends all of her time playing with the Washburn’s four children. Janie does not realize that she is different from them until she turns six. When she sees a photograph of herself for the first time, she refuses to recognize her darker skin color. To compensate for her lack of self, she goes by the nickname “Alphabet” because she has so many different names. Both her connection to the Washburn family and her biracial ethnicity isolate her from the black and white communities. African-American children mock her for her nice clothes; vulnerable and frail, Jani...
she discovers what it meant for her to be attractive growing up. She was constantly
Tracy’s identity development is heavily influenced by her new friendship with Evie from that moment on. Evie is so popular, but she makes very poor choices and Tracy follows her lead because she wants to seem just as “cool” as her new companion. This is a type of peer pressure that affects many teenagers daily.... ... middle of paper ... ...
At the beginning of the story Emily is just an ordinary little girl, but as the story continues she begins to feel herself changing. By the end of the story, Emily has gained self-consciousness and thinks of herself not as an ordinary little girl but as “Emily”.
She screams at Dorothy and tells her to leave. Dorothy packs her things and leaves immediately. The only place she knows how to get to is her school house. It is a cold winter night, but she treads through the snow eager to leave the Grotes house. Her teacher Miss Larsen finds her in the morning and she tells her what happened the night before. Miss Larsen takes her in. She lives in a woman only hostel in the city. Which lead her to finding her last foster parents who are nice and kind, the Nielsens. Even though she had such a traumatic experience at such a young age it did not break her heart. Virginity is a very big part of a girl's life and losing it the way that she did could have scarred for life. There is no denying that she will never forget it, but she does come to peace with it because it got her out of that horrible home and brought her to a loving couple who cared for her. All of these incidents caused Dorothy to lose innocence. Little by little it disappeared, but it gave her sympathetic and role modeling traits at an early age which as one can see ultimately lead to her
People tend to forget the negative parts of the past, holding onto the positive and idealizing it to create nostalgia. It is easy to romanticize and live in the past in order to avoid difficulties in the present. The past becomes a false illusion and an enchanted safe haven from the corruption in reality. However, trying to apply false illusions into reality leads to isolation and corruption. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, The Great Gatsby, investigates the detrimental effects of craving the false sense of security in the past. Gatsby’s obsession of a false hope and idealization of the past contrasts the Lost Generation’s attempt to find self-fulfillment after war and the American Dream disillusioned them.
Dinah is born into a society where all women are expected to put their feelings aside to conform to and satisfy the man and his children. She is trapped from the very beginning in a chauvinistic and male-dominated worl...
The beginning of the novel introduces the reader to Esther O'Malley Robertson as the last of a family of extreme women. She is sitting in her home, remembering a story that her grandmother told her a long time ago. Esther is the first character that the reader is introduced to, but we do not really understand who she is until the end of the story. Esther's main struggle is dealing with her home on Loughbreeze Beach being torn down, and trying to figure out the mysteries of her family's past.
I agree with the statement "honesty is the best policy". People will be able to trust people who are honest, liars will have rumors spread around about them, and it's just plain easier to tell the truth. Nobody likes people who lie all the time and won't know whether to trust them or not. People get annoyed by people who lie a lot.
Can you remember the last time someone lied to you? Or how about the last time you lied to someone else? Did you ever stop and ask yourself why? There are so many different reasons that a person might lie. Maybe a lie about something to keep oneself out of trouble, or even a lie to impress other people. But either way there are always going to be serious consequences or effects of lying.