In Rachel Klein’s The Moth Diaries the narrator guides readers through what she believes is the discovery of a vampire living across the hall, but her older self writes it off as a mental illness. The reader does not want to trust a narrator discredited by a more mature self, but the sixteen year-old remains the only authority through whom to analyse the events of the narrative. Early on the narrator reveals her unreliability, expressing her first sight of the Residence “felt as if I had woken up in a dream. No, not a dream. Dreams aren’t real. I had entered a different time and place…This wasn’t a school; it was a castle” (Klein, 2004, pp. 8-9). The unsuspecting reader skims over the narrator’s inability to identify her location within her …show more content…
(Atwood & Lee, 2007, p. 123)
The school, Brangwyn, like many fictional prep schools, has a very un-Americanness about it. Perhaps this is a product of the common reader’s unfamiliarity with uniforms and boarding schools, but through the lens Atwood and Lee (2007) the reader begins to understand how the narrator lacks a locatable self and why claiming her identity is such a challenge. By the time the reader enters the narrative, the narrator has accepted Brangwyn’s autocracy for three years, and she has learned to conform. This is seen through her compulsion to belong at the school, and the pride she takes in fitting into the school’s expectations. After reflecting on her first, nervous dinner, the narrator states, “Now I’m one of those older girls. I hurry through diner and go down for a smoke afterward. I have lots of friends, and no one stares” (Klein, 2004, p. 15). Unlike a typical adolescent narrator, the narrator of The Moth Dairies takes pride in blending in rather than expressing her individuality. By the time she begins
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Where uncanniness is solved by Jackson’s heroines taking possession of their identities, the American prep school and Schoolhouse Gothic traditions The Moth Diaries follow attack the identity that the narrator attempts to take possession of. Where Jackson’s heroines are able to take possession of themselves and resolve the uncanniness of their narratives, the narrator is not allowed to keep possession herself. The social forces her “self” fights against are too strong to prevail over. Instead, she is forced to accept the womanhood the masculine “self” Martin identified has no desire to achieve. The uncanniness linked to the narrator’s lack of a locatable self is a result of the uncertainty Jackson and Freud discuss, but also the cause of this lack created by Brangwyn, Atwood and Lee’s American prep school, robbing the narrator of Martin’s “masculine
In the Time of the Butterflies is a historical fiction novel by Julia Alvarez based on events that occurred during the rule of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. This book shows the hardships the Mirabal Sisters had to go through while being part of an underground effort to overthrow the dictatorship of Trujillo. It also shows that ultimately, it was their courage that brought upon their own death. Alvarez wants us to understand anyone and everyone has the potential to be courageous.
In the short story "Leaving the Iron Lung" Carter, Anne Laurel Carter emphasizes contrasting characters to demonstrate that dreams and safety have their own limits. First, Agathe represents Pauline’s safety
Helena Maria Veramontes writes her short story “The Moths” from the first person point of view, placing her fourteen year old protagonist female character as a guide through the process of spiritual re-birth. The girl begins the story with a description of the debt she owes her Abuelita—the only adult who has treated her with kindness and respect. She describes her Apa (Father) and Ama (Mother), along with two sisters as if they live in the same household, yet are born from two different worlds. Her father is abusive, her mother chooses to stay in the background and her sisters evoke a kind of femininity that she does not possess. The girl is angry at her masculine differences and strikes out at her sisters physically. Apa tries to make his daughter conform to his strict religious beliefs, which she refuses to do and her defiance evokes abuse. The girl’s Abuelita is dying and she immerses herself in caring for her, partly to repay a debt and partly out of the deep love she has for her. As her grandmother lay dying, she begins the process of letting go. The moth helps to portray a sense of spirituality, re-birth and becomes, finally, an incarnation of the grandmother. The theme of the story is spiritual growth is born from human suffering.
