The book, True Notebooks, by Mark Salzman, is about the author volunteering at L.A.’s juvenile hall to teach young offenders how to write. The teenage boys in his class are high-risk offenders, they are in custody for murder or other serious crimes. This book is a great read for anyone, especially writing students, who can gain inspiration from these troubled kids who express themselves through their writing. This book should be required reading in Professor Marquez’ English B50 class because it is captivating, moving, and it can motivate a struggling writing student.
Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild investigates the life and adventures of Chris McCandless. The author provides information about Chris’ life to illuminate his journey. Krakauer also uses rhetorical appeals to defend Chris’ rationale for his journey. Through Krakauer’s use of pathos, ethos, and logos, he persuades the audience that Chris is not foolish; however, Krakauer’s intimacy with Chris and his adventures inhibits his objectivity.
In the novel, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, rhetorical devices are used to illustrate the characters throughout the book to be either be good or evil by the usage of diction, connotation and denotation as well as other rhetorical devices. By using rhetorical devices it allows the audience to gain a better deeper comprehension of the book. The rhetorical devices allow Steinbeck to describe the characteristics of each character to define them as either good or evil which allows the reader to analyze the parallels between one another. In addition, rhetorical devices for example metaphor, tone, diction, simile, imagery, analogy, allegory, and paradox contribute to the author’s style which creates an image for readers to comprehend. Steinbeck uses word choice, tone, anaphora to highlight the juxtaposition between Cathy Ames and Abra Bacon to illustrate how evil and goodness change the perspective about their inherent point.
McCandless, a compassionate young man who stole the hearts of everyone he met, possesses a thirst for adventure. Numerous individuals have misinterpreted McCandless as a reckless idiot who had squandered his life away; however, after deep scrutiny of Jon Krakauer’s work, McCandless is better characterized as a non conformed sensation seeker. Furthermore, McCandless could distinct with his virtuous actions he had perpetrated throughout his non conformed life. McCandless should be acknowledged for his non conformed lifestyle, adamant state of mind, and charismatic personality.
Risks are a possibility of loss or injury; all humans at least once in their lifetime have to do something risky. If life has no risks, you’re not really living it, since we humans do not grow as a species (or society) if there is no challenge in life. People in this world must have challenge and struggle to overcome an obstacle in their life to discover the real world. This way a person will grow physically and most importantly, mentally, to never do something adventurous or take the easy way out is on them. Krakauer, Emerson and Thoreau all have their own ideas on risk, but they all have in common is that risk can change a person for the good or bad.
Christopher McCandless, the protagonist of the novel and film Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, is not your average guy. Driven by his minimalist ideals and hate for society, he challenged the status quo and embarked on a journey that eventually lead to his unforeseen demise. A tragic hero, defined by esteemed writer, Arthur Miller, is a literary character who makes an error of judgment or has a fatal flaw that, combined with fate and external forces, brings on tragedy. Christopher McCandless fulfills the role of Miller’s tragic hero due to the fact that his tragic flaw of minimalism and aversion towards society had lead him to his death.
Throughout the story of Chris Mccandless, the author Jon Krakauer is able to illustrate many fundamental life lessons through showing Mccandless’ journey into the wild as well as his abrupt separation from society. The purpose behind telling the story of Chris Mccandless is to show how his journey into the wild was caused by the controlling nature of his parents. Due to this Mccandless adopted a unpredictable lifestyle, bouncing from town to town searching for the freedom that he was always denied as a child. This everlasting desire for individuality is also what would lead to Chris’ death on the Stampede Trail.
Many times people have said that appearances can be deceiving, or that appearances are not what they seem. This can be proved true with the characters in a novel. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, she shows many examples of this in her writing. The story covers a few characters who the readers eventually get to see and know more about, who demonstrate a theme of how people are not always what they seem to be. As a result, the readers learn about these characters that they are not as crazy and irregular as they are viewed, but far different than their appearances suggest. The author of this book presents the fact that people’s demeanors can often be misleading.
Sundiata and The Odyssey are two out of the many great great orally told tales in all of mankind history. In writing, comparing your work to another similar text is extremely important for making your paper understandable to any audience. In this case, I will be comparing the two similar texts, The Odyssey and Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Both of these two tables show the characters, Sundiata and Odysseus, long quests of pursuing and accomplishing a certain objective. To reach their goal, both characters encounter obstacles and enemies who want to stop them on their prolonged journey. Another item that is extremely important in both stories is the use and importance of fate. Both characters rely on their fates for assistance and for achieving
Three of the most important aspects of any story are the point of view, characterization and plot. In the short stories “Geraldine Moore the Poet,” “The Story-Teller,” and “Enemy Territory” this statement proves to be true. With a good analysis, all of these things can be found in the stories. Additionally, the point of view, characterization and plot can relate to the theme. The point of view needs to be scrutinized throughout the whole story. In other words, if the reader were to read just the first sentence and take a guess on the point of view, there is a chance it would be wrong. The reader can not base their thoughts of what the point of view is just by reading the first sentence. Also, characterization or the representation a
In Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, multiple foils can be observed. Foils being a contrast between two characters or even settings. However, this text will be centered on specifically two foils. The first one, the narrator being a foil of Bartleby, leading to the second foil; Nippers and/or Turkey being foils of Bartleby once again. As previously said, Bartleby the Scrivener and the narrator seem to be foils of each other. The protagonist, Bartleby, resists the crowd and the usual way of living. He lives against the norms: isolating himself from society and humanity. Barely eating, or a certain point refusing to eat, living in his own office consequently cutting contact with humans and not executing his boss’s, the narrator, orders. Therefore, completely defying
The psychologist, Carl Jung, says that universal characters reside within the collective unconscious of people around the world. These characters are called archetypes. According to Jung, every story has similar archetypes to each other. The Pearl, written by John Steinbeck, also has archetypes. There are many different archetypes in the novella, The Pearl. Three of these archetypes are the hero, the trickster, and the shadow.
Dystopian stories are usually set in an unfavorable society in which to live, where the antagonist is the society itself, and the protagonist is the person who is looking towards changing this society and fixing its flaws, who believes that they can make a difference by overthrowing the government or escaping from it. The conflict is often not solved, or the hero fails to solve it, and the dystopian society continues as it was before. Harrison Bergeron is an example of a dystopian story where society has intensely controlled the population’s unique qualities to make everyone exactly equal. People’s talent, beauty, intelligence, and any other quality that makes them different is brought down and destroyed by forcing them to wear handicaps, masks, and weights. Harrison Bergeron is the protagonist of the story. He disagrees with the society’s way of living and is arrested for it, but he takes a step forward to change it. The author takes on different varieties of tone throughout the story such as gloominess, despair, and joy, which clarify the idea that he disagrees with this society’s
The sheep played a big role in the book. They represented the wave of propaganda during the Russian Revolution and other people who blindly followed Stalin. The chant “Four legs, two legs bad”, move them that they use it anywhere and whenever they get a chance to say it. The Russian people followed Stalin and his propaganda, much like a herd of
Characterization in literary fiction that has special importance, and authors develop their sense of responsibility for full and effective character development. Character is everything in literary fiction. Characters can also be animals or whatever the writer chooses to act in his/her story. Simply, characters literally make things happen in a story. This essay will describe and give a broader picture of how the characterization is developed in the short stories and how would the story look like without characters by supporting with examples of some short stories.