Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson, is about a normal fourteen year old girl named Matilda Cook, who was working at the family’s coffee shop, living life in search of her identity. Matilda went through life always working and being lectured by her mother about right from wrong, what’s lady like and what’s not. She had a normal life, her family wasn’t the riches but she had everything she needed, until the an illness called yellow fever came to Philadelphia. When the fever hit people were leaving to other places with their family, but the rest who were too poor to pay for a wagon, or who already had the fever stayed in Philadelphia. One of the people who had caught the yellow fever was Mattie’s mother.
In order to begin building the story, one must first erect a setting for everything to take place. Jeannette opens up every new memory with in this way with the use of imagery. For instance, “nothing about the town was grand except the big empty sky and, off in the distance, the stony purple Tuscarora Mountain running down the table-flat desert. The main street was wide—with sun bleached cars and pickups parked at an angle to the curb—but only a few blocks long”(51). The elaborate description of the setting allows one to understand how the place may affect the course of the narrative, as well as how each person with in the memoir may respond in relation with the environment.
Later on, we find her adopting the bird and naming it Mabel. The bird helps her overcome her grief through the training she conducted to it which she admits to as hard. Her memoir is blended with obsession, myth, history, and memory. The book airs out the need to enhance personal mechanism for coping with challenges.
As the family travels on the road where the grim events unfold, the grandma recollects that, “All at once they would be on a hill, looking down over the blue tops of trees for miles around, then the next minute, they would be in a red depression with the dust-coated trees looking down on them” (O’Connor 475). The “red depression” predicts the impending bloodshed that the Misfit causes and the “dust-coated trees” refer to the dark forest stained with blood. This use of foreshadowing builds suspense and contributes to the portrayal of the grandmother’s strange ways of describing the scenery. Consequently, the landscape establishes the character of the grandmother through her depictions of the surroundings, and creates a suspenseful mood for the remainder of the
In the beginning of the book, Phillip Malloy was passionate to make it into Harrison school’s track team. He thought that being only good at running would automatically make him into the team, but his grades interfered with his chance at the team. He didn’t make it into the track team because he detested Miss. Narwin’s class and felt the book, The Call of the Wild was useless, so he put the most unnecessary response to an answer of his exam.
Speak Have you ever gone through a trauma? “ Recovery doesn't erase the trauma as if it had never happened, it just makes it easier to deal with” ( American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress). The novel Speak is about a teenage girl going through her tough high school years. She started the school year with no friends and with a heavy secret weighing over her. One might think that her problems are just teenage normal ones, but what they don't know is that she was suffering from a sexual assault, rape.
In the book Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen, one of the biggest focal points is mental illness. Mental illness can be tough to talk about, simply because the phrase “mental illness” encompasses such a wide range of conditions and conjures up images of deranged people, but it is very important, especially in this book. There is a certain stigma that people who are put into mental hospitals because they have medical problems or are insane and a possible danger to society. While this is sometimes true, it is far more common for patients to need help for a disorder, but just don’t know where to go or what to do, and can end up putting themselves or someone else in danger.
The question of sanity becomes apparent when McMurphy, a confident gambler, who might have faked psychosis in order to get out of the work farm, is assigned to the mental hospital. He quickly stirs up tension in the ward for Nurse Ratched by encouraging the men to have fun and rebel against her rules. Brodmen appears to be sane for the most part, despite his hallucinations of a fog, which seems to be the result of something both the ward and the world has done to him. He is able to think logically and though others believe him to be deaf and dumb, he uses this to his advantage. Chief states, “They don't bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when I'm nearby because they think I'm deaf and dumb.
Clive Wearing was a prolific British musical conductor and producer for BBC. He was a wildly intelligent and successful person. It came as a surprise to himself and his family when unexpectedly suffered a loss of consciousness. The type of memory loss that Clive Wearing has is retrograde and anterograde amnesia. He is unable to retain new memories; he is also unable to unearth past memories to his consciousness as well.
How she describes her surroundings and her interactions with her family evolves as her condition worsens. By the end, the reader can truly see just how far gone the narrator has gone. The narrator’s fixation on the yellow wallpaper had gone from a slight obsession to full mental breakdown. As it is with most good stories, the presence of strong symbolism and detailed settings is a very important aspect of the story that helps to draw the reader into the story.
The protagonist of this novel, Lily Owens, has always had a troublesome life. Both her parents, Terrence Owens, also known as T. Ray, and Deborah Fontanel are ridden with illness, sadly caused from each other. Lily also meets a new family in this novel after running away from her cruel father who abuses her. This family is also dealing with mental illness. August Boatwright is a member of this family and has been surrounded by this sickness for more than half of her life.
Ken Kesey uses his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, to describe the lives of patients in a mental institution, and their struggle to overcome the oppressive authority under which they are living. Told from the point of view of a supposedly mute schizophrenic, the novel also shines a light on the many disorders present in the patients, as well as how their illnesses affect their lives during a time when little known about these disorders, and when patients living with these illnesses were seen as an extreme threat. Chief Bromden, the narrator of the novel, has many mental illnesses, but he learns to accept himself and embrace his differences. Through the heroism introduced through Randle McMurphy, Chief becomes confident in himself, and is ultimately able to escape from the toxic environment Nurse Ratched has created on the ward. Chief has many disorders including schizophrenia, paranoia, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, and, in addition to these illnesses, he pretends to be deaf and dumb.
In the story, Homeless Bird, by Gloria Whelan, a 13 year old girl named Koly went through many different situations, these situations made her take on many traits. Three traits I would like to interpret through this writing is sadness, depression, and anxiety. In the beginning of the novel one of the first character traits that Koly demonstrated was sadness. Koly went through this trait when her husband, Hari died (p. 45).
2. Toby 's Epilepsy and Daphne 's Life in the Asylum in Owls Do Cry Janet Frame 's novel Owls Do Cry tells the story of a New Zealand family who struggles with poverty. Set in the fictional town of Waimaru, the story follows the lives of Bob and Amy Whithers and their children Francie, Toby, Daphne and Chicks. Aside from their monetary struggles the family has to deal with the early death of their daughter Francie (cf.
This image seems at first cold, but it is a realistic judgment of her ideas of parenthood. The feeling of distance is also shown in: “I’m not more your mother than the cloud that distils as mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind’s hoard.” The final lines of the poem present the reassuring vision of a loving mother attending to her baby's needs. Plath’s self-image – ‘cow-heavy and floral in my Victorian nightgown’ – is self-deprecating and realistic. The final image is an optimistic one.
