In the stories ‘Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress’ by Dai Sijie and ‘The Boat’ by Alistair MacLeod, characters that are trapped in a close minded environment use their knowledge of books to escape and fulfil their desires.
In both of these stories, characters are trapped in a close minded environment with some sort of higher power restricting their knowledge of the outside world. In ‘The Boat’ the mother is a strong presence in everyone in the family’s life. “My mother ran her house as her brothers ran their boats.” (MacLeod,2000,pg.3) “She despised disorder in rooms and in houses and in hours and in lives, and she had not read a book since high school. There she had read Ivanhoe and considered it a colossal waste of time.” (MacLeod,2000,pg.5)
…show more content…
“Shortly after my sisters began to read the books, they grew restless and lost interest in darning socks and baking bread, and all of them eventually went to work as summer waitresses in the Sea Food Restaurant.” (MacLeod,2000,pg.5) The knowledge of the outside world leads the girls to a better life “None married a fisherman.” (MacLeod,2000,pg.8) The books helped the daughters break the chain that they were stuck in, the chain ‘of the sea’. “And then there came into my heart a very great love for my father and I thought it was very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations.”. This passage is where the son realizes that his father, similar to the girls was not ‘of the sea’, and wanted to escape too. “I would remain with him as long as he lived and we would fish the sea together. And he made no protest but only smiled through the cigarette smoke that wreathed his bed and replied, "I hope you will remember what you've said." (MacLeod,2000,pg.11) This quote, near the end of the story is where it is clear that the father has made his decision to escape. Because he had promised his father to stay with him as long as he lived, if the father had never died, the son would have probably never become a professor. So the books influenced the father to escape and this helped the son escape as well. The Little Chinese Seamstress in ‘Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress’ is illiterate and has no real ambitions in life,until she meets Luo and the narrator who change her life with the writings of Balzac. At the start of the story, the narrator asks Luo if he is in love with the Little Chinese seamstress and he replies that she is “not civilised, at least not enough for me!” (Sijie,pg.27)“With these books I shall transform
Fantastical Realization Fantasy and fiction flood most of our childhood but, the older a child gets, the quicker fiction turns to fact as slowly but surely, the rug of fantastical imagination is pulled out beneath them. This is exactly the case in Li-Young Lee’s short poem A Story. A Story is about a father who struggles to tell stories to his son, but as the boy grows older, his coming of age begins to make their relationship complex. Even though the complexity of the relationship is never directly stated, Lee shows this idea through point of view and literary devices. found in the poem.
Throughout the novel the father's love for his son pushes him to protect him no matter the risks. For example in the novel many times the two would go to an abandoned house
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, written by Dai Sijie, is set in 1971 during the China’s Cultural Revolution. The book starts with two boys, unnamed narrator and his friend Luo being sent from their hometown Chengdu to a small village in Phoenix Mountain to be “re-educated”. The book continues with them skillfully living through the harsh village life with their talent of storytelling and their western knowledge gained from books. Throughout the novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie illustrates different types of literature and how it transforms the character’s life, action and their personalities in both good and bad way. This book is one unique novel about two boys and one little girl’s transformation by the magical
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman is a captivating story that combines elements of coming-of-age, myth, and fantasy. The novel's captivating narrative is adorned with numerous historical and literary allusions that deepen and clarify the meaning of the tale. This essay delves into the significance of four specific textual references and explores the layers they add to the overall message the novel is trying to get across. The Hempstock family is the subject of a significant literary allusion in The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
The novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a novel by Dai Sijie set during the Cultural Revolution in China which lasted from 1966 until 1976. Even though the author’s main focus is not opposing Mao’s rule, acts of oppression and the strict control practiced by the government can often be observed in the book. The author focuses on the process of re-education which includes sending urban youth to rural areas. Sijie depicts the mental and physical development of two boys who are being re-educated on the Phoenix Mountain of the Sky. The novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress challenges the concept of re-education and the aspects of the Chinese government by contrasting the Communist ideology to the dynamic character of the narrator, by using symbolism to complement the transformation of the major characters and by including the picaresque story of the Little Seamstress narrated by herself.
In life difficulties may arise, but an “instructive eye” of a “tender parent” is a push needed in everyone’s life. Abigail Adams believed, when she wrote a letter to her son, that difficulties are needed to succeed. She offers a motherly hand to her son to not repent his voyage to France and continue down the path he is going. She uses forms of rhetoric like pathos, metaphors, and allusions to give her son a much needed push in his quest to success.
to still keep established pace and tone, which is that calm, disassociated mood. At this point the father, the reader might think, is a construction of the husband’s mind, because the husband had focused on “the idea of never seeing him again. . . .” which struck him the most out of this chance meeting, rather than on the present moment of seeing him (Forn 345). However surreal this may be in real life, the narrator manages to keep the same weight through the pacing in the story to give this story a certain realism through the husband’s
Due to the famous rest treatment in which the narrator is told to follow, her interactions with other individuals is severely limited. Most of her social interactions are between her and her husband John. The narrator’s relationship with her husband is considered to
Similar to the father, he tries to pass on the culture hoping it could survive within the family. Sadly, the culture “[was] slowly dying” (341) in the sink. When the fish was being cooked in the wok, it is described as “tires on gravel, a sound so loud it drowns all other noises” (342). The noise level hints a tense argument that has been built up within the family for years. As such, when the fish is served, the tension and dissatisfaction between the son and father imploded; hence, the father acted violently towards his son for being “ungrateful” (344).
Lastly, the two words the son and the man add to the complexity of the relationship. This shows that the man can’t picture himself being a father, especially after knowing he can’t meet the child’s expectation, but will always picture his son being a child in his eyes. In conclusion the author uses literary devices to add depth and emotion to the complex relationship between the two characters. He does this by changing the point of view throughout the poem from son to father. He uses a purposeful structure from present to future coming back to present to demonstrate with the complexity of the father's
Women often marry older men in arranged marriages, because their family wants them to marry wealthy. What they don’t mention is the frustration and fear some women have, when married to these men. “The Leaving” written by Budge Wilson is a short story of a mother and daughter named: Elizabeth and Sylvie. Sylvie lives with her mother (Elizabeth), father and her four brothers in Nova Scotia. Sylvie and her mother are treated with no respect in their household.
2)First Swim Through the conch shell , Edna’s craving to break from the limiting island of society . Continually using the imagery of the sea as
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. “A Story” is essentially a pencil sketch of the juxtaposition between the father’s biggest fear and the beautiful present he is unable to enjoy.
The struggle of man versus nature long has dwelt on the consciousness of humanity. Is man an equal to his environment? Can the elements be conquered, or only endured? We constantly find ourselves facing these questions along with a myriad of others that cause us to think, where do we fit? These questions, crying for a response, are debated, studied, and portrayed in both Jack London’s “
People may think that movies aren't as different as their book counterpart. While that may be true, there are many aspects between the book and the movie that aren't as similar. The book The Joy Luck Club written by Amy Tan share many similarities and differences with the movie by the same name. The book and the movie possess similar qualities; nevertheless there are many parts where the movie diverged from the book. However, although there are many differences, both movie and book place an emphasis on the same themes.