Moderate alcohol consumption can provide health benefits as well as a temporary sense of bliss. During Baudelaire’s time, wine was the drink for workers, who would drink collectively; in other words, drinking was a social activity. On the contrary, alcohol consumption to the point of drunkenness is a different story. Alcohol and alcoholism are popular subjects in art and writing, mainly because throughout history and to this day there have been myriad artists, who have used and abused alcohol, claiming that drinking releases their creative spirits, or conjures a muse of some sort. Consequently, while medically worrisome, alcohol is still favorably looked upon in the artistic world. Supporting this conjecture is French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire, who has an entire section dedicated to wine, or alcohol in general, within his poetry …show more content…
Furthermore, the bliss caused by alcohol would be brief; the moment the drinker wakes up, he has to go back to work and face another laborious day. Similarly, in “The Wine of the Solitary,” a wine bottle is personified as a seductress who promises companionship and pours “hope, and youth, and life” (12) for the lonely drinker. Moreover, the wine declares: “Which makes us triumphant and equal to the gods!” (14), claiming that it has the power to immortalize the drinker. However, like the wine in “The Soul of Wine,” everything the wine in “The Wine of the Solitary” proclaims is false advertisement; at the end of the poem, the drinker remains desolate and alone, and possibly even more mortal than before, considering the health problems caused by drastically consuming
... This line implies that the drinking will never end and that no one can stop him from drinking no matter what you do. This poem is a poem that has beautiful imagery that consistently connects the reader to what’s going on in the actual poem like these lines from “Country Western Singer”, “And the blood I taste, the blood I swallow / Is as far away from wine / as 5:10 is for the one who dies at 5:09” (37-40). These lines have to do with the final push of the alcoholic and the fact that they lost the battle against alcoholism and did in fact pass away.
Just one become only two, which then leads to number three that will be the last… so they say and apparently so will the one after that, after that, and after that until they can physically drink no more. For some, this might happen on their twenty first birthday or only once, but for many people in the world this happens every month, every week, or even every day. “Alcohol is the most commonly used addictive substance in the U.S. 17.6 million people, or one in every 12 adults, suffer from alcohol abuse or dependence” (“Alcohol”). The need and overdose of alcohol is called alcoholism. This addiction causes pain, anger, and loss of control all over the world. One might say, “I can handle myself. I am just fine,” but we all know they are not fine because most of the time they are causing hurt around them. In Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, her father, Rex Walls, is an example of one of these 17.6 million alcoholics and this disease affects the family in multiple ways.
We have all wanted to get revenge on someone. Revenge is a very common feeling. It originates with hate or jealousy. Revenge can make our lives miserable and make us do things that hurt other people. We shouldn’t try to get revenge on anyone. If someone did something bad to us, we should think more deeply about that situation before taking any action that could cause some legal problems. Some people can get the point of killing just to get their revenge and some people leave this decision due to some circumstances, just like in the story we just read, “He Becomes Deeply and Famously Drunk” by Brady Udall. This story deals with the concept of revenge. Archie, is a handsome, loud and blunt seventeen-year-old who has spent much of his recent life
Frances Willard’s top priority through her literary piece was to show the negative effects and degradation of the common man due to excessive use of alcohol. Frances Willard’s article on the temperance movement portrays the women’s part in pacifying man’s grasp on alcoholic beverages and the steps they had to take to make it h...
It is a fact of life that Alcoholism will distort the victim’s view of reality. With authors, they put parts of their personality and symptoms of their condition into their characters sometimes, flawed distortions included, with varying degrees
Art and substance are sometimes concomitant. One verdant drink, Absinthe, is a landmark to an era long passed among the modern age’s most brilliant artistic minds. Although originally used for medicinal treatment, it was consumed ravenously by such famous individuals such as Hemingway, Van Gogh, Degas in Parisian cafes. However, the rise of the prohibitionist movement and fear of its narcotic effects led to its ban across western Europe in 1915. Nevertheless, its resurging popularity stands as a testament to a yearning of the radicalism and change at the turn of the century.
