In the beginning of Papa’s Parrot, by Cynthia Rylant, the protagonist, Harry Tillian, who is the son of Mr.Tillian who owns a candy and nut shop loves his dad's store. Growing up he went there everyday after school and so did his friends. Although harry stopped liking candy and nuts at age seven he loved his dad's store. This all changed the year Harry got into junior high school. He did not come to the candy and nut shop often and neither did his friends. They went to the burger place and the arcade to play video games, they weren't little anymore, his dad got bored because no one kept him company and bought a overpriced parrot named Rocky. Whenever Harry ended school and passed by his dad's shop he saw him talking to the parrot and doing
Ethel Waters overcame a very tough childhood to become one of the most well known African American entertainers of her time. Her story, The Eye on the Sparrow, goes into great detail about her life and how she evolved from taking care of addicts to becoming the star of her own show. Ethel was born by her mother being raped at a young age. Her father, John Waters, was a pianist who played no role in Ethel’s life. She was raised in poverty and it was rare for her to live in the same place for over a year. Ethel never fit in with the rest of the crowd; she was a big girl, about five nine when she was a teenager, and was exposed to mature things early in her life. This is what helped shape Ethel to be the strong, independent woman she is.
Parrot in the Oven, by Victor Martinez, is a novel that portrays the lives that forty-five million Americans live every day from the point of view of Manny Hernandez, the main character of this book. He is a Mexican-American citizen who lives in the projects of his hometown in California. Manny lives with his mother, his abusive father, his two sisters Pedi and Magda, and Nardo, his irresponsible older brother. Throughout the story, Manny goes through many big events that help him discover what his real values should be and who he really is. Scenarios including speaking too soon, rebelling against his father and joining a gang that changed his character drastically. Manny gradually shifts from obliviously reckless, to outgoing and cautious,
Sven Birkerts essay, “The Owl Has Flown” taken from The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age 1994 focuses on the immature thoughts of using electronics with our reading. He refers to the past on multiple occasions, giving the reader the sense that Birkerts may think that the past was a much better way of reading. When Birkerts talks about reading he also means learning and interpreting, getting the understanding from what we read. The depth of reading has changed a lot since the middle ages and Birkerts believes that it has changed and will continue to change for the worse. A quote from my reading of this essay that really tore at me is, “As we now find ourselves at a cultural watershed—as the fundamental process of transmitting information is shifting from mechanical to circuit-driven, from page to screen—it may be time to ask how modifications in our way of reading may impinge upon our mental life. For how we receive information bears vitally on the ways we experience and interpret reality.” the reason for this becoming an obstacle for me is that I agree and disagree with him.
John Updike's short story "A&P" is about a teenager who has to make a serious decision. The story is set in an A&P supermarket in a town north of Boston, probably about the year 1960. As the plot unfolds, Sammy changes from being a thoughtless and sexist boy to being a young man who can make a decision, even though it might hurt him.
In Song of the Hummingbird by Gracie Limon, It’s clear by chapter three that Father Benito and Hummingbird are starting to reach an impasse. He could no longer hold his tongue “This woman who had a way of prying out thoughts and feeling of which he was not aware”. With her story of transgression, incest and murder her sin was to be forgiven in eyes of the lord, but she wanted Father Benito words. His thoughts conflicted, so he was surprised that the words he spoke were forgiveness. At this point, Hummingbird feels ready to start the next level of her story. I liked in the dialog that it express every insecurity Father Benito went through when saying he forgives her. To me, he seems that he can no longer stand to hear more like he wants to sing
In the short story A&P by John Updike, the story is told in a first person narrative of a teenage boy working as a cashier in an A&P grocery store on a hot summer day. The story begins with the teenage boy named Sammy becoming preoccupied by a group of three teenage girls that walk into the grocery store wearing bathing suits. Sammy admires the girl's beauty as most nineteen year old adolescent boys would, in a slightly lewd and immature nature. His grammar is flawed and he is clearly not of an upper-class family, his job appears to be a necessity for a son of a family that is not well off. The name he gives the girl who seems to be the object of his desire, Queenie, portrays a social difference from himself. Sammy further imagines the differences in class and living style when he describes Queenie's voice as "kind of tony, the way it ticked over 'picked up' and 'snacks'." He imagines her with aristocratic home life in describing “her father and the other men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big glass plate and they were holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them."Sammy compares his own parents occasions, where they serve their guests "lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with 'They'll Do It Every Time' cartoons stenciled on."
