“If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can” (William Faulkner). Have you ever experienced a hard time in your life, but you use determination and courage to overcome it? The book, Catherine Called Birdy, is about a young girl named Catherine who experiences, torture, pains and sorrow. Catherine is the lady of manor of her household who does all the lady-task, betrothed to a man named Shaggy Beard and her family physical abuses her and tries to overcome it all. Catherine starts to experience the troubles in her life but goes after the things she wants, not what her father wants. In the book, Catherine Called Birdy, by Karen Cushman is about how Catherine cannot escape her marriage, lady-task and family. No matter how hard she tries, she can't decide her own love. "There is a pouch of silver from Shaggy Beard, but if I use it to save the bear, I am chained to both beast" (148). This explains how Catherine wants to save a bear, but if she does pay for the bear to be safe, she has to marry Shaggy Beard for certain. Catherine decides that buying the bear is a good decision because she doesn't want to …show more content…
Catherine wrote, "There was shouting, slaping, stomping away which ended with me locked in my prison of a chamber without my inks in an attempt to break my spirit" (137). When Catherine experienced this, she knew her family didn't care about her so they treated her not fairly. This shows that the way her family treats her is the way people treated people in those days, but she uses determination and courage by still doing what she does for her own good. "I roared, he roared, I threw things, he stepped on them, I pushed him, he shouted about stubbornness and delivered several hard blows to my face" (117). This can explain how her father treated her and how they didn't really get along. No ones care who was treated back then, but her determination and courage helped her to keep going with her
Of Nightingales That Weep Chapter 1 This chapter is about Takiko and her first family home. It tells a lot about her family. They talk about the war in this chapter also. Takiko’s mother decides that she will remarry after her father dies.
The conflict Catherine faces is Person versus self. “Little Bird, in the world to come, you will not be asked ‘why were you not George?’ or ‘why were you not Perkin?’ but ‘why were you not Catherine?’ ” (Cushman 17). It is depicted that Catherine tried to be everyone else but not herself. Hence, Catherine’s conflict is internal because she must change her conceptions. Catherine must accept who she is. Catherine’s conflict is resolved in the resolution. Catherine understands the Jewish woman’s advice. “And it came to my mind that I cannot run away. I am who I am wherever I am” (Cushman 202). Catherine understands she cannot be like Perkin or George, and she will not be asked if why she was not like Perkin or George. However, Catherine will be asked why she did not act like herself, and why she was not
Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate is the story of an African boy, Kek, who loses his father and a brother and flees, leaving his mother to secure his safety. Kek, now in Minnesota, is faced with difficulties of adapting to a new life and of finding his lost mother. He believes that his mother still lives and would soon join him in the new found family. Kek is taken from the airport by a caregiver who takes him to live with his aunt. It is here that Kek meets all that amazed him compared to his home in Sudan, Africa. Home of the brave shows conflicts that Kek faces. He is caught between two worlds, Africa and America. He feels guilty leaving behind his people to live in a distant land especially his mother, who he left in the midst of an attack.
Annie Dillard, in “A Christmas Story,” demonstrates for the audience that is so easy to miss the true meaning of life. The story “A Christmas Story,” begins with a setting of a enormous feast. The banquet hall decorated with expensive materials, for example, “two thousand chandeliers hung from the ceiling, parti-colored floor of lumber.” The atmosphere was lively. There were many guests attending the banquet. The food that was served was a soup, which was said to have all the perfect ingredients as well as it “seemed to contain all other dishes.” The host of the banquet was a young man. The young man observed carefully as the people stuffed themselves and the young man thought, “No one person has seen nor understood the excellence of that soup.”
In "Our Secret" by Susan Griffin, the essay uses fragments throughout the essay to symbolize all the topics and people that are involved. The fragments in the essay tie together insides and outsides, human nature, everything affected by past, secrets, cause and effect, and development with the content. These subjects and the fragments are also similar with her life stories and her interviewees that all go together. The author also uses her own memories mixed in with what she heard from the interviewees. Her recollection of her memory is not fully told, but with missing parts and added feelings. Her interviewee's words are told to her and brought to the paper with added information. She tells throughout the book about these recollections.
Susan Griffin's "Our Secret" is a study in psychology. It is a look into the human mind to see what makes people do the things they do and in particular what makes people commit acts of violence. She isolates the first half of the twentieth century and in particular the era of the Second World War as a basis for her study. The essay discusses a number of people but they all tie in to Heinrich Himmler. He is the extreme case, he who can be linked directly to every single death in the concentration camps. Griffin seeks to examine Himmler because if she can discern a monster like Himmler than everyone else simply falls into place. The essay also tries to deduce why something like the Holocaust, although never mentioned directly, can take place. How can so many people be involved and yet so few people try to end it.
