In ‘The Chambered Nautilus’ by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Holmes uses a nautilus as a metaphor for human life. A nautilus is a sea creature that lives inside a spiral shell. As it grows, it makes new and larger chambers of its shell, closing off the old chambers and forming a spiral. According to legend, a female nautilus can still float and sail the sea by lifting up a purple membrane that would act in a similar way compared to the sails on a boat. Holmes first compares the nautilus to a ship, specifically of pearl because the inside of a nautilus’ shell has the appearance of a pearl. The rest of the stanza is what tells you that the supposed ‘purpled wings’, which would be the legendary purple membrane, are just a legend. Holmes writes that the ‘ship’ sails in the enchanted gulfs where the Sirens sing and the sea-maidens sun their hair. Sirens, and sea-maidens are both legends, not real beings and the ‘ship’ is sailing the ‘enchanted gulfs’ where those legendary creatures are residing. …show more content…
Showing the nautilus’ multiple homes and depicting the shell as a puzzle that can only be solved once the nautilus is dead and the shell has been broken.
Meanwhile, in the third stanza, Holmes writes about how the nautilus grows into a new chamber, leaving and closing off the old chambers. This is one of the stanzas where the human life metaphor shows more. Holmes uses the nautilus’ growing process within the shell as a representation of our lives. To symbolize how we cannot turn back to relive our past because it is closed off to us, just like the chambers with a nautilus, and we can no longer do anything about it.
Holmes, in the fourth stanza, switches from telling the story of the nautilus, to the reader, to talking directly to the nautilus. Holmes is thanking the nautilus for delivering the message of how we should live our lives – without looking back – even after its
Chief among these was Mary Holmes, wife of Peter Holmes and a relatively new mother. Though she receives little characterization over the course of the novel, this, in fact, does provide her with character details. By remaining static, Mary Holmes shows stronger than any other character the denial to accept their fate. As the novel takes its course, Mary and Peter are seen preparing for life after August, buying supplies for their child for when she grows older, planting a garden and trees in their front yard, and ignoring the news of the radiation reaching the northern areas of Australia. In the novel, one of the flowers mentioned to be growing in the garden is the narcissus (245), which shares its name with a man in a Greek myth who ignored all but himself, a parallel that can be drawn to Mary Holmes and her actions, or lack thereof, in the end of the world.
In the passage from the novel LUCY, author Jamaica Kincaid dramatizes the forces of self and environment, through her character whose identity is challenged with a move. The new home provided all she needed, but it was all so many changes, she “didn’t want to take in anything else” (15-16). Her old “familiar and predictable past”(40) stayed behind her, and she now had to find who she was in her new life. Kincaid uses detail, metaphor, and tone in the passage to show her character’s internal struggle.
There was a moment in “This Old House” when the young man looked around the house and noticed all the clutter, he thought maybe he was a part of the clutter or possibly the clutter was him. We tend to notice things after being a part of something bigger than yourself, but when we finally notice it may be too late. “Given enough time, I guess, anything can look good. All it has to do is survive” (264). Once the opportunity presents itself; you either get the desire to become something you are or something you wish you were, by branching away in order to live on your own, which reality sets and we are now independent. I am talking about the protagonist in this essay, which he starts to learn things while he is isolated and more independent from the others. When rosemary told the young man about how her father died, they also mentioned how crazy some people were, depending on their hat tolerance. Why is that you think? I believe it is a metaphor on how hats goes through so many adventure and you may notice its ragged up look after a while, but at the end of the day what has it been through to make it special. Well we come to find out that the young man finally views all the antiques and clutter around the house as to something that once was, but is now “Given enough time, I guess, anything can look good. All it has to do is survive” (264). He couldn’t explain the feeling that he may have figured out who he was for the first time in this essay, but throughout time we will figure out ourselves and possibly enjoy a happy
On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, the most expensive hurricane in American history, made landfall in Louisiana with winds of one hundred and twenty-seven miles per hour (“Hurricane Katrina Statistics Fast Facts”). The sheer magnitude of the amount of lives and property lost was enormous, and it was triggered simply by warm ocean waters near the Bahamas ("How Hurricane Katrina Formed"). Nature was indifferent to whether the raging winds and rain would die off in the ocean or wipe out cities; it only follows the rules of physics. A multitude of American authors has attempted to give accounts and interpretations of their encounters with the disinterested machine that is nature. Two authors, Stephen Crane and Henry David Thoreau, had rather contrasting and conflicting interpretations of their own interactions with nature. Crane’s work, “The Open Boat,” is story based on his experience as a survivor
...the chaos against which that pattern was conceived” (580). Here, the narrator is describing the process of discovering himself. Conceiving “a plan of living” (580) does not come independently; this plan must be patterned to succeed where a former plan had failed. In other words, the narrator must use the symbols of his old life—the contents of his briefcase—as the chaos against which a new pattern of living may be conceived. Therefore, it is only after the narrator shakes “off the old skin” (581), that he can declare that “the hibernation is over” (581). To leave the hole, to return to the world, the narrator has to learn from the objects who he is not; he had to realize “there is a death in the smell of spring” (580). To be reborn, as things do in springtime, something else must die; to emerge anew, the Invisible Man must leave behind the ashes of his former self.
