Auto Wreck is an ominous, grim, and disturbing poem written by Karl Shapiro about death, fate, coincidence and the envisioning of reality. In this harsh poem Shapiro describes an awful car accident where many people ends up dead. He flawlessly employes a unique imagery and language that gives the reader a clear and true sensation of the terrible mishap. The author makes us feel as if we had seen and even experienced the car collision ourselves. Although it may see that the main focus in this poem is death, which is one of the most important, the poet also throws in the way he and everyone else saw everything after the accident, how their emotions changed, and how they envisioned reality afterward. Shapiro not only acknowledges and makes vivid the deaths that just occurred and how different people reacted to it, but he also discusses how much of an accident it really was, how someone had to be guilty and if anyone was really innocent at all.
First, Shapiro initiates by describing the efficient and fast-approaching ambulance to the place of the wrack-up. He starts with a “soft” allusion to death and life when he compares the sound of the siren to a heart “beating, beating”, and the lights of the ambulance to blood “pulsing out” of “an artery”. When the ambulance arrives to the place of the incident the doors open and light comes out, which was a way for the author to give a fleeting hope of life in the chaotic scene of the accident, and then takes it away when he describes the condition in which the victims were put inside the ambulance when he says “the mangled lifted.. And stowed into the little hospital”. Shapiro gives the impression of the inevitable presence of death when he says: “Then the bell, .., tools once”, like the ...
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...has no logic or rational conclusion when he says that this event “Cancels our physics” and that it “spatters all we knew of denouement”. At the end he states how things happen even if they are not convenient and gives the quality of evil to something that can not really be.
In conclusion, Shapiro leaves the reader in a state of bewilderment that would be the same as if the reader was actually present in the auto wreck. He shows confusion himself never settling for a complete resolution, never finding a cause for the deaths that he, the witness, had just observed. He seems perplexed by the question of why bad things happen to good people. Lastly, questions like: was it really an accident?, was the cause just being in the wrong place at the wrong time?,was it a trick of destiny and fate?, or even, was it an incident having cause and effect?, remained unanswered.
Setting: This book starts out in this kids house his name is crash. Then they go to the arcade. That is where they spend most of the story. Then close to the end they go to the riverside.
For my reading assignment I read “Car Trouble” by Jeanne Duprau. The story takes place in many cities in the United States. Some are real places like Richmond, Virginia, St. Louis, Missouri, and Los Angeles, California. The book also has some fictional towns like Sunville, New Mexico, a town built completely off of solar power and other natural resources. There are many more real and fake cities throughout the story, but the ones mentioned are the most written about and most important to the story.
Alan Shapiro is a poet whom uses the sorrowful tragedies that occurred in his lifetime and turns them into beautiful poems in which he greatly expresses through his poetry. Most of his poems symbolize either a type of sorrow or tragic death, and the expressions used throughout his poetry make it noticeable that Alan Shapiro endured a life of hardship and tragedy. While Shapiro was growing up he lost his brother and his sister in which the poem “Sleet” by Alan Shapiro beautifully encompasses his feeling of grief and sorrow due to the loss of his siblings.
The catalyst of the novel is a traumatic car accident causing two instant deaths and one paralysation. However, the star of the story isn’t the driver Daniel,
This can’t be happening thought Bill. Man I’m in so much trouble, there’s no way I can get out of it. I’m stuck. Bill had just wrecked his parent’s BMW in an accident, and they had no idea that the expensive car was even missing from the garage. And a terrible thing had happened as a result of the crash. A young woman lay dead in the passenger side of the vehicle, swarmed by medics. Bill had escaped injury, but as his body was still at the crash site, his mind wasn’t. He was in total shock at what had happened. If I only left the car in the garage and didn’t try to “borrow” it, Lisa might still be alive….Bill tried to imagine that it wasn’t real, that he was in his bed dreaming, but no, he was responsible for the destruction of his parents’ car and his the death of his girlfriend. It was as if his mind wasn’t registering, as if it was in some far away place. He just couldn’t come to grips with what had happened. This is a classic example of severe shock. The event that took place was so strong that the mind has trouble working. While in Bill’s case where he had indeed had an accident, the realism of the situation dwarfs the mind as if a small comet hurtled towards a blazing sun. But this is just one aspect of realism. The whole of realism is made up of the fact that our lives, the world, the universe, it’s all real. And as much as our minds would want to deny it, everything will stay real, and for most people they just make the best of it. But for the rest of the people, they invent new ways to get around the feeling that a wall has been placed in their path. All this goes to say that people must be original and “keep it real” to survive the physical and mental fatigue life throws at them and also that everything will always be real and we must be in touch with our minds to harvest the realness.
There are many short stories in literature that share a common theme presented in different ways. A theme that always keeps readers’ attention is that of death because it is something that no one wants to face in real life, but something that can be easily faced when reading. “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson both exemplify how two authors use a common theme of death to stand as a metaphor for dystopian societies.
