The story “Ranch Girl,” by Maile Meloy, is darkly symbolic and full of disobliging introspection. The main character struggles to find meaning in an uneven and arbitrary existence. Via willful ignorance or merely the tribulations of a woman less fortunate than she herself believes, her internal conflict is unveiled as illusion. Yet she remains confined. While her ultimate goal is the modest life with her wanted cowboy, she is perpetually unable to reach her dreams, and unable to change them. The starkness of her self-wrought prison lends a certain sad ambiance to her world, reflected through characters that paint the setting. Her dreams flutter and settle unfulfilled, like dry dust, stirred by the story’s cattle. The main character’s self-esteem flags at every turn. She’ll never be the debutant nor will she ever ride English. She’ll always have the proverbial ringlets in her hair, and the disgusting …show more content…
The setting is nearly a character. Lonely, a bit disgusting, not wholesome, but with a semi-authentic dreaminess. Towns are made of people and towns are full of people, this town is no different. The characters could’ve told the story without the ranch girl. We could have read about Carla, or Andy, or Haskell, Suzy or even Lacey or any others, and been left with much the same story. They all live without growing, little things change but their lives stagnate. They don’t grow into greater things than themselves. Their victories are bitter because they are meaningless. Their failures, crippling. Lacey won’t get Andy either. The ranch girl’s father, can’t quit his job. For all his swagger, Andy is dead. Carla’s marriage doesn’t work out. These pieces of quilt, that make this story, may not directly be the setting, but without them the story has no setting. This town is a dead end. It swallows everyone mentioned in the story in one way or another, or rather they all allow themselves to be
Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country gives readers a look into the federal government’s failed policy to preserve grazing lands by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of livestock with a particular focus on women. Centering around women because they are the primary owners and caretakers of livestock in Navajo reservations.
Woman Hollering Creek is a book of short stories published in 1991. The author, Sandra Cisneros, separated her book into three sections. The section that will be analyzed is the first section where the narrators are female children. Out of the many stories in section one, the three that will be focused on are, "Mericans," "My Friend Lucy Who Smells Like Corn," and "Barbie-Q." The children in these three stories are all lower class, Mexican-American females. These stories have been described by Thompson as Cisneros remembering her childhood, filled with no male figures, lack of close female friendships, and poverty (415-417). Each story shares both similar themes and different themes.
McCarthy’s plot is built around a teenage boy, John Grady, who has great passion for a cowboy life. At the age of seventeen he begins to depict himself as a unique individual who is ambitious to fulfill his dream life – the life of free will, under the sun and starlit nights. Unfortunately, his ambition is at odds with the societal etiquettes. He initiates his adventurous life in his homeland when he futilely endeavors to seize his grandfather’s legacy - the ranch. John Grady fails to appreciate a naked truth that, society plays a big role in his life than he could have possibly imagined. His own mother is the first one to strive to dictate his life. “Anyway you’re sixteen years old, you can’t run the ranch…you are being ridiculers. You have to go to school” she said, wiping out any hopes of him owning the ranch (p.15). Undoubtedly Grady is being restrained to explore his dreams, as the world around him intuitively assumes that he ought to tag along the c...
The setting takes place mostly in the woods around Andy’s house in Pennsylvania. The season is winter and snow has covered every inch of the woods and Andy’s favorite place to be in, “They had been in her dreams, and she had never lost' sight of them…woods always stayed the same.” (327). While the woods manage to continually stay the same, Andy wants to stay the same too because she is scared of growing up. The woods are where she can do manly activities such as hunting, fishing and camping with her father. According to Andy, she thinks of the woods as peaceful and relaxing, even when the snow hits the grounds making the woods sparkle and shimmer. When they got to the campsite, they immediately started heading out to hunt for a doe. Andy describes the woods as always being the same, but she claims that “If they weren't there, everything would be quieter, and the woods would be the same as before. But they are here and so it's all different.” (329) By them being in the woods, everything is different, and Andy hates different. The authors use of literary elements contributes to the effect of the theme by explaining what the setting means to Andy. The woods make Andy happy and she wants to be there all the time, but meanwhile the woods give Andy a realization that she must grow up. Even though the woods change she must change as
Walker goes a step further, however, by using hooking cows and hangdog looks to reinforce the major themes of her story”(Christian 185). Walker is a writer who can not only touch African Americans with her writing, but also those who have never knew what it meant to live and grow up in those type of conditions. Walker in her writing showed what be enslaved meant; she wrote from the angle of trying to entail the love overpowered whatever position they were in.
