The poem “Facing It,” by Yusef Komunyakaa is a heart wrenching story of a man who was in the Vietnam War. He is recounting the lost and maimed of the war. The author himself served in the Vietnam War. This poem has many accurate depictions of the struggles felt by the veterans coming home from this highly controversial war. The personification seen in the story catches the attention of the reader in a way that almost makes the reader feel as though they themselves are in D.C. staring into the wall.
It is noteworthy that this story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is the foundation of the religion with the largest number of followers worldwide. Why does it continue to resonate with so many people even today? The reason is that this utopia contains archetypes that reflect the collective unconscious that is found across all cultures. This is the result of universal themes in this story about humanity’s needs and desires that we still see occurring in our society today. The story of Genesis contains three archetypal characteristics that illustrate these patterns that still demonstrate humanity’s needs.
Flannery O’Connor’s The King of the Birds is a narrative explaining the narrator’s obsession with different kinds of fowl over time. The reader follows the narrator from her first experience with a chicken, which caught the attention of reporters due to its ability to walk both backward and forward, to her collection of peahens and peacocks. At the mere age of five, the narrator’s chicken was featured in the news and from that moment she began to build her family of fowl. The expansive collection began with chickens, but soon the narrator found a breed of bird that was even more intriguing; peacocks.
Have you ever heard of Edgar Allan Poe? He was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. He died at an early age of 40 in October of 1849. He was a famous American author best known for his short stories of mystery and horror tales. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” one of his famous short stories, was first published in January of 1843 in a magazine called The Pioneer. In “the tell-tale heart”, the narrator is without a doubt insane.
In the novels, Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, and The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, the main characters go through a series of problems that they need to overcome. In both novels the authors use character development to show that sometimes evil overpowers the good and vice versa.
The Monitor on Psychology article “What makes good people do bad things?” by Melissa Dittmann analyzes the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Stanford psychology professor Phillip Zimbardo in 1971 and discusses what the experiment can tell us about human nature and what causes humans to be evil. In the novel “Lord of the Flies” the author William Golding discusses the effects of the theories mentioned in the article by creating his own fictional experiment with children stranded on an island during a nuclear war. Throughout his novel Golding explores the focus of Dittmann’s article; that environments and situations can bring out the evil that is inside all of us. People can act good or bad depending on their environment, and these actions are not entirely their fault because when people are not held accountable for their actions their more violent natures are revealed.
In conclusion, there is good and there is evil in the world. Depending on your situation you can be either one. The novel and experiment show us how easy it is to become a dark soul, but there is still good somewhere in them. Lord of the Flies and ¨The Stanford Prison Experiment¨ have many similarities in the way they both show the effects that occur when you lose all moral standards, and lack of rules. It showed us the dehumanization and loosening social and moral values that can happen to people immersed in such a situation. Overall, there will always be good and evil in the
In literature, birds often represent beauty, freedom, and grace. Shown soaring through the sky, these creatures remind us of freedom and life. However, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, birds represent chaos, the moral and physical destruction of Shakespeare’s characters. As the play progresses and the kingdom crumbles, Shakespeare presents birds alongside the destruction, thus transforming such elegant creatures into symbols of doom. Even though birds do occasionally display order, that order is ultimately crushed as more birds appear, suggesting that all order ultimately breaks down.
As life persists, humans continue to make the same mistakes that we have been making for many years. The poem “Evening Hawk” by Robert Penn Warren is about the continuous errors of humanity, which is forgotten in the past, as death keeps approaching and society progresses. The poet uses imagery, diction, symbolism, and other figurative language devices throughout the poem to convey the dark mood and deeper meaning of history and death in the poem.
Therefore it can be said that power gives evil the need to feed off the fear of others, it drives them to suppress their emotions and mindset providing them the opportunity to commit such acts that would previously be considered “sins”. Mr. Zimbardo’s theory on the Lucifer effect can been seen in action through the entire movie. The lucifer effect begins to tell us a couple of reasons as to why sometimes good eggs can turn bad. One of those reasons being authority, while the other relies on dehumanization, or the process of stopping to see someone as fully human. The process of dehumanization can be said to eliminate guilt or human feelings toward a misdeed, it takes away need to be moral and do good evil and opens the dam for the evil lurking to lash out. In the case of this experiment the point of views regarding the prisoner varies from two sides; Mr. Zimbardo's and the guards. Through the course of the experiment, Mr. Zimbardo seems disconnected to the experiment as he fails to realize till the very end that he himself has become what he had wished to educate others to watch out
Mankind will only survive by living with adversity, not with perfection. Humans seek success but true growth comes from the struggles faced obtaining it. Without the challenge, mankind and nature itself withers away in boredom and sterility. Humans, as with all organisms in nature, survive by adapting to challenge, not by the lack of them. The narrator in Wallace Stegner’s “Crossing Into Eden” finds that paradise is no place for humans because it is too perfect and does not offer the adversity mankind requires to exist. “Eden” can only exist without the presence of humans because humans belong away from perfection where struggle may be found.
Expulsion. The pain and suffering that accompanies it. Nobody wants to be excluded, but what if it’s the difference between quenching your curiosity and remaining ignorant? In both the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and in the dystopian novella Anthem, by Ayn Rand, the protagonists are faced with this predicament. Their actions come with immense consequences which forever change not only their own life, but that of the human race. The environment and lifestyle in which we are brought up in can greatly affect our motivations and thus our decisions.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel This Side of Paradise was his first book that he published that sparked his stardom in the world of authorship. Thomas Jefferson once said, “If you find yourself constantly trying to prove your worth to someone, you have already forgotten your value.” Life is quite a journey. There are numerous things that will forgo in life that will cause people to change their thinking or beliefs. The friends’ people hang out with, their hobbies, interests, schools and universities they attend. They are all part of the equation in finding your identity and your purpose in life. For Amory Blaine, it started all the way back from his childhood when his mother was raising him. After that came the countless, un-meaningful relationships,
The Lucifer Effect is concocted Zimbardo is mainly about why “good” people turn “evil” or do horrifying things. The term evil means “behaving in a manner that harms, dehumanizes or demeans innocent others” (Zimbardo 146) the theory discusses whether humans are naturally evil (fixed) or is it their environment that fuels them to do things that are not in their nature. Zimbardo acknowledges that the very top creates the environments that manage the system who deflect the evil on to others to disregard their hand in creating the environment.