The Arm Of The Starfish Theme Essay

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As most books do, Madeleine L'Engle’s The Arm of the Starfish has many recurring themes. Similar to books, other forms of stories also contain these themes. This includes movies, music, plays, and poetry. After analyzing Robert Frost’s poem, Two Tramps in Mud Time, I picked up on a few themes that correspond with with the story line of The Arm of the Starfish. Themes are important to recognize in stories because it deepens the reader’s understanding of the emotions within the story.The three main themes I came across between this book, and poem were trust, business, and choosing between good and evil.

The first theme I recognized was choosing between good and evil. This is a theme that can particularly connect to the reader, because it’s …show more content…

This may seem minor and obvious, but it does play an important role in both the book, and the poem. The first stanza of Two Tramps in Mud Time says, “I knew pretty well what he had in mind, he wanted to take my job for pay”. In the poem, two tramps are trying to take advantage of the narrator by taking his job, so they can get paid. In the book, both sides, O’Keefe’s and the Cutter’s, are trying to take advantage of Adam by manipulating him to get him to work for them. In the beginning of the book, Adam originally went to Portugal to work for O’Keefe. After he met Kali in the airport, and she told him to watch out for O’Keefe, he wondered if it was really safe. After hearing both sides of the story, and figuring out that O’Keefe was his safest bet, he discovers he made the right choice. O’Keefe’s regeneration experiment wasn’t just a hobby, he was using it for a good cause. He was trying to see if humans could regenerate limbs just as starfish could, since he discovered something humans and starfish have in common. If the experiment had gotten into the wrong hands, like Typhoon Cutter’s, he could have abused the science of the experiment. This theme is important because it displays the main scenario of the story. Adam first got into this ordeal by an invite to work in O’Keefe's …show more content…

The second stanza of Two Tramps in Mud Time says, “That day, giving a loose my soul, I spent on the unimportant wood”. This line tells that the narrator is recognizing they are wasting their time with strangers. In The arm of the Starfish, with limited time and trust, Adam needed to decide which of the sides would be considered a waste of his time, due to lack of trust or importance. The poem also had an interesting part in stanza four. It said, “The lurking frost in the earth beneath, that will steal forth after the sun is set, and show on the water its crystal teeth”. I interpreted this as saying that after you get on someone’s “good side” , and your friendship is warm, it’s easy for that person’s dark side to emerge. Adam was smart, recognizing that Kali could’ve potentially be playing him. Adam pretended as if he were totally on her side, despite that fact that he actually still was rushing on her. Little did Kali know, O’Keefe had told Adam what she could’ve been planning. Kali then turned on Adam, as if i would be a total shock to him. The last line of this stanza said, “...and show on the water its crystal teeth”. This goes to say that beneath somones still surface, they can have an entirely different character with different intentions. Trust is a huge theme of this book, if not the single most important. Trust is used to portray how Adam interacts with different characters, and what he bases his quick decisions off

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