Throughout the book, Where The Red Fern Grows, character's actions are constantly affecting each other. However, the grandfather is one character that is unique in a way that he impacts others in ways others are not able to. The grandfather's actions mainly affect others in positive ways. Two examples of this are when he gives Billy, the protagonist, his own tricks for catching raccoons on pages 55 and 87. By doing this he helps ensure Billy's success with his hunting hounds. On several occasions later in the story, the influence the grandfather has impacted his own relationships with his family and
Love and respect are a couple of the few things that will last forever, but they are not always shown. In the Russian folk tale retold by Leo Tolstoy, “The Old Grandfather and His Little Grandson” and “Abuelito Who”, an informal yet intimate poem by Sandra Cisnero, the universal theme is “love and respect your elders”. A universal theme is “a message about life or human nature that is so fundamental to human existence that is true for all people of all time periods and cultures.” (Sato, 76) These themes aren’t restricted to just one particular place or time, but reappear over and over again, all over the place. “Themes in literature tend to recur because human beings are more similar than different, no matter what the culture.” (Sato, 77)
In Nikki Giovanni’s poem, “Legacy”, the speaker shares a message through the eyes of a grandmother and a granddaughter who have thoughts about the role of legacy, family bonds, and respect, but do not openly share them as they talk to each other. The poem is a short arrangement of sentences which depict one interaction between the 2 characters, but is meant to set the stage for establishing the pattern of communication between generations. The setting is probably a fall day before a holiday where the children are outside playing and the grandmother is inside baking some items for an upcoming family gathering. The grandmother has a history of baking and these rolls are an example of something that she prepares for the family that they enjoy and are part of her identity. The grandmother has great pride in the rolls and wants to make sure that the family continues to be able to enjoy them long after she is gone by passing it down to her granddaughter: “I want chu to learn to make these rolls” (line 3). Although this is a straight forward request of the granddaughter, it really is much more. The grandmother is acknowledging
The stories “Abuela Invents the Zero” and “A Celebration of Grandfathers” follow the past of a very nice, thoughtful man by the name of Rudolfo Anaya, and the present day of a rude, unthoughtful girl by the name of Constancia. Both of these stories give very different points of views in terms of character personality and respect towards their elders.
The poem “A Story” by Li-Young Lee depicts the complex relationship between a boy and his father when the boy asks his father for a story and he can’t come up with one. When you’re a parent your main focus is to make your child happy and to meet all the expectations your child meets. When you come to realize a certain expectation can’t satisfy the person you love your reaction should automatically be to question what would happen if you never end up satisfying them. When the father does this he realizes the outcome isn’t what he’d hope for. He then finally realizes that he still has time to meet that expectation and he isn’t being rushed. Through shifting points of view, a purposeful structure, and settle choices in diction the author adds
The narrator makes bad choice after bad choice; first, he steals a stuffed toucan from a store. Then proceeds to run with this large toucan, and steals a car, which he finds out that has a baby inside, then gets stuck in a ditch and leaves the car and baby behind, and then finally gets caught. This all spans from him wanting to get his supposed girlfriend Dawn a Christmas present. Towards the end of the story, we learn that Dawn is living with another guy, possibly her new boyfriend. This is where the theme of loss begins to come in. Not all has he lost is his girlfriend, he has lost relations with his family it seems as well. “My parents. It’s not like I hate them or anything. I just can’t see them.” He does not have a good relationship with his parents, this tells us that he is hurt emotionally.
As kids we are faced with challenges and obstacles, but we end up overcoming and growing from these obstacles in the end. In the movie, The Legend of the Mountain Man, the kids in the movie are faced with many obstacles that they have to overcome and deal with. One of them being their Dad having cancer and him having to leave them at their grandparents house while he gets treatment for his illness. At their grandparents house, the kids learn that their family has many secrets, and they are determined to figure out exactly what those secrets are. While on the quest to uncover their hidden family secrets, they learn about the legend of the mountain man. At the end of the story, the kids learned that their family had been hurt for a long time and that they were grieving the death of their son who died years ago. The kids discovered that their grandparents cared about their dad and them even though they didn’t show
Have you imagined how the post-apocalyptic world will look like and will you choose try hard to survive or to die? In the book, The Road, written by McCarthy, the sky is dark. It’s cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. Everything has gone, only except some human beings who try every way to survive even by hurting and killing people. It seems that there is no reason to keep surviving in a world which no hopes remain, a father still perseveres to survive with his son and they are sustained by their love. On their journey, the father sacrifices a lot to protect his son and strongly shows his parental love.