Karl Shapiro uses diction to paint a sharp and realistic image in the audience’s mind. When Shapiro starts off with the words “beating, beating” (Line 1) and “red like an artery” (Line 3), the reader immediately gets the image of a heart beating. The image of the heart beating red like an artery shows the struggle for life. When Shapiro describes the ambulance as having "wings in a heavy curve," (Line 6) an image of an angel fills the audience’s mind. Still later in the poem there are there are "wrecks that cling,/Empty husks of locust.” (Lines 20-21), showing that there was something alive, ...
In Amy Hempel’s Short Story “Going,” we take part in a journey with the narrator through loss, coping, memory, experience, and the duality of life. Throughout the story we see the narrator’s struggle through coping with the loss of his mother, and how he moves from a mixture of depression, denial, and anger, to a form of acceptance and revelation. The narrator has lost his mother to a fire three states away, and goes on a reckless journey through the desert, when he crashes his car and ends up hospitalized. Only his thoughts and the occasional nurse to keep him company. He then reaches a point of discovery and realizations that lead to a higher understanding of mortality, and all of the experiences that come with being alive.
The story “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” By Rod Serling, has a plot that is highly affected by character actions and events that happen in the story. The strange flying thing flew near Maple street, the text states that ”What was that? Was that a meteor?”. This strange object was the start of everything weird that had happened and was why everyone wanted to know what was going on. Later on Tommy brought up some comic book stuff and makes everyone think the worst According to the writer, Tommy says, “Except the people they had sent down ahead of them. They looked just like humans.” This was the start of everyone not trusting each other, and pointing fingers and blaming each other for the strange things that have happened. Also when
“Car Crash While Hitchhiking” and “Work” both follow the stream of consciousness of the narrator, which shows the influence of drug on people’s mentality. Both stories are confusing with the narrator moving around the time and place; it seems as if the narrator is talking about whatever comes into his mind without specific plot or message. In “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” the narrator talks about the family that picked him up, and suddenly switches to the story of him and salesman by saying “…But before any of this, that afternoon, the salesman and I …” (4) In “Work,” narrator says “And then came one of those moments,” (52) when he recalls a memory about his wife while talking about Wayne. Both stories shift abruptly without proper conjunction. In everyday lives, people think of numerous things. However, what they say are limited, as they talk consistently with a specific purpose, considering factors such as time, place, and appropriateness before they speak. On the other ha...
Commonly, vehicular collisions are considered a negative occurrence. Dave Eggers hints towards this mindset in his short story Accident. Plotted in the middle of an intersection in 2005, the story commences with the main character driving his automobile through the intersection and striking an older Camaro. The three teenagers in the Camaro are fine, but the main character notices all the damage he has done to their vehicle and he fears an unpleasant encounter with them. Dave Eggers uses irony throughout the situation to illustrate the main character’s relief. The characters’ involvement with the collision emphasizes Egger’s theme that no matter how unfortunate an incident, positivity can result.
In doing so, he risks falling into cliché, trite typicality almost impossible to transcend even for the most gifted writers. Yet somehow, he manages to infuse genuine truth and feeling into this poem. Rather than write a poem blatantly about the unfairness of premature death and the tragic irony of his friend’s illness, he crafted a piece that inherently encompassed those ideas through the extended metaphor of abductors in a car and through the specific images of grief as it manifests itself in reality. He addressed the intangible through concepts accessible to the reader’s understanding, and subsequently, the pain and sorrow of the situation felt all the more immediate. Fenton used the deeply personal memory of his friend’s death at the hands of Lou Gehrig’s disease as the source of emotional truth, but through atypical (in the best way) constructs was able to address extend the scope of the poem far beyond the
In his poem Auto Wreck (p. 1002), Karl Shapiro uses carefully constructed similes to cause the events he relates to become very vivid and also to create the mood for the poem. To describe the aftermath, especially in people's emotions, of an automobile accident, he uses almost exclusively medical or physiological imagery. This keeps the reader focused and allows the similes used to closely relate to the subject of the poem. Three main similes used are arterial blood, tourniquets and cancer. These images all follow the same idea, and thus add more to the poem than other rhetorical figures might.
“Honk!” The car horn was extremely loud considering how close it was. Even now, almost 10 years later, the sound paralyzes me with fear and guilt every time I hear it. The accident, my biggest mistake, haunts me every day. Some people say murders should be put to death, but from my experience, the torture of solitude is much worse. I had killed someone. Even though it was an accident, it was still my fault. I guess manslaughter is the proper name for it. I was driving my car, playing with the radio, not focusing on the road, when I hit a woman who was gardening around her mailbox. I bet she didn’t think planting a few flowers would result in her death. I didn’t think that changing the radio would ever cause me to spend years in prison. Life’s never what you expect, that’s for sure.
Last year I got involved in a massive car accident. It was the most terrified part of life. It was the moment. I will never forget in my whole life. Before, I never realized how people really feel when a car accident happens.But,after this car accident I know what really it felt like. It was the moment. My mind was totally feared of driving. I was crushed by the hot metal and cold dirt of car. I was not feeling my arm,my body was numbed.It was felt like my lower body pressed down with monster force. All I could feel was the noise of car accident ringing in my ear.I was barely able to move my body. I was kept thinking. What my parents going to think about this? Where is my friend John? I looked through the window and saw the cars passing by