Human nature can be extremely rough and create dangerous situations. It also affects how people behave. The author Jim Heynen wrote a short story called “What Happened During the Ice Storm” to shows how some boys acted differently than the norm in a harsh situation. After carefully reading the short story the reader will understand that human nature can create some challenging situations for people and people behave to those challenging situations.
At first the author paints a picture of a small village or town that is getting hit by a ice storm. The narrator shows how cold it is by commenting, “But the freezing rain kept coming. Tree branches glistened like glass. Then broke like glass. Ice thickened the windows until everything outside blurred” (Heynen 1). From this the reader can tell this isn't a regular snow day. Tree branches are freezing so much that they are just breaking like glass. Also the windows have become translucent from how thick the frozen ice is on them. The narrator also states, “Some farmers went ice-skating down gravel roads” (Heynen 1). The gravel road is so frozen that a person can ice skate on it. That itself shows how cold it is outside in this story. The reader should be able to tell
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The narrator explains, “Farmers moved their livestock into the barns, and most animals were safe. But not the pheasants” (Heynen 1). This shows the reader that pheasants were considered important to keep alive. All the other animals were brought inside and taking care of while the peasants were left outside in the storm. However it only gets worse. The narrator then goes on to comment, “Some farmers went ice-skating down the gravel roads with clubs to harvest the pheasants that sat helplessly in the roadside ditches” (Heynen 1). From the narrator adding the word ice-skating it gives a feel that this was fun it the farms. Killing these helpless birds was fun and
Setting: The book is set in a high school in Syracuse. Just from the way that Melinda explains Syracuse we can understand that she is not exactly thrilled to live there. The winters being long and brutal are what she hates the most. On a snowy day Hairwoman (her English teacher) asks the class what they though snow symbolized in the book that they were studying. Melinda finds it stupid that such a basic thing as snow has to have a symbolic meaning and she just thinks that “Hawthorne wanted snow to symbolize cold”. Now it is ironic that from such a sentence we can actually get a symbolic meaning. In this case Melinda seems to be talking about emotional cold and she always uses snow to talk about silence.
In the story,”What Happened During the Ice Storm,” the author, Jim Heynen, utilizes imagery to develop the theme of: be a leader of kindness, not a follower of violence. “Tree branches glistened like glass. Then broke like glass.” shows the contrast between the beauty that the cold rains brought, as well as the violence that came with it. This compares to, “went ice-skating…with clubs to harvest the "pheasants…” because both begin with an innocence, and end with contrasting violence. “...looking at each other, each expecting the other to do something. To pounce on a pheasant, or to yell Bang!” Exhibits how the boys were just waiting to follow whoever acted first, whether in violence or compassion, by describing their actions of uncertainty.
Tragedy strikes at every hour of the day, no matter where in the world a person lives. The true test of a person’s humanity is how they handle the tragedy. All over the country, people are hit with life changing catastrophes and feel hopeless. Taking their feelings out on others around them who are just trying to help, their pain translates into the bad traits of humanity such as selfishness, conceitedness and unreliability. Others though, work through their struggles and show the world how strong they can really be. People in terrible situations can also be mature, self-confident and sympathetic. It all really depends on the individual going through the tragedy. Many authors also play on this fact when they write their novels. For example, in Tatiana De Rosnay’s novel Sarah’s Key, De Rosnay’s characters go through some very powerful and personal struggles. Some characters put their best foot forward but others close up and only look out for themselves. Although people go through horrible personal tragedies, some people bring out the best traits in human nature and some bring out the worst.
He fig-ured that the normal half hour walk home might take as long as two hours in snow this deep. And then there was the wind and the cold to contend with. The wind was blowing across the river and up over the embankment making the snow it carried colder and wetter than the snow blanketing the ground. He would have to use every skill he’d learned, living in these hills, to complete the journey without getting lost, freezing to death, or at the very least ending up with a severe case of frostbite be-fore he made it back to Ruby.
Imagine you are looking out your window. White puffy snow starts piling up. How unexpected, you think as it nears two feet deep. Standing outside is impossible, you are blinded by white and bitter cold. This was what it was like for the people living in the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard of 1888. They portrayed the people in the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard as courageous and resourceful in the horrible storm.