The poem "Kindness" by Naomi Shihab Nye speaks about how you experience kindness and what it really is. The main point in this poem is that in order to experience people's kindness you need to experience hurt, sorrow, and loneliness. The author says that when you loose everything and have no one or thing that when kindness comes along it lifts you up "and then goes with you everywhere/ like a shadow or a friend" (33-34). When portraying this message the author uses a sad but hopeful tone to send the message she wants to say. This tone helps portray the message because you can feel how sad someone is when they are lonely and they have nothing. Then when the author changes the tone at the end of the poem in the last stanza to hopeful tone the reader can feel the hope and happiness that a person feels when they are down and they are given kindness.
The father/son relationship are shown in both poems. Both are adults reflecting on their past. “My Papa’s Waltz” is about how the father would dance daily with the son. Although it was painful when he sometimes missed a step and his “right ear scraped a buckle”, this was a memorable memory for the son (Line 8). The poem has a happy tone of the sons childhood days. “Those Winter Sundays” has a sad dark tone. “Speaking indifferently to him” (Line 10). It is clear that there is little communication between the father and the son. The author remembers how his father woke up early to heat the house and worked hard to provide for the family. Although this poem is much sadder, it still shows love. Both sons understand their fathers efforts but they are shown in
Stories are the foundation of relationships. They represent the shared lessons, the memories, and the feelings between people. But often times, those stories are mistakenly left unspoken; often times, the weight of the impending future mutes the stories, and what remains is nothing more than self-destructive questions and emotions that “add up to silence” (Lee. 23). In “A Story” by Li-Young Lee, Lee uses economic imagery of the transient present and the inevitable and fear-igniting future, a third person omniscient point of view that shifts between the father’s and son’s perspective and between the present and future, and emotional diction to depict the undying love between a father and a son shadowed by the fear of change and to illuminate the damage caused by silence and the differences between childhood and adulthood perception.
Furthermore, “The Old Grandfather and his Little Grandson” by Leo Tolstoy informs the reader of a Grandfather who lives in a tiny hut with his peasant son, daughter in-law, and their juvenile son. “When he ate, bits of food sometimes dropped
In Ralph Ellison's short story Battle Royal, we are introduced to an intelligent, newly graduated young boy. This boy, the narrator, is struggling with finding out who he is, and learning his true self and purpose. He says he is an "invisible man"; but not in the supernatural sense, in the sense that no one knows who he really is. Many conflicts arise around the main protagonist which reveals his true character. At the beginning of the story, many characteristics are revealed through his interactions with others and himself like being uncertain, a pushover, and constantly needing validation from others.
Sometimes the relationship between two generations is very complicated. “My Father Is a Simple Man” by Luis Omar Salinas and “A secret Lost in the Water” by Roch Carrier explore these universal themes, the greatness of love together with the unavoidability of conflicts between two generations through the depiction of the speakers’ personal experience with their fathers.
“Someone will Remember Us,” holds the hope that even in death, someone will remember and thus those people will be a part of history. However, in Renée Vivien’s translation of the poem, concepts such as, “erotic suffering, obsession, and anxiety” are present. Nonetheless, those negative emotions resulted in “eternal devotion” within the poem (36). Through the translation of Sappho’s poem, Vivien takes on the role of Sappho’s lover, and thus she proves that someone did remember her. Love believes that Sappho and Vivien both represent loneliness and isolation within the poem. But, “contemporary queer subjects” can better relate to Vivien because they are seeking other lonely individuals like themselves in the past (36). Vivien sought out someone like her by translating Sappho’s lyrics and interrupting it in a different way. However, the concept of remembering someone remained