Rebecca Myers Professor LaKeya Jenkins English 102-80 2 June 2017 Short-Fiction Essay In Julia Alvarez’s “Snow”, an immigrant schoolgirl named Yolanda is experiencing her first time in New York. Her catholic school teacher, Sister Zoe, is a kind woman who is dedicated to teaching Yolanda the English language. As time progresses, Yolanda learns of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not only does Yolanda have to become accustom to a new environment, she also fears the threat of bombs and must be prepared for a catastrophe. In the short story “Snow”, the author symbolizes the word snow by showing that the protagonist, Yolanda, feels a sense of fear and joy through first time experiences as she adjusts to a new life in New York during a time of crisis. The main character of the story, Yolanda, is new to not only New York, but America too. If being in a new surrounding and learning a new language is not scary enough, she also learns that Russian missiles are supposedly going to be trained on New York City, her new home “soon I picked up enough English to understand holocaust was in the air. Sister Zoe explained to a wide-eyed classroom what was happening in Cuba” (Alvarez 83). The wide eyes imply that Yolanda and her classmates are fearful about what they are learning. Yolanda imagines what would happen if a bomb did hit. Knowing the possibilities if this catastrophe occurs frightens her and she prays that it does not happen “at home, Mami and my sisters and I said a rosary for world
In James Whitcomb Riley’s poem “When the Frost is on the Punkin”, he explains in detail what his speaker loves about fall mornings. From this poem, we can tell that the speaker likes the crispness of the air, the sun, and the colors of a beautiful fall morning. The speaker likes the cool air of autumn. The poem states, “When the heat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here.” By expressing this line, he shows us that he is ready for the cool air of autumn after a hot summer.
Everyone has a story to write about. Julia Alvarez surely did. She was born on March 27, 1950, in New York City. When she was three months old her parents, both native Dominicans decided to go back home. While there her father got involved with a plan to overthrow the dictator Rafael Trujillo.
After living at Camp Manzanar for four years, Jeanne is ready to finally leave but also nervous to reenter the outside world. At her new junior high school in Long Beach, her teacher tries her best to make her feel like she fits in. But after Jeanne reads a page in their reading book aloud, perfectly without any mistakes, another classmate’s reaction is not at all what she expected. “When I finished, a pretty blonde girl in front of me said, quite innocently, “Gee, I didn’t know you could speak English.” She was genuinely amazed.
Doyle’s anecdotes, imagery, and varying sentence lengths allow us to interpret the physical and emotional transformation of snow. Throughout Doyle’s essay, there is the prominent use of anecdotes, allowing the audience to connect with his piece, whether or/ not they have seen snow. His opening: “I met a small girl who told me she had never seen snow.” sets a rhetorical situation. Doyle’s use of a rhetorical situation allows the audience to read from the point of view of a young and curious mind while also presenting his purpose, “snow is inarguable”
The Dumas were given so much kindness and were accepted so quickly in those two short years that they were in America. They were highly thought of in their community that they didn’t want to go back to their homeland of Iran after their two-year were up. They didn’t know when they were going to come back, the girl even said so herself, “I didn’t know then that indeed be returning to America about two years later” (Dumas, 16).All that the girl knew was that everyone was upset that she was leaving.
David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard explains the devastating force of an intense blizzard, which caught several people unprepared, and it tells the tragic stories of these people. On January 12, 1888 a massive blizzard struck the center of North America, killing between 250 to 500 people and affecting thousands. There were many factors that made this blizzard exceptionally deadly. Many farmers and children who were outside were unprepared to deal with any cold conditions, “a day when children had raced to school with no coats or gloves and farmers were far from home doing chores they had put off during the long siege of cold” (Laskin 2).
In the passage from Maxine Clair’s “Cherry Bomb,” the adult narrator shares her memories of her fifth-grade summer world. Through the use of literary techniques, Clair clearly depicts the naivety and youthfulness of the adult narrator’s fifth-grade summer. In the first paragraph, the narrator’s feelings of naive and youthfulness about their childhood summer are highlighted through her memories of an expression, and an ice truck. The narrator uses the appeal of the expression “‘I am in this world, but not of it’” to express the youthfulness of her fifth-grade self.