The novel is set during the Great Depression, which was “a time of great economic turmoil and disaster” (American History), in Soledad, California. Before the characters are fully introduced, there is a sense of isolation already because the name of the town literally translates to loneliness in Spanish (Study Spanish). Most of the characters experience loneliness. The reader quickly learns that Lennie is a lonely character when George reminds Lennie: "guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place" (Steinbeck 15). As the novel continues, the reader quickly learns that the workers are not the only ones who are lonely; Crooks, Candy and Curley's wife also confess their loneliness. Candy experiences loneliness due to his disability and his age. Candy lost his hand after an accident involving machinery, which ultimately forces him to stay behind. His age also causes Candy to feel a sense of loneliness because he is...
As defined by Edgar Roberts setting is “the natural, manufactured, political, cultural, and temporal environment including everything that the characters own. Characters may be either helped or hurt by their surroundings and they nay fight about possessions or goals” (Roberts 109). In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, this setting is the focal point. Every natural event or decision made by the characters is unique to the wild platform on which it takes place. The setting of the West, including the mindless violence within this setting and the merciless desert that it holds, shapes the story and characters therein on a magnitude so great that the characters have no control over it.
Laura Ingalls Wilder may be viewed as one of the greatest children’s authors of the twentieth century. Her works may be directed towards a younger crowd but people of all ages enjoy her literary contributions. The way that Wilder’s books are written guarantees that they have a place among classics of American literature (“So many…” 1). Laura Ingalls Wilder’s form of writing portrays an American family’s interworking in a journey through childhood.
The setting of a story is the physical and social context in which the action of a story occurs.(Meyer 1635) The setting can also set the mood of the story, which will help readers to get a better idea pf what is happening. The major elements of the setting are the time, place, and social environment that frame the characters. (Meyer 1635) "Trifles by Susan Glaspell portrays a gloomy, dark, and lonely setting. Glaspell uses symbolic objects to help the audience get a better understanding for the characters. The three symbolizes used are a birdcage, a bird, and rope.
Whether the setting of a story is insignificant or important strictly depends on the way the author develops the time, place, atmosphere, and social context. In Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” and “A Rose for Emily” the setting becomes a huge contributor toward the overall mood and timeline of the stories. Faulkner wrote these two short stories in such a way that the audience feels like they’re living in that dusty old house or the farming community in rural Mississippi.
One of the main symbols of the story is the setting. It takes place in a normal small town on a nice summer day. "The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full summer day; the flowers were blooming profusely and the grass was richly green." (Jackson 347).This tricks the reader into a disturbingly unaware state,
Upon reading the first paragraph, Shirley Jackson describes the town in general. The town is first mentioned in the opening paragraph where she sets the location in the town square. She puts in perspective the location of the square "between the post office and the bank" (196). This visualizes for the reader what a small town this is, since everything seems to be centralized at or near the town square. This is also key in that the town square is the location for the remaining part of the story. The town square is an important location for the setting since the ending of the story will be set in this location. Also, Shirley Jackson creates a comfortable atmosphere while describing the residents of the town. First, she describes the children gathering together and breaking into "boisterous play"(196). Also, the children are described as gathering rocks, which is an action of many normal children. She described the men as gathering together and talking about "planting and rain, tractors and taxes"(196). Finally, she describes the women of this community as "exchanging bits of gossip"(196) which is a common stereotype of women. She creates a mood for the reader of the town and residents of this town on a normal summer morning.
The setting of the town is described by the author as that of any normal rural
The stories setting takes place in Western Colorado. In Western Colorado in a home of a retired nurse named Annie is where the whole story takes place. Annie's home is a two story log cabin out in the middle of nowhere. The closest neighbors are miles away. It takes place in the middle of winter snow storms.
While the setting for Sherman Alexie's "This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona" and William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" differ, their settings develop different themes and perspectives. These two stories are similar in some ways and different in others because, one is in the Northwest of Arizona vs. the Deep South. Depending on where you are can determine the mood, tone, and sometimes it can even symbolize something. In “This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona” the settings change throughout the story. As for “A Rose for Emily” the setting stays the same through the whole story. The setting helps to set the mood, it can have a symbolic meaning and sometimes it helps in explaining why the characters act the way that they do. In these two stories the setting is important and plays a major role.