Emptiness Essays

  • Emptiness in The Hollow Men

    2831 Words  | 6 Pages

    Emptiness in The Hollow Men After Eliot had published The Waste Land, he felt as though he had not been able to fully convey the sense of desperation and emptiness in that work. Beginning with "Doris’s Dream Songs" and "Eyes I Last Saw in Tears," he explored these themes, eventually uniting all such poems in The Hollow Men. The end product is a work that, unlike The Waste Land and its ultimate chance for redemption, has only the indelible emptiness of the hollow men as its conclusion. The hollow

  • Irony, Symbolism, and Imagery Reveal the Emptiness of War in One Hundred Years of Solitude

    959 Words  | 2 Pages

    Irony, Symbolism, and Imagery Reveal the Emptiness of War in One Hundred Years of Solitude While most scholars have agreed that war is a real and significant part of human history, these same scholars have yet not reached a consensus on the characteristics of war. History books often lean toward glorifying war with stories of soldiers dying for their honor and homeland; novels, on the other hand, tend to point out the emptiness of war with stories of soldiers losing their youth and contact with

  • Emptiness And Emptiness

    895 Words  | 2 Pages

    Emptiness Emptiness. Most people know it as the quality of lacking meaning or sincerity; meaninglessness. What if there was new meaning to the word? Nirmala says, “It’s not our fault that we tend to avoid feelings of emptiness. We were taught to do this by everyone around us who was doing it. In fact, there's a good reason to avoid one feeling of emptiness—the feeling of hunger—since we need to eat when we're hungry. However, we often interpret a feeling of lack as a need for food. Have you ever

  • Shiloh by Bobbie Ann Mason

    735 Words  | 2 Pages

    but an emptiness deep within. Norma Jean is presented as a strong character on the outside in the opening of the story. “She lifts three-pound dumbbells to warm-up, the progresses to a twenty-pound barbell.”(Mason p. 46). However as the story progresses she exhibits the emptiness which she feels. “One day Leroy arrives home from a drive and finds Norma Jean in tears.” (Mason p. 50). Norma Jean feels an emptiness toward her deceased child, her husband, and also her mother. Her emptiness toward

  • Light and Dark in Heart of Darkness

    1182 Words  | 3 Pages

    present in darkness. The Europeans in the novel represent those who hide from the truth within them and within reality. In Conrad's novel, most Europeans are portrayed as self-deceptive; they use societal customs to obscure the darkness and emptiness present within their souls. The chief accountant exemplifies the self-deceptive European. Marlow gives his impression of the accountant in this excerpt, "I took him [the accountant] for a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs

  • gatlove Money, Love, and Aspiration in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

    652 Words  | 2 Pages

    Jordan Baker's reputation does not do much for her other than get her entrée to more parties. A very few, such as Gatsby, stand out by their wealth; his hospitality secures him a hold on many peoples' memories, but Fitzgerald is quick to point up the emptiness of this, [...] In this connection, Fitzgerald's insistence on Gatsby as a man who "sprang from his own Platonic conception of himself" is important. Conceiving one's self would seem to be a final expression of rootlessness. And it has other consequences

  • Franciscan Values

    652 Words  | 2 Pages

    For the last few years, I have been going through life trying to figure out what my purpose is. My drive for life had been lost, and I needed spiritual guidance. As I reflected on the past, it brought a feeling of emptiness within. By stepping back and allowing the Lord to lead me, my life finally had purpose, a direction and set values. These values came second nature to breathing, however I never viewed them as things I had to do. They were things I enjoyed doing. The Franciscan Values that are

  • Robert Frost

    713 Words  | 2 Pages

    frightening. It is human nature to search for companionship. In the poem “The Most of It,” Robert Frost uses a wealth of strong imagery to tell a story of a person who has lost his loved one to death and has to suffer the feeling of loneliness and emptiness created by it. Frost uses the setting of a lake surrounded by a forest to convey a feeling of peace and of being alone to the reader. A man is sitting on the edge of the lake, crying out for someone, his echo being his only company. After time, a

  • Free College Essays - Lusting After Ladies at the A&P

    1362 Words  | 3 Pages

    Does lust lead to hardship and emptiness? In this paper (do you mean "this paper" or "John Updike's 'A&P'?) Sammy has a sexual appetite that causes him problems. His worship of a woman's (careful with placement of possessive apostrophe) body causes him to misplace his values and center only on one value. This value is his lustful pleasure he gets when he sees three girls in their skimpy swimsuits. The pleasure he receives outweighs the consequence of emptiness he finally feels after he defends those

  • George Orwell's 1984 - A Character Sketch

    904 Words  | 2 Pages

    and the old fear, the hatred and the bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment – he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps – of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O'Brien's had filled up a patch of emptiness and had become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had faded out before O'Brien had dropped his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers

