The Ocean At The End Of The Lane Analysis

1. Pathos is a term which appeals to emotion. It convinces an audience by creating feelings that already reside in them. Pathos is presented in the opening of “ A New Perspective” written by Janice E. Fein when the narrator talks about going to kindergarten. She mentions how her mother “is walking me to kindergarten” which appeals to the audience since it brings up memories of how their mother or father must have walked them to kindergarten too. Pathos is used by creating an emotion connecting with the piece and audience.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Print. The Road is set in a grim atmosphere. It is after apocalypse world where all signs of life are extinct. People and animals are starving, and predatory groups of savages wander around with pieces of human bodies stuck in their teeth. It is both oppressive and disheartening. McCarthy sets an atmosphere like one mediately after the world wars. It is not far-fetched to imagine the possibility of such a sad environment today. The novel tells a story of an unnamed man and his son in who struggle to survive in this horrific environment. I feel that the language in the novel is verbose. McCarthy is blunt in his descriptions. He uses repeated struggles and similar scenes forcing the reader to share the tough experience of the characters. I agree with the author that The Road is the picture of a post-apocalyptic world. I also agree with the opinion that suffering might never end, like the novel indicates through imagery at the very end. The author manages to combine happy moments with sad ones even though the sad ones takes the larger share. In addition, he accomplished his aim of having an audience that is glued to the book all along sine it is both engaging and informative. The author has a perception that the world is composed of more bad things than the good ones. This novel will be important to me as I explore the themes of post-apocalyptic fears and human struggles. However, I do feel that he leans too heavily on sadness

In Zora Neale Hurston’s short story, “John Redding Goes to Sea”, the main character John Redding struggles with standing out in his small hometown. This theme can also be seen several times throughout many other works in modern society. Two of which being John Green’s Paper Towns and Footloose. All of these stories focus on the ideas of a coming of age story – and how to find who you really are in the real world.

In the excerpt from “Cherry Bomb” by Maxine Clair, the narrator makes use of diction, imagery and structure to characterize her naivety and innocent memories of her fifth-grade summer world.

In “The Open Boat” the narrator tells the story of four men that are struggling with a storm in the middle of the sea. Later, they expect to survive by arriving on an island that comes into view. To their surprise, the land was empty and there was no one to help them so they re- boarded

People have beliefs that short stories are narrated by people who are reliable. However, unreliable narrators are people who are telling the story in their own way. The three stories, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, and Strawberry Spring by Stephen King. The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is unreliable because she cannot determine reality from hallucinations and cannot express herself because she is dominated by her role as a woman.

In the works of Literature an epiphany is “a moment of profound insight or revelation by which a character’s life is greatly altered” (24). In the short story “Cathedral” Raymond Carver uses epiphany to draw on the theme, blinded views can alter someone’s behavior. On the realistic level, epiphany advances the plot and character development because they are the basis for the story’s central action. They also help define the narrator and play a vital part in revealing the story’s theme. The following changes in the character’s views have shown an evident development.

In the excerpt “from The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allen Poe creates the conflicted character of an unnamed narrator through indirect characterization. Using the components of Action, what others say, and character’s internal thoughts, Poe portrays a story about insanity and reveals the conflicted and even insane thoughts and emotions going on in the character’s head.

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 Yellow Wallpaper” a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and published in 1892, is both a psychological and feminist piece of literature. It demonstrates oppression, defined as “the feeling of being heavily burdened, mentally or physically by troubles, adverse conditions, anxiety, etc.” The story, written in a form of a journal, is seen through the eyes of a nameless female narrator, who moves with her husband, John, to an estate during the summer to cope with her “hysteria”, eventually leading her to a state of oppression and insanity. The story reflects the confinement and restraint most women during the 1900s felt in marriages and the inferiority women had too men.

The author's literary techniques used in "The Rattler" portray a feeling of sadness and regret. A human has come across a snake, in the snake’s natural habitat. For the sake of human safety the snake must die. The reader becomes sympathetic for the man and his choice to save himself and others. The man also shows a sense of humility when he chooses to leave the rattlers on the snake. He could have chosen to keep these as proof of his heroic actions, however he chose to spare the snake’s own self-respect as if he had lived, ” I did not cut the rattles off for a trophy; I let him drop into the close green guardianship of the paper-bag bush.”

Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” was published in 1955. O’Connor was also known for her novel The Violent Bear it Away (published in 1960) and her collection of short stories Everything That Rises Must Converge (published in 1964). The author often used violence and greed to show how she saw humanity that was without God. She liked to write about pettiness and vanity in the rural south, both of which play large parts in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” This particular piece of work is about a family who goes on a road trip that takes an unexpected turn when they cross paths with a murderer and his henchmen. It’s a meeting that ends fatally for the family, but nonetheless changes two characters for the better. The main character, the grandmother, is displayed similarly to many other protagonists that O’Connor had written- selfish, rude, and vain. She and the murderer, called The Misfit, are both used to show that people can change with the help of God’s grace. Symbolism is also prevalent in

California, the petri dish of global political activity. From its very beginning, Southern California has been a frontrunner in political thought and activism. Major political organizations have either started in California or at the very minimum have local political branch. But as Pulido points out “people cannot fully participate in social movements without undergoing a process of political awakening.” (Pulido pg 61). I would like to explore the process of political politicization and how it correlates with protagonist Jackie Ishida, a young Japanese American senior law student coming of political age in the novel “Southland” by Nina Revoyr.

The pursuit of dreams has played a big role in self-fulfillment and internal development and in many ways, an individual 's reactions to the perceived and real obstacles blocking the path to a dream define the very character of that person. This theme is evident in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is about the search for identity. A woman of a mixed ethnicity resides in several communities, each playing an important role and serve as crucial influences on her life. During the story, she endures two failed relationships and one good relationship, dealing with disappointment, death, the wrath of nature and life’s unpredictability.

Childhood is a prime era in the creation of oneself as a whole, your morals and dreams and the role and influence older generations such as parents play on a child’s development. Within all four chosen texts the portrayal of childhood has played a pivotal role in both the destruction and creation of their central characters, each providing different methods and reason of escape from childhood which is ordinarily known as a happy period, ‘where the real meaning of life is located’. Childhood should be classed as a happy, carefree period full of happy memories and adventures, these protagonist face a life of hardship and decision making beyond their years leading to their attempt to blossom into adulthood leaving behind miserable childhoods.