This expedition of sort is demonstrated when Lily, having lost her mother as a young child, seeks a sense of comfort within the Boatwright sisters and the bees. Experiencing this sense of comfort and joy for the first time, given from the bees, Lily is met with a feeling of euphoria and excitement. However, upon realizing that the love she was feeling wasn’t truly from a mother, Lily described a dramatic change in feelings as, “Then, without all warning, all the immunity wore off, and I felt the hollow spooned-out space between my navel and breastbone begin to ache. The motherless place” (Kidd 150-151). Due to the dramatic contrast between the two emotions, it is evident that the theme, how the lack of a motherly figure leads to a missing part in a person’s life, is constructed using the structure. The sudden change from exhilaration to guilt and sorrow adds to the organization of the passage. By including such a dramatic shift between emotions, the author draws the reader’s attention to the contrasting feelings. Because the euphoria that Lily was experiencing was converted back to dysphoria, it is evident that the lack of having a mother in a child’s life cannot be fulfilled with another feeling. Thus, Lily is lead back to the start of her
Under the orders of her husband, the narrator is moved to a house far from society in the country, where she is locked into an upstairs room. This environment serves not as an inspiration for mental health, but as an element of repression. The locked door and barred windows serve to physically restrain her: “the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” The narrator is affected not only by the physical restraints but also by being exposed to the room’s yellow wallpaper which is dreadful and fosters only negative creativity. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”
In relation to the theme of isolation in this novel, Anderson uses this chapter to illustrate how the characters in the town of Winesburg should be perceived. Characters that are “grotesque” because they live their lives by a single “truth” that prevents them from maturing, developing, and ultimately growing into what Anderson...
Throughout Marilynne Robinson’s works, readers are often reminded of themes that defy the status quo of popular ideas at the time. She explores transience and loneliness, amongst other ideas as a way of expressing that being individual, and going against what is deemed normal in society is acceptable. Robinson utilizes traditional literary devices in order to highlight these concepts.
“I slept… but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth…. as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death…and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms…and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel” (43).
Anne Tyler’s “Teenage Wasteland” is a story about a modern day family of four and the relationship issues they experienced with each other. The story is presented in third person limited; however, the reader is shown much about how the mother of the family feels and the troubles she experiences in her relationships with her husband and children, primarily her son Donny. Daisy is portrayed as a mother who worries that she had failed Donny because of his continual disobedience toward the authority figures in his life. Donny is a teen who constantly misbehaves in school and in the story is described as “noisy, lazy, and disruptive; always fooling around with his friends, and would not respond in class.” (188). These behaviors lead Donny to poor grades in school. Daisy takes Donny to a tutor who is supposed to help Donny improve his grades and make better choices in life. The tutor turns out to own a “teenage wasteland” as referred to in the story that was a place that “teenage hoodlums” hang out. Donny starts to get worse in school and eventually gets kicked out. After Donny gets kicked out of school, he leaves his hometown and his whereabouts become unknown. Daisy is left in shock, wondering where she went wrong in young Donny’s life.
“How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar events – that I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire – when in fact I am lying undressed in bed! […] All this would not happen with such distinctness to someone asleep. Indeed! As if I did not remember other occasions when I have been tricked by exactly similar that’s while asleep!”
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; Or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You." Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 1-37.
I had gone. . . to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring (13).
Karen Russel’s “Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers” follows Elijah, a post-munition dreamer, among a group of sleep-troubled campers. Through a clever usage of character, imagination, and flashback, Russel has created an unforgettable story that also provides insight on how to make a story work well. Although a specific age is not given to the narrator, it can be inferred that Elijah is around or passed the onset of puberty. Given his age, the almost fantastical elements in the story are easier to accept.
Her father works out of town and does not seem to be involved in his daughters lives as much. Her older sister, who works at the school, is nothing but plain Jane. Connie’s mother, who did nothing nag at her, to Connie, her mother’s words were nothing but jealousy from the beauty she had once had. The only thing Connie seems to enjoy is going out with her best friend to the mall, at times even sneaking into a drive-in restaurant across the road. Connie has two sides to herself, a version her family sees and a version everyone else sees.
Through metaphors, the speaker proclaims of her longing to be one with the sea. As she notices The mermaids in the basement,(3) and frigates- in the upper floor,(5) it seems as though she is associating these particular daydreams with her house. She becomes entranced with these spectacles and starts to contemplate suicide.