Symbolism In Paper Towns

The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story full of imaginative symbolism and descriptive settings. However, without the narrator’s unique point of view and how it affects her perception of her environment, the story would fail to inform the reader of the narrator’s emotional plummet. The gothic function of the short story is to allow the reader to be with the narrator as she gradually loses her sanity and the point of view of the narrator is key in ensuring the reader has an understanding of the narrator’s emotional and mental state throughout the story.

Have you ever felt safe somewhere, but realized your only protection was ignorance? In Jacqueline Woodson’s When a Southern Town Broke a Heart, she introduces the idea that as you grow and change, so does your meaning of home. Over the course of the story, Woodson matures and grows older, and her ideas about the town she grew up in become different. When she was a nine year old girl, Woodson and her sister returned to their hometown of Greenville, South Carolina by train. During the school year, they lived together in Downtown Brooklyn, and travelled to. Once Jacqueline has tasted the sweet life of freedom and privilege in New York, she realizes how ignorant she was about Greenville. Her Grandmother had been protecting her from the racism and segregation that permeated the town like a disease. Through metaphor and character growth, it seems obvious that Woodson is trying to convey the theme that perceptions of home can grow and changes as one grows older.

Likewise, the characters believed that those closest to the characters did not exhibit any concern until they withstand an eye-opening incident, putting into perspective how much they are valued underneath cold exteriors. In the modern reality, reading about characters undergoing a disconnection acts as if it were a mirror to the viewer, allowing them to reflect on how toxic their own filial and peer relationships are. In short, instead of facing the grueling reality of oblivious affection from others, readers use literature as a way to see which events act as effects of an indeliberate

Standing on the corner, York has a gaunt, cadaverous visage. He has a tired look on his face that, in one way or another, parallels to his washed out, tired, blue jean overalls. One could easily come to understand that he has worked hard his whole life, and despite his appearance, his pale, blue-grey eyes reveal life and love for his wife and children. Every Saturday he takes his family out to town, where he waits on the corner with the other town’s men like his fathers and grandfathers did.

Every type of person struggles with a thing we call, identity. Personal identity come from multiple factors from our race to our own personal beliefs. Some people say we have the choice to choose our own identity, but is that always true? No, in fact other people can affect how we look and essentially identity our self’s. In the article called. “Gawking, Gaping, staring” this article is written by Eli Clare from Tim Marrows telling. In this article it is about a transgender individual who throughout their whole lives have been ridiculed by this one characteristic. The person in the story tells you about many years before today these people such as drag queens or transgender were normally put on display and called freaks, they were starred at and ridiculed. The person who is telling the story on how now we might not have “Freak Shows” we do still stare, and judge without realizing the affects that it can have on the ones being targeted. We do not know how bad our words hurt but some time they can cause

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie’s happiness and self-fulfillment greatly depended on the man whom she was in a relationship with. From, the beginning of the novel, Janie never followed the path that had the utmost value to herself; She always settled for what other people thought was best for her. This made Janie never quite content with her situation and caused her happiness and self-fulfillment to be hindered by her circumstances. The horizon, a motif representing dreams, wishes, the possibility of change, and improvement of ones’ self, is the point in which Janie’s journey of self-discovery is illustrated by.

Billy Collins appropriately created the title “Schoolsville” for this poem. The title is broken down and is imagined by readers of a little town occupied by former students who still act as they did in high school. From the beginning line, it is clear to the reader that the speaker is reminiscing his past by “glancing over my shoulder at the past,” (Collins 534). By stating, “I realize the number of students he has taught is enough to populate a small town,” also adds to the image created by the title (Collins 534). The speaker has taught so many years that his former students could populate a town.

In the story Hairball by Margaret Atwood, Kat is living in a fictitious world as she lives life with a fake persona, but in reality she is lost and does not know who she truly is. Firstly, Kat has gone through many personality changes throughout her life; from her childhood as the pure Katherine, to high school Kathy, and blunt university Kath, to finally her present chic image Kat. Her character change suggests that she was constantly looking for who she truly was. However she still does not find her true self as at the end of the story she says, “... [I am] temporarily without a name.”(45) At this scene, Kat gave away her tumor ‘Hairball’ which symbolizes giving away her image as Kat. This indicates readers that she is back at another personality

Gilman also highlights a lack of identity of the narrator through the setting of the novella which reflects the narrator’s societal confinement. The protagonist is surrounded by “hedges and walls and gates that lock”, which create a sense of separation that the narrator feels from others and the outside world. In addition, the room in which she is confined contains a “heavy bedstead, and… barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on”. These physical and ‘prison-like’ restrictions imposed on the protagonist clearly demonstrate her lack of freedom. Additionally, Gilman’s use of syndetic listing to describe the narrator’s physical entrapment is perhaps reflective of her feelings of suffocation and her inability to escape as the list feels never ending. Essentially, it is the physical and subsequent metaphorical entrapment of the female protagonist by her husband in The Yellow Wallpaper that leads to a loss of her identity.

In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” written in 1983, the author points out that empathy and perspective are the only way to truly experience profound emotion.The narrator is struggling is sucked into his own comfort zone, he drowns his dissatisfaction on life, marriage, and job in alcohol. A man of limited awareness breaks through his limitations by socializing with a blind man. Despite Roberts physical limitations, he is the one who saved narrator from himself and helped him to find the ones vies of the world.

“The Village” by heavily accredited movie director M. Night Shyamalan is rich with symbolism and is a breath of fresh air for the horror and thriller movie genres. The themes and ideas presented in the film can be fascinating for all types of people. In Shyamalan’s “The Village”, several types of symbolism are used, such as the myth of “Those We Do Not Speak of”, Ivy’s blindness, and the colors to explain the overall theme of loss of innocence.

It is evident that change is a natural component in the average person’s life. Some however, are more drastic than others. This is exhibited through the first-person narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall Paper”, who undergoes a drastic change in her health due to postpartum depression, her relationships with the individuals around her, and her isolation. These changes later develop an internal conflict in the form of a troubling identity plight.

Rejection can make one feel alone, helpless, and out of place, and it’s a feeling that can make someone feel like they are no good, or that they aren’t worthy of a good life. All throughout the story, we are given examples of how the young girl is shamed and rejected. She was never accepted for who she was and this made her do things, sometimes extreme to help out her family. She knew she would never fit in, and her actions proved just that.

The man with lots of prejudices against blind people, that jealous husband who thought that the blind man has feelings for his wife began to draw. Robert encourages the narrator to close his eyes and keep drawing. The narrator then understood the significant life lesson by saying “My eyes were still closed .I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. It’s really something.” (Carver,

Take a second and imagine, imagine yourself being starved, tortured, and enslaved. What would you do to save your children and yourself? In Cynthia Ozick's story “The Shawl” we meet Rosa and her two daughters Stella, who is fourteen, and Magda an infant who is being concealed, on their grueling march to a concentration camp. The Nazi’s are unaware of Magda’s existence due to Rosa hiding her under the shawl as they are marching. Rosa is faced with the difficulty of keeping her daughters alive, while trying to survive herself. Through the point of view of Rosa, Ozick uses symbolism to capture the many different coping mechanisms used to survive the horrors of being a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp and through her selflessness becomes a Christlike heroine. Rosa’s imagination gives positive characteristics to situations and objects to help cope with traumatic events such as, the magical properties of the shawl, the grass outside