The style and motives of Ambrose Bierce are those of a great intellect and cynic. Ambrose Bierce used graphic images to get his message across in a lot of his stories such as "Chicamauga" and "The Affair at Coulter's Notch". A good portion of his short stories were stories of innocent people and soldiers and their experiences. He also wrote a book called "The Devil's Dictionary," which reinterprets a few terms in the English language. Ambrose Bierce's cynical perspective, which can be seen within his literary works, actually masks a sensitive idealist, who wants to create an awareness in the readers of the horrors of war as well as the injustices and insensitivities in people and society.
To start off, Ambrose Bierce used a lot of graphic images to deglorify war. There were many graphic images in the story ?Chicamauga?, for example, ? - lacked a lower jaw - from the upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone?. ?The unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, the fierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a great...
Hicks, Patrick. "War, Literature and the Arts." War, Literature and the Arts. An International Journal of the Humanitie, n.d. Web. 6 Dec. 2013. .
Robert Ross is a sensitive, private boy; last person you would expect to sign up to fight in World War One. In The Wars by Timothy Findley, symbols are used in conjunction with Ross’ story to cause readers to reflect on symbols in their own lives, and to allow then to dive deeper into the world of an innocent boy who is placed into a cruel war. The various symbols in The Wars provide for a graphic and reflective reading experience by emphasizing Robert’s connection with nature, his past, and his experiences during the war.
The inimitable novel “A Confederacy of Dunces” written by author John Kennedy Toole was not even published until after his suicide. The story in the pages of this novel reveals a hilarious, funny, sidesplitting, yet brilliantly crafted fictional masterpiece. The picaresque novel focuses on the life of the main character Ignatius J. Reilly. The character of Ignatius is a protagonist against the modern age. In his writing Toole saturates the narrative of the novel with an absurd sense of humor that stimulates both laughter and sympathy from readers. With his unique writing style Toole seamlessly combines, symbolism, sadness and humor in a literary
George Gittoes (b.1949) creates works that that communicate the issue of the graphic horror of war. A social realist painter, photographer and filmmaker, his approach to art is that ‘he layers and accumulates material until, out of apparent chaos, there is a synthesis of idea, passion and image’ (Mendelssohn, 2014). As an eyewitness to the world's war zones, Gittoes clearly uses his work as a means of communication to society.
In Winesburg Ohio, the reader is first introduced to “The Book of the Grotesque”. This introductory chapter, provides the reader with what might be considered a summary of the characters in the novel itself. The elderly writer, who has obviously seen and experienced a lot of the world’s turmoils, e.g. The Civil War , has been haunted by the faces of all the people he has ever known. The faces of these people are twisted and distorted, and ultimately appear “grotesque” to the elderly writer: It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.” (p.24).
The World Book Encyclopedia. 2000 ed. : p. 78. Griswold, Rufus Wilmot. The "Scarlet Letter" The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors. Ed.
Analysis of The Red Room by H.G Wells, The Signalman by Charles Dickens, and An Arrest by Ambrose Bierce
Within The Inferno Dante, the protagonist wanders off the moral path and gets lost in the dark woods. Almost attacked by wild animals he is saved by the ghost of Virgil, a popular Roman poet. Virgil guides Dante through the nine circles of Hell and through this journey Dante unveils his true feelings toward the political world during the medieval time. While Dante unleashes his hatred towards clericalism, in the epic poem of Canterbury Tales, Chaucer documents various social tensions in the 1300’s due to the explicit portrayal of thirty- four characters. Within The Inferno and Canterbury Tales, these vernacular writings illuminate anti-clericalism inspired by personal experiences during the medieval time.
What exactly is evil? Is it a tangible object or just an unperceivable idea? There are many theories to these two simple questions anywhere from a physical evil presence to one’s personal concept of what is evil to them. In literature, evil can take many different forms, including physical evil, inner evil, and a combination of the two. No matter what mode it takes though, the presence of evil in literature has always been influential in the plot and always has the same ending: death.
In the story Chickamauga by Ambrose Bierce, a young boy goes through a journey that, while unique to him, leads to a loss of childlike innocence that happens to all of us. All too soon, however, the boy wanders to far from home and becomes lost. In his journey to get back to his familiar home he experiences a gradual loss of his childlike innocence, culminating in a total loss of childhood innocence when he realizes that the dead woman he has found is his mother.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, written by American author Ambrose Bierce, is a story of one poor man’s fate at the hands of the Union Army during the 1800s in the American Civil War. A man named Peyton Farquhar, a successful planter in the Confederate States, is ultimately hanged by Union soldiers for sabotaging a railroad trestle. As he is falling to his imminent death by hanging, he experiences a false image of him escaping from the execution and making it home to his wife. The image he experiences is what is known today as a deathbed vision (DVs) or departing vision. Many people experience hallucination-like visions before passing away. The expression of someone’s “life flashing before their eyes” is referring to deathbed visions. This
A war hero is someone who risks their life for the good of others, and their country, one who shows mercy, is not arrogant, and shows true selflessness. These types of heros have been seen in the works of Bierce, Crane, Whitman, and Hersey.
German, Norman. “Imagery in the “Battle Royal”. CLA Journal Vol. XXXI(2001): 394-399. 11 June 1988
Mr Birling is the father, and leader of the Birling family. He is described by Priestly as a ''Portentous'' man. Throughout the first act, we see Arthur Birling being conveyed by the play write as a rather pompous and foolish character. He shows no remorse or concern for his wrongful actions, unless they affect his reputation. Birling is also portrayed as a defiant capitalist and extremely narrow minded.
people’s ruin. The scarlet letter set off a course of events one right after another that