The diction surrounding this alteration enhances the change in attitude from self-loath to outer-disgust, such as in lines 8 through 13, which read, “The sky/ was dramatic with great straggling V’s/ of geese streaming south, mare’s tails above them./ Their trumpeting made us look up and around./ The course sloped into salt marshes,/ and this seemed to cause the abundance of birds.” No longer does he use nature as symbolism of himself; instead he spills blame upon it and deters it from himself. The diction in the lines detailing the new birds he witnesses places nature once more outside of his correlation, as lines 14 through 18 read, “As if out of the Bible/ or science fiction,/ a cloud appeared, a cloud of dots/ like iron filings, which a magnet/ underneath the paper
January 12, 1888, a blizzard covered the northwest part of North America that claimed many lives. This blizzard was considered to be the worst blizzard of all time, and was dubbed the “the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard”, for claiming the lives of so many school children on their way home. The death toll of this murderous blizzard rose, because of lack of preparation and being uninformed. During this time, many farmers and families were unprepared to survive a blizzard of this magnitude, by the lack of clothing they wore. Forecasters were not as accurate enough to inform people on the weather conditions. Also, shelter was a major factor in protecting themselves from the winter storms, but the shelter was not stable
The Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan is a novel that discussed different climate periods that occurred. The setting of the novel occurred in Europe from 1300 to 1850. Throughout that time period the climate in Europe was changing quite drastically. The layout of this book was done chronologically and thematically. Fagan broke down the book into four different parts: Warmth and its Aftermath, Cooling Begins, The End of the “Full World”, and The Modern Warm Period. He also went further into breaking down each section from discussing the medieval warm period, to the climate seesaw, then to the specter of hunger, finally to a warmer greenhouse as well as other things in between. The way he wrote the book was not based on his personal experience. It
(6) The suddenness of the winter storm caught people by surprise. A roar “like an approaching train” was all the warning the storm gave. (130) The roaring wind and snow brought darkness and dropping temperatures. The people who were inside when the blizzard struck faced a dilemma. Staying inside and doing nothing seemed “heartless,” but going into the storm “on a rescue mission was likely to be fatal to the rescuer and useless to the lost.” (143) The people who were unfortunate enough to be away from home, whether they were at school or working with their livestock, had to make a difficult decision. They could either risk trying to make it home or chance it out and stay where they were. Schoolteachers had to decide whether to send the children home or keep them at the school. If anyone ventured outside, he or she risked frostbite, hypothermia, and likely
When the narrator introduced the main character of the story, the man, he made it clear that the man was in a perilous situation involving the elements. The man was faced with weather that was 75 degrees below zero and he was not physically or mentally prepared for survival. London wrote that the cold "did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold."(p.1745) At first when the man started his journey to the camp, he felt certain that he could make it back to camp before dinner. As the trip progressed, the man made mistake after mistake that sealed his fate. The man's first mistake was to step into a pool of water and soak his legs to the knees. This blunder forced the man to build a fire to dry his wet socks and shoes so his feet would not freeze and become frostbitten. When the man began to build a fire he failed to notice that he was doing so under a large, snow laden spruce tree where he was getting his firewood. When the man had a small fire that was beginning to smolder the disturbance to the tree caused the snow to tumble to the ground and extinguish the fire. "It was his own fault or, rather, his mistake. He should not have built the fire under the spruce tree. He should have built it in the open."(1750).
He acknowledges the suffering of the geese by arguing that there is no way to assess their pain. Later, Grunis compares the overcrowding and force-feeding of the geese to the industrial farming system in the United States of America. “Traditional agriculture has disappeared. It has been replaced by enormous farms, where animals are raised in harsh conditions. Thousands of chickens are crowded together in cages; calves are kept in extremely narrow stalls” (Sullivan).
The passage begins with the author establishing the mood with the use of the word “chatter”. It’s quite a positive word, which creates a light, happy atmosphere at the outset of the excerpt. The emphasis placed on “more” snow later on in the sentence lends to the interpretation that this passage takes place in the winter, with an abundance of snow and cold temperatures. We are then introduced to the 1st person perspective of the protagonist; the use of the word “maybe” indicates that it is a supposition, which is a contrast to the narrator’s descriptive tone. The rhetorical questions that follow this speculation give the reader an insight into the protagonist’s mind. She questions the birds’ ability to keep warm in the harsh cold, which illustrates her growing association between the cold and her husband’s death, a technique Glancy uses throughout the passage. Furthermore, the leap between the “little hearts” question and the “shovels” one is decidedly arbitrary, giving the first impressions of the protagonist’s unhinged mind.
Have you ever seen snow before? That white fluffy stuff that covers the ground completely. Well if you have, I am sure you have overcome an obstacle in your life and have reached something “irreplaceable and beautiful” (102). Just like Sister Zoe had said when she saw that snow falling from the sky. This story was very enlightening because the way the author brought in herself and portrayed herself through the character Yolanda was very intriguing. She brought the subject to life in many ways. However, the author of “Snow” uses two specific elements, its symbolism and its character to prove how overtime one individual will be able to overcome obstacles. Not only does theses elements point this out but the narrator also makes an impact of the reader as well.
As the plot unfolds, I feel the story's protagonist falls victim to several factors brought into play at once: his inexperience with the severity of the Klondike winters, his inability to envision the possible consequences of his decision to travel alone in such weather, a series of unfortunate events during his trip, and the misjudgment exercised in his attempts to survive those incidents. Though quick and alert, the man's lack of imagination renders him unable to visualize what might happen to a man traveling without a companion should adverse circumstances arise in such severe weather in an uninhabited landscape. When he indeed finds himself in dire straits as a result of getting wet in the brutal freezing weather, he once again fails to imagine how quickly the cold will threaten his life and consequently misjudges the severity of his situation. His poor judgment causes him to make one mistake after another until he finds himself incapable of extricating himself from his situation. It seems obvious that had he made himself more familiar with the culture of the land and paid attention to the warnings of the old-timer on Sulpher Creek, he might have chosen to delay his trip and live to travel another day.
captive by a sheath of frost, as were the glacial branches that scraped at my windows, begging to get in. It is indeed the coldest year I can remember, with winds like barbs that caught and pulled at my skin. People ceaselessly searched for warmth, but my family found that this year, the warmth was searching for us.