Self-acceptance is clearly determined through one’s mind set and the steps that one has or is taking in order to achieve this goal. However, this journey can be slowed by various negative forces that life consists of that one was to fight through in order to achieve the final destination of self-acknowledgement. In the novel, Birdie by Tracey Lindberg, the main character, Bernice undergoes physical, spiritual, and emotional changes that are expressed through her slow development into the person Bernice strives to be. The ultimate destination for Bernice is acceptance of her three identities; Bernice, BirdieBernice and Birdie. Bernice is a defeated and depressed women, BirdieBernice being a motivated version
Perhaps no other event in modern history has left us so perplexed and dumbfounded than the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, an entire population was simply robbed of their existence. In “Our Secret,” Susan Griffin tries to explain what could possibly lead an individual to execute such inhumane acts to a large group of people. She delves into Heinrich Himmler’s life and investigates all the events leading up to him joining the Nazi party. In“Panopticism,” Michel Foucault argues that modern society has been shaped by disciplinary mechanisms deriving from the plague as well as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a structure with a tower in the middle meant for surveillance. Susan Griffin tries to explain what happened in Germany through Himmler’s childhood while Foucault better explains these events by describing how society as a whole operates.
No matter how seemingly fitting, Catherine finds imperfection in every man: one is too pompous, or another too bawdy. Although her actions manage to intimidate many of them, she creates ingenious plots to make her father scare them away. Menacingly, her father betroths her to the worst of them all, Shaggy Beard, a middle-aged man who is absolutely vile. Throughout the book, her determination to be rid of her current life including a future with Shaggy Beard, grows in intensity with each passing day. During the story, Catherine expresses her disdain for Shaggy Beard, the suitor she is bound to wed, when she states, “I vow I will find a way to be rid of him. I will be no Lady Shaggy Beard” (106). Despite her persistence to completely abolish Shaggy Beard from her life, each day when the sun goes to sleep and the moon awakens, Catherine is reminded that there is no way she will be able to circumvent a long dull life with Shaggy Beard. At the beginning of the book, Catherine is like spring, vibrant and alive with hope coursing through her veins. Near
“Raymond's Run”, by Toni Cade Bambara embodies the theme of being yourself, shown in the main character, Squeaky. While dealing with her disabled brother, she must live with her mother’s expectations; cloaking her true self to be a “strawberry” or “fairy”, shunning the real, athletic side of herself. The poem, “Caged Bird”, shares a similar resemblance to “Raymond’s Run” for the themes they share. The poem demonstrates how the free bird dares to claim the sky, climb, and reach new heights, while the caged bird longs for freedom from discomfort and rage. Just like the poem, the “Raymond’s Run” protagonist Squeaky goes through a stage where she is forced to act like a girl, and do girly things, such as wearing dresses and white doll shoes. Soon, she learns to follow her calling and break through the shackles of gender identity. Squeaky learns to accept the way she is instead of succumbing to the gender stereotypes and feminine expectations set by her mother and the
“”Bird” is a realistic fiction novel written by angela johnson. It's more like you're reading a poem rather than an actual book. Thirteen year old Bird decides to leave home and go search for her second father who left without saying goodbye. Bird lives in a shed that belongs to another family, she scavenges off the family that lives there. Each character in the book has their own sort of “heart problem” while Birds being that she lost her stepfather and she wants to have normal family.
Bird usually portrays an image of bad luck that follows afterwards and in this novel, that is. the beginning of all the bad events that occur in the rest of the novel. It all started when Margaret Laurence introduced the life of Vanessa MacLeod. protagonist of the story, also known as the granddaughter of a calm and intelligent woman. I am a woman.
Catherine is free-spirited, wild, impetuous, and arrogant as a child, she grows up getting everything she wants as Nelly describes in chapter 5, ‘A wild, wicked slip she was’. She is given to fits of temper, and she is torn between her wild passion for Heathcliff and her social ambition. She brings misery to both of the men who love her, ultimately; Catherine’s selfishness ends up hurting everyone she loves, including herself.
The first, most obvious trait of Catherine’s heroism is that she values human relationships above materialism. Nothing is more important to Catherine than her lover, Henry, and as the novel goes on, her baby. When Henry is injured and sent to Milan, she has no trouble transferring to the new hospital there. Catherine loves Henry and would drop anything to be with him. Nothing material holds her back from being with him. Even when they live in Switzerland, they don’t have many material possessions. They live very simple lives because all the couple really needs is each other. In chapter forty, Henry describes their time together with this quote, "When there was a good day we had a splendid time and we never had a bad time. We knew the baby was very close now and it gave us both a feeling as though something were hurrying us and we could not lose any time together." Catherine obviously values her time with Henry more than anyone else, but it isn’t the physical aspect of getting out and doing things that satisfies her. What satisfies Catherine is the extra time she gets to spend with the love of her life b...
Catherine’s revenge does not make things better for her. Her revenge on Heathcliff by blaming him for her upcoming death does not meliorate her mind. Just before she dies, she ascribes Heathcliff for her “murder.” “You have killed me, and thriven on it, I think” (Bronte 158). Catherine resembles what Oliver Goldsmith said, “When lovely woman stoops to folly, and finds too late that men betray, what charm can soothe her melancholy?