The paradisiacal kingdom under the sea is symbolic of childhood. At the onset of the story, the sea kingdom is described: “where the waters are as blue as the petals of the cornflower and as clear as glass, there, where no anchor can reach the bottom,” and where “[one] would have to pile many church towers on top of each other” in order to reach the surface (Andersen 217). The sea describes the deep consciousness of the Little Mermaid as a young child, which is characterized by emotion, beauty, imagination, purity and innocence - representative successively of the water, flowers, the imaginative sim...
The functioning of the average human mind has intrigued and plagued philosophers and thinkers over centuries, one of the most curious and fascinating studies have been made into personages with dual personalities, schizophrenia being one of the factors. Similarly, in the book, The Strange Case, as well as in the film, Psycho, the books are taken place in late Victorian London, but Psycho is in late 60’s in the USA. The respective authors in these two texts portray that duality of human nature exists in society and humanity through the use of characterization and setting.
What Frederick Douglass was to the 19th century, it might be argued that James Baldwin was to the 20th century.
... fading but swirling’ within their mind. Watson’s extensive use of metaphors and symbolism allows the reader to form a perception towards the text which is relevant to their own experiences, creating a universal poem which can relate many aspects of the human condition while acknowledging the individuality of each. The ‘dead body’ is used to denote the transition for its ominous connotations and to enforce that the transition cannot be reversed, in the same way that a dead body can no longer be given life. He finally expresses it as ‘a finder’s fee that cannot claimed’ in that the loss of naivety to a greater awareness is unintentional and despite that, it can never the returned. Ultimately, the poem acts as a warning to the reader to heed in the psychological world through the raw display of the immediate effect that caused by experience within the human condition.
Welch opens the story with this line to show a relationship between the narrator's feelings of worthlessness and the worthlessness of his environment. In addition, the author melodically begins the novel in a somber manner ? so the reader may immediately adjust to the tone encompassing the story.
He feels like he is the only person who questions life and knows that it was not meant to be this way. Also, this quote sets a dark setting which then gives the reader an ominous feeling that is present throughout the novel. This also is related to the dark and dismal lives that everyone lives during this time. Finally, the main character describes his surroundings as a prison, or that it gives a prison-like feel. This also is related to how he feels different and trapped in this way of life.
On page 39, it describes the moment in which bullies from his school force him to go face to face with a skeleton in a doctor’s office. Such a terrible experience truly could have scarred Holmes, but at the same time his comfortability with an representation of death could have prompted his killer roots. Also, the “accidental” death of Holmes’s childhood friend, at an event that Holmes was present, was another red flag in terms of potentially becoming a psychopath. We learn more of Holmes’s younger upbringing through the text in which it states,"He drifted through childhood as a small, odd, and exceptionally bright boy....in the cruel imaginations of his peers, he became prey" (Larson, 38) Holmes was essentially an outcast, a person who has been rejected by society or a social group. He was the target of many because of his oddness and rather unique characteristics. With no solid upbringing, and a probable fascination with death, Holmes was bound to be the infamous serial killer he became in his future.
In the movie Holmes, in the beginning, was much more prideful and rude to Watson and people in general, but later on, Holmes was a lot nicer and somewhat humble at least compared to the book. This difference made the viewer feel less liking of the character of Holmes and it almost seemed that the director tried to save Holmes’s character by making him nicer at the ending. The difference had a big impact on the feeling of the movie because it felt that he was so stuck up he was rather unapproachable. ...
Through metaphors, the speaker proclaims of her longing to be one with the sea. As she notices The mermaids in the basement,(3) and frigates- in the upper floor,(5) it seems as though she is associating these particular daydreams with her house. She becomes entranced with these spectacles and starts to contemplate suicide.
At the beginning of the novel the reader is informed that Marlow is “not typical”, that he, contrary to stay-at-home-minded seamen, is a “wanderer”. He has no home, in a psychological sense of the word. He simply “follows the sea”. This may evoke an interpretation that the man is disturbed, that he attempts to find out about the secrets of his soul, to get to know himself. Since boyhood he had been interested in unexplored lands and especially in a long winding snake-like river with the “head” in the sea and the “tail” plunging deeply into the land, which, as Marlow admits, “charmed” him. This image resembles a map of a journey from the dark lands of the soul, the unconstrained, uncivilised core, which may be called a Freudian Id, towards light, that is Superego. Marlow desires to follow this path in the opposite di...