“On the Divide,” tells the story of a young girl, Lena, who is forced into marrying a man who the entire Divide is terrified of. Canute is a man of extra large stature, he keeps to himself and nobody seems to know much about him other than that he drinks a lot. Lena has always had plans of marrying Canute, but rather in her own time. The two live in the Midwest, which Cather describes the entire time as a place that is constantly dreary, the weather and life here seems to become a part of the people, “Men fear the winters of the Divide”(2) the Divide is not a pleasant place to live. The entire Divide seems to be plagued by the place in which they live, hot or cold, “Insanity and suicide are very common things on the Divide.”(3) The weather
Split is an award-winning, realistic fiction book written by Swati Avasthi. The book has a total number of 280 pages, and it could be found in our school library. The story focuses mainly on two brothers, Jace and Christian Witherspoon. After years of suffering from abuse from his father, Jace eventually runs away from home like his older brother did before. Finding himself, bruised and tattered, at Christian’s doorsteps, Christian decides to take him in because he is family. Along with new identities and new friends, the story centers on the two brothers settling in to a better life while trying to figure a way to rescue someone that has been unable to escape from the wrath of their enemy for years: their mother. However, they are left with a devastating answer. This report will focus on one of the primary protagonists, Jace Witherspoon, a significant event, and the overall theme that the author is trying to convey.
The narrator, upon meeting Ethan Frome for the first time, thought "he seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface." He "had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, but had in it…the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters" (Wharton, 9).
Finally, even though, for a long time, the roles of woman in a relationship have been established to be what I already explained, we see that these two protagonists broke that conception and established new ways of behaving in them. One did it by having an affair with another man and expressing freely her sexuality and the other by breaking free from the prison her marriage represented and discovering her true self. The idea that unites the both is that, in their own way, they defied many beliefs and started a new way of thinking and a new perception of life, love and relationships.
Jonathan Kozol is an American writer from Boston, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Harvard University. He began his career as a teacher in the Boston school system and also became involved in the study of social psychology. This lead to his involvement as an activist for low income and poverty destined children who are not provided the means for a proper education.
Conflict is an important part of any short story. The short story, “On the Sidewalk Bleeding,” contains three major conflicts: man vs. man, man vs. nature, and man vs. himself. In this essay, I intend to explain, prove, and analyze these three struggles.
The Midwest: land of TV news anchors, housewives, and dreary, never-ending fields. In her memoir “The Horizontal World”, Debra Marquart uses interesting rhetorical techniques to detail this vast, distinctly uninteresting plain. By using unusual figurative language, outside examples to solidify her points, and a geometric extended metaphor, she paints a picture of perhaps the most boring place on Earth.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Winter Dreams.” American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. Seventh ed. Vol. II. New York: Norton & Company, 2008. 1010-25. Print. The Norton Anthology.
Cather’s text clearly depicts the physical strains of daily life in Nebraska as opposed to life within more populated parts of the world. A Wagner Matinee gives just a small insight into the working life on a Nebraskan farm. Most individuals in the most popular parts of the world do not understand precisely how difficult it is to live a life that consists completely of physical labor. As the narrator describes what he remembers of his life on the form, he very distinctly recalls the physical pain he felt from working. “I became in short...
Tobias Wolff is framing his story Hunters in the Snow, in the countryside near Spokane, Washington, where three friends with three different personalities, decide to take a trip to the woods for hunting in cold, snowy weather. The whole story follows the hunting trip of these three friends. The reader can easily observe that the cold, hostile environment is an outward expression of how the men behave towards one another. Kenny, with a heart made of ice, is rather hostile to Tub, while Frank is cold and indifferent to Tub and his pleas for help. The environment is matching the characters themselves, being cold and uncaring as the author described the two from the truck when they laughed at the look of Tub: “You ought to see yourself,” the driver said.
He begins the piece by stating two different options to choose from: “Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice” (Lines 1-2). He then attributes love and desire to heat but says he has experienced the other side of cold which represents hate and destruction. “From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire. / But if it had to perish twice, / I think I know enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice is also great / And would suffice” (Lines 3-9). He’s indecisive in his decision-making, agreeing with both sides of the controversy. He knows that the world is to change (ending in fire or ice), but doesn’t know how or when. This is where his underlying fears become evident - he feels hopeless doom for the changes to come. The only way he can feel some control is if he thinks he knows how it will all end. Sometimes change is inevitable, however people still consciously worry about things they cannot control. By making the change and either/or situation, he feels more comfortable with accepting the change since there’s only one of two ways he could leave the
Frost is far more than the simple agrarian writer some claim him to be. He is deceptively simple at first glance, writing poetry that is easy to understand on an immediate, superficial level. Closer examination of his texts, however, reveal his thoughts on deeply troubling psychological states of living in a modern world. As bombs exploded and bodies piled up in the World Wars, people were forced to consider not only death, but the aspects of human nature that could allow such atrocities to occur. By using natural themes and images to present modernist concerns, Frost creates poetry that both soothes his readers and asks them to consider the true nature of the world and themselves.
(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
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. "Winter Dreams." Print. Rpt. in English 102 Course Pack. By Megan Newell. Montreal: Eastman Systems, 2012. 33-40. Print.
Niel and Ivy’s separate outlooks upon life – that of the Old West versus that of the Industrial Revolution – are as disparate as their appearances. Niel, with his “clear-cut [features, and] his grey eyes, so dark they looked black under his long lashes,” (Cather 33) represents the Old West and all its hopes and dreams, while Ivy with his red skin, harsh dimples like “a knot in a tree-bole,” (21) and his “fixed, unblinking” (21) eyes, is the realist of the next generation. Niel, younger than Ivy by several years, “had believed that man could live according to aesthetic ideals, and this belief is a positive one. However, he had not yet harmonized such ideals with human life” (Rosowski, Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady: The Paradoxes of Change, 59). It is this refreshing – though naïve – belief in the ability of men to rise above petty emotions, and particularly his reverence of Marian Forrester as an archetype of womanly goodness, which is slowly worn away in Niel as the novel progresses. When Niel returns to Sweet Water after his time away at a university, he meets Ivy, and from their brief conversation Niel realizes the difference between himself and Ivy. The men of the Old West, Niel realizes, were “dreamers, great-hearted adventurers who were unpractical to the point of magnificence; a courteous brotherhood, strong in attack but weak in de...
The three most important words within “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens, due to their connection with the concept of reality and perception, are “misery”, “bare” and “listener”. Throughout Wallace Stevens’ poem, the center of focus alternates between the reality of the winter scenery and the reality developed through the speaker’s perception of that scenery. The word “misery”, found in line 8, offers insight into the speaker’s understanding of the winter setting around them. The word “bare”, found in line 12, helps to define the physical illustration of the winter landscape described within the poem. The word “listener”, found in line 13, emphasizes the idea that realism is conformed to an individual’s judgement of their surroundings. As Wallace