Waiting for Snow in Havana enters a very crowded arena of excellent memoirs, written in English, about young Cubans growing up both in Cuba and in the United States. In 1990, Pablo Medina published Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood. Virgil Suárez wrote Spared Angola: Memories from a Cuban-American Childhood in 1997. Flor Fernandez Barrios unveiled Blessed by Thunder: Memoirs of a Cuban Girlhood in 1999; and the most famous and popular memoir to date, the best-seller by Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano’s Coming of Age in America, appeared in 1995.
In the excerpt, The Street by Ann Petry, there is a 3rd person omniscient narrator to explain the hatefulness of the cold along with the keen determination of Lutie Johnson. The narrator completely conveys the true parts of the cold to better show Lutie Johnson’s experiences by employing descriptive personifications and vivid imagery of the central antagonist as the wind. Imagery is undeniably the most used literary device in this excerpt, as it gives the reader an accurate sense of the horrible temperate weather that the protagonist is forced to endure in her search for a home. The presence of the “Cold November wind” is shown in the sense of disorder and chaos that is at 110th street. “Scraps of paper “are sent “…into the faces of the people
The rain fell down in frigid sheets. Ira Whelan stood alone on the gelid deck that was once the Petersburg train station. Now all that remained of the once bustling establishment was the foundation of a prodigious building, and the sooty frozen planks that lay under him. It was winter in West Virginia, and it was the first one after the war’s end. If Ira would’ve had shoes, perhaps the cold weather wouldn’t have bothered him so considerably.
Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard is a collection of poems highlighting the childhood of her life and honoring her mother. Additionally, Trethewey speaks about the racial background of the Deep South where she grew up and one of the first black regiments who were called into service during the Civil War, the Louisiana Native Guards. Trethewey includes sonnets and monuments to express the meaning behind her poetry. Throughout the collection of poems, there are certain poems that are very apparent in expressing the severity of Trethewey and the Native Guard’s struggles. One of the poem’s in Native Guard that truly captivates the story of Trethewey’s childhood and racial struggles is “Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971”.
Yellow Star is a 2006 biographical children 's novel by Jennifer Roy. Written in free verse, it describes life through the eyes of a young Jewish girl whose family was forced into the Łódź Ghetto in 1939 during World War II. Roy tells the story of her aunt Sylvia, who shared her childhood memories with Roy more than 50 years after the ghetto 's liberation. Roy added fictionalized dialogue, but did not alter the story. The book covers Sylvia 's life as she grows from four and a half to ten years old in the ghetto.
When the wind begins to nip at your face, when the sky becomes a light grey, when all life seems to be hidden away, one knows that there is a high chance of snow. Plants seem to lose their color and become as barren as that of the sky. Animals and humans seem to burrow up from the cold weather outside. But one can only anticipate the white flurry substance coming from the sky. Snow is a magical thing.
Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country (1956) is a Japanese novel based on the sense of loss, entrapment and the complexity of human emotions. In the novel, the author uses the omniscient third person, highlighting the male protagonist, Shimamura’s point of view. This narrative technique is one of the primary methods used to convey the themes of wasted beauty, isolation, unfulfilled love and transience, by being of a “stream of consciousness” nature. This narrative mode takes the form of an interior monologue within the character, reflecting the immediate occurrence of ideas in his mind and highlighting his thought process. The reader witnesses very little change in the setting of the novel, as all significant parts take place amidst the small
The Snows of Kilimanjaro Thematic Analysis Earnest Hemingway gives the reader an opportunity to observe several different themes in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” such as impending death, conflict, regret, and redemption. Hemingway shows several uses of foreshadowing such as imagery and symbolism to portray the coming death of Harry and utilizes flashbacks as a style to show the regret and conflict that Harry feels. While on the mountain, Harry also has an experience which portrays a sense of redemption for him as he is ascending to the top of the mountain. The central themes of death, conflict, regret, and redemption are clearly shown in the way Hemingway utilizes imagery, symbolism, structure, and writing style.