Snapshots of Carver and O’Connor, Pre-Mortem
Raymond Carver is glaring from the other side of the table, one beefy arm dangling on a chair, the other planted firmly in front of him. His eyes are white, ethereally white, and his hair is a salt and pepper gray. He looks like someone who buys rounds of drinks for everyone at a bar downtown, or, as one critic noted, maybe he’s your son’s little league coach. He is tough but jowly, going slightly soft, like a man who had a hair-trigger temper once but has worked all these years to overcome it.
Flannery O’Connor, on the other hand, is a Sunday school teacher: bookish, awkward in a necklace, looking much older than 39. She is smiling crookedly, furtively, smiling away from us. At church socials, she would be a fixture, a great conversationalist, or possibly the woman that holds everything together, flitting from table to table, cooing in a gentle Georgia lilt.
You might see Carver at the hardware store, or O’Connor picking through the stacks at the library. You might spy Carver raking his lawn on Sundays; O’Connor would be trying to settle a group of eight-year olds in a church basement with colorful stories of Noah and Moses. They seem like people I know, people I have seen around town, people I wave to on Sunday mornings. Yet for all their vigor, for all their presence, their days are numbered. I know that these are snapshots of people who are going to die. In a few years, their vivacity will be undercut by mortality, their photographic presence instead marked with the great void of absence.
The later pictures show a Carver who is puffy, bald, with jowls dropping to the floor, paying for all those nights at the bar and all those cigarettes, a victim of intensive radiation treatment. O’Connor deteriorated in the opposite direction, not bloating but shrinking: the sinews in her neck jut out like those of a strange, scraggly bird, her soulful eyes bulge, and her body is rigid with lupus. In the final days, she had her God and her peacock farm in backwoods Appalachia. He had his friends, his writer’s reputation, his temporal achievements. Their intensive creative lives visible across their faces in the early photographs have been replaced by tranquility, the comforting promise of death, and a final absolution.
Flannery O'Connor's writings offer deep insight on the fallen nature of mankind through original sin, but redemption through the grace of Jesus Christ.
Therefore, Andrew Jackson, in summary, was very democratic in the way which he transformed American politics, advanced social equality, and served to protect the people. Andrew Jackson shouldn’t have been recognized as a “dictator” or “king”, to the contrary, he should’ve been exalted and praised as the true “people’s king” spreading pure democracy throughout America.
Flannery O’Connor was an American writer who wrote several short stories. O’Connor was known for shocking her readers with violence. O’ Connor had strong Christian beliefs that were reflected in her writings. O’ Connor once said:
A murdering messiah. A Bible-selling prosthesis thief. A corpse in full Confederate regalia waiting in line a Coca-Cola machine. One of the most haunting qualities about Flannery O'Connor's fiction is the often shocking but always memorable images adding intensity to her stories. Her violent comedy is a fusion of opposite realities--an explosive meeting between contradictory forces. She creates characters from the southern grandmothers, mothers, preachers, neighbors, and assorted "good country people" populating her world, using their traits, words and behaviors to give her fictional world life. And we are as familiar with them as she is. We know them; they could be people from our region, our town, our family. Just regular folks. But she pushes them beyond normal boundaries, beyond any reality we or they could imagine by introducing them to their opposite. The person on the other end of reality. For example, the grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" appears to be the stereotypical grandmother busily involved in her fami...
Hunter, Frederic. “Following the footsteps of Flannery O’Connor”. Christian Science Monitor 5 Sept. 2008: 19 Biography in Context. Web. 30 July 2015.
O’Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979, Print.
Kirk, Connie Ann. Critical Companion to Flannery O'Connor. New York: Facts on File, 2008. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 8 Feb. 2014.< http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.library.acaweb.org/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzIyOTQ4MV9fQU41?sid=1836ce9e-26f4-4cc4-af65-eb5e046a6668@sessionmgr110&vid=2&format=EB&rid=1>.