The short story Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot, by Robert Olen Butler is a story about just what the title suggests. The husband that returns in the form of a bird died because of an accident he had while he was investigating a situation with his wife. He heard her mention the name of a new guy at work more than three times so he took it upon himself to look of the man’s address and go to spy on his house to see if his wife was cheating on him. When he got there he heard “funny little sounds” coming from a second floor window so he decided to climb a tree to investigate. He was out on a limb trying to peek through the window when he ran out of branch, and fell to the ground before he could see what was going on in the house. After his fatal fall from that branch, he returned to life but as a bird instead which is incredibly ironic. The story, Jealous Husband, is filled with irony, as almost every main point about the main character is ironic. The strong use of irony in this story is used by
“Mother Hens Cluck: Cell Phones Support Learning” has stronger evidence and reasons. In the article they have many logical reasons along with evidence. For example, the author used the reason “They have the right to access a simple tool that can help make things easier for them.”, this reason make sense because it helps explain her claim of “My students have the right to use their cell phones at school as much as I do”. The evidence she used for the first claim was “I use it all the time, for everything both professionally. Why should've to my students?” This evidence is very logical because it is proving that if the teacher can use a phone, the students should be able to as well. Another reason she used was “Many of my kids have challenges
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ by Ken Kessey is a narrative of Chief Bromden, a severe schizophrenic in a psychiatric hospital. Chief is a Native American man who has habituated at the asylum the longest out of all the patients. He feigns to be deaf and dumb to prevent drawing attention to himself. According to Chief, the hospital is a giant machine referred to as the ‘Combine’, which is used to force the patients to abide by the rules. The hospital is visibly divided into two categories of patients, the ‘Acutes’ (curable) and the ‘Chronics’ (incurable). The men are dictated by the heinous Nurse Ratched, a cold and uncompassionate woman. This tale begins with the introduction of the Chief, Nurse Ratched and her aides. Chief often slips into the ‘fog’,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was written by Ken Kesey. The book is about a guy named Randle Patrick McMurphy. It all starts out where he goes to a mental hospital and is introduced to to Chief Bromden, who is also the half- indian narrator of the book. He has been in the hospital for ten years, he suffers from hallucinations and delusions. Bromden pretends to be deaf and dumb to be unnoticed, but he is six feet seven inches tall. It made it quite hard for him to be hidden from anything being the odd person out of everyone there because he just stuck out like a sore thumb. All of the mental patients are males and are divided into acutes who are curable, and chronics who can not be cured. Nurse Ratched is a nurse who runs the ward and everyone
Plot Summary: With a turning of each page, author introduces various animals and people, and ask them what they see. Students first meet Brown Bear followed by Red Bird, Yellow Duck, Blue Horse, Green Frog, Purple Cat, Black Sheep, Goldfish, Teacher and Children. Each character sees another in a predictable pattern, which is repeated over and over until a student can join in with a teacher and easily predict the next lines. The creative rhyming finishes with the summary of all the characters that the “children” have seen.
The main character, Zebra, tells a story about a bird with a broken wing in “Zebra” a short story created by Chaim Potok. The reader can infer that the injured bird plays a significant part in Zebra’s story and tells the reader more about Zebra’s emotions. This quote shows just how the bird with the broken wing, in Zebra’s story, compares to him: “When it was Zebra’s turn, he told a story about a bird that one day crashed against a closed windowpane and broke a wing. A boy tried to heal the wing but couldn’t. The bird died, and the boy buried it under a tree on his lawn” (Potok 51). The reader can guess that the bird is very significant because it compares to Zebra. One way that the wounded bird and Zebra are similar is that both of them cannot do the things they love since they got hurt during a fatal accident. The bird cannot fly and Zebra cannot run. Also,
People often take their place in society for granted. They accept that position into which they are born, grow up in it, and pass that position on to their children. This cycle continues until someone is born who has enough vision to step out of his circle and investigate other ways of life in which he might thrive. One such person is embodied in the character of Sammy in A&P, by John Updike. Sammy is the narrator of the story and describes an incident in the store where he encounters a conflict between the members of two completely different worlds the world that he was born into and the world of a girl that captures his mind. Through his thoughts, attitudes, and actions, Sammy shows that he is caught between the two worlds of his customers at the A&P.
In the novel A Bird In The House, Margaret Laurence illustrates the theme of physical entrapment. All of the characters in the novel feel the need to escape their personal situation. In fact, the title is a symbol of entrapment because of the bird that is. trapped in the house and is also trying to get out. From my background knowledge.
The apocalypse of the birds continues, even after three months, isolating Nat’s family knowing that he is the sole survivor of the nearby area. Nat and his family have enough food from nearby stores that have dead bodies of the public that thought of this attack as a mere change of weather. Time goes so slow for Nat’s family that they could feel the earth rotating fifteen degrees per hour.