The Swimmer by John Cheever begins at Helen and Donald Westerhazy’s pool when Neddy Merrill makes the decision to journey eight miles home by swimming through a series of pools, he calls the “Lucinda River” (297) and walking when unable to swim. While he making his way back home, he stops at fourteen old friends’ houses and drinks before continuing on if possible. By the end of Neddy’s journey, he is exhausted and comes to the realization that he has lost not only his house but also his wife and daughters, and also his so-called friends and even a mistress. Cheever suggests that alcoholism is a destruction of life through the use of symbolism, imagery, and characterization.
One of the symbols that the author uses in “Cathedral” is drinking which shows how humans use drinking as a form of escaping of their problems, but at the same time drinking helps the narrator to have a more open mind. In the story drinking is present many times, when the wife tried to kill herself, when the husband is waiting for her wife and the blind man, when the husband meets Robert, and when the husband, the wife and Robert eat and when they watch television. According to Caldwell Tracy “The narrator's disaffected state of being seems exacerbated by his turn to alcohol and drugs, which he uses both to provide a comfort level during Robert's visit and as a strategy to deal with his frequent nightmares.” Drinking in the story can be seen as a way of escaping reality because one knows that the husband is lonely an alcohol is a way of forgetting that. “I did the drinks, three big glasses of Scotch with a splash of water in each. Then we made ourselves comfortable and talked about Robert’s travels” (436), this quote shows how drinking in the story was the form in which the husband and Robert star socializing and ...
“The Swimmer” by John Cheever is a short story about Neddy Merrill and his journey through alcoholism. Alcoholism plays a detrimental role in Neddy Merrill’s life because it has been ruined due to his dependence on this awful substance. The author symbolically presents the stages of alcoholism, its effects on the alcoholic, as well as how the alcoholic’s family and friends change towards Neddy.
Substance abuse plays a role in more than one of Poe's works. In the black cat alcohol drives the narrator to rip out his cats eye with with a pen and then hang the cat in guilt of what he had done. The narrator was a kind hearted man who loved animals and would do nothing to hurt them until he started to drink. He became an angrier person, always getting enraged with the people and creatures around him and his personality changed for the worse. Substance abuse changed him and drove him to be a different person than he really was. After killing the cat he felt little to no remorse for the deed he had committed and went back to his drinking and partying.Eventually his drinking led him to kill his wife, substance abuse changed him into a cold hearted man who could rationalize killing his wife and getting away with it.
Some scholars argue that the narrator’s actions are not propelled by perversity, but rather his actions are propelled by alcoholism. Alcoholism answers some questions as to why the narrator commits his actions; however, it is still unclear as to what first drove him to alcoholism. Joseph Stark further disproves alcoholism as an acceptable answer behind the narrator’s actions, “the two murders (of cat and wife) occurred while he was sober. Only the gouging of the cat’s eye happened while he was drunk (qtd. in Piacentino, footnote 9). Hence, though alcohol may have been a contributing factor to his crime it cannot be described as the ultimate cause” (260). Furthermore, I argue that the narrator’s perversity is initially why the narrator becomes an alcoholic. Perversity is the only answer that can be given to explain each action the narrator commits.
mental stability as well as his work. Poe took John Allan’s death harshly and began adding opium to his alcohol. His abuse of alcohol and opium increased dramatically immed...
To continue, Solitude commences with the statement, “This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense and imbibes
The internal conflict of alcohol addiction expressed by “used to spend my nights out in a barroom” is battled by the power of love that is conveyed through “’Cause there’s nothing like your love to get me high”. The conflict is solved for the speaker by his lover’s irresistible love that is compared as a parallel to an alcohol addiction. The speaker is talking to this person that saved him from alcoholism so that this person knows how he appreciates her and how there is no love that compares to theirs.
There are many times where the narrator describes his actions towards his loved ones while under the influence of alcohol. Since the narrator is trying to draw the attention to his consumption of alcohol, he tries to make sure that his actions trace back to it. In the short story, the narrator says "But my disease grew upon me -- for what disease is like Alcohol !..."(Poe 23) which shows his addiction for alcohol becoming stronger. The narrator's madness seems to be heightened by the alcohol. He begins to chan...