All hail King Andrew Jackson. In the election of 1824, presidential candidate Andrew Jackson had lost to John Quincy Adams, son of former president John Adams, in a brutal campaign war. Jackson sought revenge and did everything to sabotage Adams term as president, including branding his presidency the “corrupt bargain”, and giving his wife so much grief that she died. When Jackson finally became president and defeated Adams in 1828 his mantra was that the voice of the People must be heard, however many felt that he did not live up to his mantra. This raises the question: How democratic was Andrew Jackson? The term democratic can be defined as a government ruled by the people. Andrew Jackson was not democratic because of his mistreatment of the Native Americans, the decision of the bank, and his abuse of power.
Raymond Carver is considered to be one of the most important American short story writers of all time. He utilized his work to reflect two distinct periods in his life. This first stage of his life depicts people in desperate situations, similar to his own experiences with poverty, alcoholism and divorce. Later in his work, during a time when he was given a second chance at love, it seems as though he is “reborn.” Carver is an author who experienced real hardships throughout his lifetime and used his literary work to depict his uncertain feelings about love. Raymond Carver uses the theme of love in “Gazebo”, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and “Where I’m Calling From” to parallel the loss that he experienced, in his own marriage and career, due to alcoholism.
In conclusion, O’Connor uses this story to show that the south is hard to change and clings to its roots of the Pre-Civil War era. The grandfather is the character everyone leans on as a living historical figure of a time long past, trying to be remembered.
Alcohol abuse is the most common problem, nowadays. In fact, majority of people drink alcohol repeatedly to the point where they have difficulty to stop. Statistics show that, as much as, “40% of college students report drinking five or more drinks in one episode” (Walters & Baer, 2006). Alcohol has become more popular over the years as advertisements, simultaneously with commercials of it, filled the media. It also is easily accessible and cheap in comparison to other psychoactive substances. On the other hand, alcohol safety awareness programs are barely noticeable. My research will present how alcohol and its abuse gets into people’s lives and how it influences their physical and mental health, as well as, social existence.
In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, characterization, specifically through the multitude of narrators, transforms an otherwise pedestrian plot into a complex pilgrimage to the truth. As I Lay Dying is told from the perspective of fifteen different characters in 59 chapters (Tuck 35). Nearly half (7) of the characters from whose perspective the story is narrated are members of the same family, the Bundrens. The other characters are onlookers of the Bundrens’ journey to bury their mother, Addie. Each character responds to the events that are unfolding in a unique way and his or her reactions help to characterize themselves and others.
...sque, and in Flannery O’Connor’s artistic makeup there is not the slightest trace of sentimentally” (qtd. in Bloom 19). Flannery O’Connor’s style of writing challenges the reader to examine her work and grasp the meaning of her usage of symbols and imagery. Edward Kessler wrote about Flannery O’Connor’s writing style stating that “O’Connor’s writing does not represent the physical world but serves as her means of apprehending and understanding a power activating that world” (55). In order to fully understand her work one must research O’Connor and her background to be able to recognize her allegories throughout her stories. Her usage of religious symbols can best be studied by looking into her religious Catholic upbringing. Formalist criticism exists in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” through Flannery O’Connor’s use of plot, characterization, setting, and symbolism.
... nations of the time saw their expansion and imperialism as a profoundly nobly pursuit. The native people of Asia and Africa were considered to be savages and uncultured. The influence of European ideals and ways of life would, in the minds of their conquerors, help these people achieve better lives and a lead them to a better existence.
Seen during the page (37), McCandless was still found in well health. However, by August 18, 1992, McCandless was found dead in a bus where he left a note “S.O.S I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE PUT OF HERE. I AM ALONE…” (198). Although the note stated that McCandless was injured, in which it would be the possible reason why he died young, people were not sure exactly how he died, yet the annotations found in McCandless journal states how he was starving for about the last two months of his life. Whether McCandless died by starvation, injury, or both, it is recognized by both the readers and author that he died in a slow painful way, however, the author describes the last picture McCandless took of himself. Krakauer states, “But if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours-because he was so young...alone…because his body betrayed him and his will had let him down-it is not apparent in the photograph. He is smiling in the picture…Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.” (199) The author first describes the profound pain that McCandless could have been suffering and follows how McCandless, although suffering, was happy and not disappointed with his outcome of his life. The way the author references to the last picture and profoundly explains what the character could have been feeling and showing in the image, is a way the author, Krakauer, presents his argument, of living life with no