Raymond Carver's A Small, Good Thing

The three stories to be discussed in this essay are “The Bouquet” by Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “Gimpel the Fool” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It’s interesting to dissect these pieces of literature to see how they reflect the time period they were written in, by whom they were written, and if the stories they read have any abnormalities outside what is expected.

Poets and other writers often express life through their works and characters. Some poems convey a depressing, gloomy attitude towards life, while others show the world as a joyful and simple place. Two skilled creative writers, Edgar Lee Masters and Edwin Arlington Robinson, wrote detailed poems describing the lives of characters with extremely different perspectives on life. Many obvious differences can be identified between the lives of Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy and Masters’s Lucinda Matlock.

Audrey Petty uses “Late Night Chitlins with Momma” to express her own close bond with her mother and how it shaped her identity; this is expressed through the narrative style, the diction and syntax, the use of food as a metaphor, and the short story’s structure.

The story Unstoppable by Tim Green is a shocking book that keeps readers on their toes Harrison is a teenager with a horrible past who is in foster care and goes to a home that is a terrible place. His foster parents make him work an awful lot, and he has little to no free time. Harrison gets fed up with feeling “less than” his foster brother one day he snaps and accidently kills his adopted father. He ends up going back into the system and goes to court for the murder, but he was found not guilty. His Social Worker’s twin sister, Jennifer, adopts him and he meets his new adopted father, Coach. Harrison begins to play football for Coach and he is good at it and he is the new running back for the team. However, he is faced with a serious problem of cancer and he loses his leg due to this. To overcome this Harrison befriends a veteran who tells him stories that he will be fine and can overcome this. In the end that Harrison sees that his problem is not terrible and he can’t move on with life and doesn't need to dwell over losing his leg. The story is trying to show that don’t take the little things in life for granted.

“The Search for Marvin Gardens” by John McPhee compares the Game of Monopoly to the realities of everyday life. This essay conveys that some people will search their entire life for Marvin Gardens, happiness, and success, but they will only make it to Atlantic City. McPhee uses metaphor, description, and narration to make his case. This intricate and detailed work is meant to reach anyone who is familiar with the Monopoly Game. The purpose of the essay is to show how rare and precious Marvin Gardens is, and if a person finds this square, he or she should never let it go.

For different people, comparable situations do not always reproduce the same end results or leave the same impressions. Rather, the resulting conclusion is often highly variable. As is the case of two labors featured in the poems, My Father’s Lunch” and “The life of a Digger”. While Erica Funkhouser’s speaker, Henry, experiences injustice and lack of reward for his hard labor in “The Life of a Digger,” Margarita Engle’s speaker experiences prosperity and remuneration for their father’s hard work in “My Father’s Lunch.” Each author uses the setting of a laboring man’s lunch break to demonstrate the ramifications of a hard day’s work and the rewards or lack thereof for their efforts.

Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” are similar because they focus on the same subject. However, they differ in how the speakers’ feel about their relationship with their parent(s). In Plath’s “Daddy”, the speaker is a daughter thinking about how her father treated her. She tells about how she felt trapped by him and how she tried to ‘kill’ him, line 6 of the poem, but he dies before she has a chance. The ending of Plath’s poem implies that she got married to a man like her father. In Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”, the speaker seems to be an adult reminiscing his childhood through a metaphor of a dance. The poem suggests that the boy was abused and the mother stood by without doing much about it. Three topics that

In the short stories we have read there have been numerous themes. The impact of tradition, the value of heritage, the importance of family, the divide between social classes, and the presence of love are all ideas that can be found in the stories we have read. Short stories have managed to encapture the importance and true meaning of life in just a few sentences by imposing on the readers themes we can all relate to. A common theme presented in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” and Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson” is the power of knowledge and education.

Life is the most simple and the most complicated thing throughout the whole universe. Every single day people are looking for meaning in their lives. However, not many people are able to find out what the meaning of their life really is. Some believe that there are multiple meanings for each person’s life. In the following books, each of the main characters are looking for the meaning in their own lives: The Catcher in the Rye, Into the Wild, In Cold Blood, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These books show that each character have different meanings to their lives and they want to find out what it is.

In Spoon River Anthology, Masters uses colloquial diction and free verse to portray the lives of the lay-people that once lived in a fictional town near the Spoon River. The poems are significant because they are in the form of epitaphs that uncover truths often hid from view in small town life. The epitaphs are individually significant in that they contain irony that accompanies the colloquial, small town diction. In the epitaph of “Elsa Wertman,” Masters tells of a poor German girl who had an illegitimate child with a well-to-do gentleman of the small community. Ironically, her son is adopted by the wife of Thomas Greene and the boy is raised as the son of Thomas and Frances Greene, not Elsa Wertman. Ironically, the boy believes he came from

In life difficulties may arise, but an “instructive eye” of a “tender parent” is a push

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses shows comfort is not always found in a place or in another person; sometimes comfort can be found within oneself. San Angelo, TX, where it all started to change. A boy whose only person he really grew up with had left, left him without a home as well. A new beginning awaits three young boys with different views of life, death, religion and love. But what awaits them can be a deadly comfort for the cowboys.

"Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together." This quote by Marilyn Monroe represents the two fathers. in Little Things,The father's relationship with his wife falls apart. The father in Today Will Be a Quiet Day has a good relationship with his children. Even though Little Things father made a wrong choice and right now does not have a good relationship with either his soon to be ex-wife and his kid he can still have a good relationship in his future life. In Little Things by Raymond Carver the parents of the baby are very hostile to each other. The father is told he cannot have the baby, so he fights for the baby. In Today Will Be a Quiet Day by Amy Hempel, the father and the kids are very happy with each other.

Michael Lewis, the author of the short story “Buy That Little Girl an Ice Cream Cone” had gone to school at Princeton University and the London School of Economics. Lewis had spent four years as a bond salesman on Wall Street. It was there that Lewis got the idea for his first and bestselling book “Liar’s Poker” and decided to become a professional writer. This essay originally from his book “Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood” is trying to get us to recognize that sometimes your kid’s actions can really surprise you and they might not always be the best surprise but it’s hard not to feel proud when they are standing up for their sibling. Lewis uses the rhetorical strategy pathos to get the audience to understand how proud and impressed

Family is an important and significant influence in every child's life, it provides a sense of safety, support, belonging and love. Without family a kid's upbringing can be empty and lacking with a sense of insecurity and loneliness. Maloney shows in ‘A Bridge to Wiseman's Cove’ the impact of a lack of family in Carl and Harley's life. In the Novel, we also see the importance of work in Carl's life, it gives him a sense of self worth and confidence. The novel displays the necessity for work and family in Carl and Harley's life, through the good changes throughout the book in their well being.