  • Willy Russell’s Intention by the End of the Play

    961 Words  | 2 Pages

    Sometimes one person would have the spotlight on just them so the background is black. This picks out this one person so all our attention is focused on this person and the darkness in the background is very gloomy like a dark hole to symbolise the emptiness that will be in some of their lives because of the deaths at the end. There is a musical theme to suggest the same idea or place theme. Like the music that is played at the Johnstones house. When this song comes on it is to show the poverty

  • The Crack-Up Critical Reception History

    1089 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Pasting it Together,” and “Handle with Care” appeared in the magazine in February, March, and April of 1936, respectively. The essays dealt with the “lesion of confidence” (Bruccoli 405) and the crippling sense of spiritual, authorial, and personal emptiness from which Fitzgerald was suffering during this period of his life. Their brutal honesty and the radical departure they meant for Fitzgerald as a literary figure elicited various reactions from his contemporaries and critics. There was mixed

  • Oedipus Rex and Gilgamesh

    1027 Words  | 3 Pages

    'No two men are alike in the way they act, the way they think, or the way they look. However, every man has a little something from the other. Although Oedipus and Gilgamesh are entirely different people, they are still very similar. Each one, in their own way, is exceptionally brave, heroically tragic, and both encompass diverse strengths and weaknesses. One is strictly a victim of fate and the other is entirely responsible for his own plight. Out of the two men, Gilgamesh was far braver than

  • Similarities Of Characters In Lord Of The Flies And Farenhite 451

    1201 Words  | 3 Pages

    story lines but have very similar types of characters. In Fahrenheit 451 the main characters are Montag, Faber, Clarisse, and Beatty. Montag is someone who knows what he wants and what he wants is change. He is a fireman who suddenly realizes the emptiness of his life and starts to search for meaning in the books he is supposed to be burning. Though he is sometimes rash and has a hard time thinking for himself, he is determined to break free from the oppression of ignorance. He quickly forms unusually

  • Comparing On the Road and Easy Rider

    824 Words  | 2 Pages

    stricken" (Kerouac 209). These statements are part of Kerouac's argument in their critique of society's fearful attitude toward achieving desires. Sal reiterates the argument to disregard social identity when he accuses a girl he meets of an "emptiness. . .that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done. . .'What do you want out of life?' I wanted to take her and wring it out of her" (Kerouac 243). But Kerouac's strongest argument of

  • Hypocrisy in E.E. Cummings’ the Cambridge Ladies

    1973 Words  | 4 Pages

    This discriminating voice is used when speaking of the Cambridge ladies’ Christianity, their communal identity, and when speaking of their frivolous concerns. Depth and empathy, both of which the ladies lack, are juxtaposed against the women’s emptiness and indifference. Collectively, the Cambridge ladies share the inability to connect to their religion and to the exterior world that surrounds them. In addition, Cummings contrasts nature imagery against the material and socially based Cambridge

  • Suburbia: Inappropriate Growing Environment

    2751 Words  | 6 Pages

    intellectual and emotional challenge and growth. However, such is clearly not always the case. As a place to develop and mature, one of the worst locales in America--and possibly the most misjudged--is suburbia. A vast wasteland of dressed-up emptiness, the typical suburban town promises an idyll it could never truly hope to deliver. An attempt at compromise between the country and the city, it instead combines the worst aspects of both. And as we shall see, children who grow up in this abyss will

  • Codependency in Samuel Beckett's Endgame

    1336 Words  | 3 Pages

    end of the play his parents have apparently died, and he has given up the struggle or reason to live on. It is now that Clov is on the verge of escape to leave his life of submission to Hamm, but to where? For there is nothing but a vast void of emptiness. Samuel Beckett was born on April 13, 1906, in Foxrock, near Dublin. As a child he was raised in a religiously oriented, Protestant, mid... ... middle of paper ... ...down the lids of Hamm's parent's dustbins as well, Hamm being prone to

  • At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

    1452 Words  | 3 Pages

    to the title, in the cover of the book is the photo of a pink pig. It does not say why, but I suppose that it would be on sale in the market and called his attention. Or perhaps, the Inflatable Pig was a premonition of its book: Great by outside, emptiness on the inside. AT the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Is a book about Paraguay written by John Gimlette, an English lawyer who has come here in Paraguay for visit. But from its beginning, the book is full of errors and plagued of hatred towards

  • Finding Hope in Their Eyes Were Watching God

    3086 Words  | 7 Pages

    condition, such as the need to possess, the fear of the unknown and resulting stagnation. But Hurston does not leave us with the hopelessness of Fitzgerald or Hemingway, rather, she extends a recognition and understanding of humanity's need to escape emptiness. "Dem meatskins is got tuh rattle tuh make out they's alive (183)" Her solution is simple: "Yuh got tuh go there tuh know there." Janie, like characters in earlier novels, sets out on a quest to make sense of her inner questionings--a void she knew