Primal Essays

  • Primal Instinct

    786 Words  | 2 Pages

    Primal Instinct In the Lord of the Flies William Golding has a group of schoolboys crash on an island and become barbaric. The reason why the boys turn wild is because of their primal instinct to hurt others. This behavior is inherited from early ancestors killing to stay alive. Mans tendency towards violence, how people take sides and divide into groups, and the struggle for power are three ways mans behavior will generally occur. Each of these suggests that violence is a key factor to getting

  • Primal Scenes in Americana and White Noise

    517 Words  | 2 Pages

    Primal Scenes in Americana and White Noise Written in 1989, Frank Letricchia's essay on the overriding themes of Don DeLillo's writing offers a short but concise praise of two of DeLillo's major works: Americana and White Noise. Letricchia offers the thesis in his essay that "two scenes in DeLillo's fiction are primal for his imagination of America" (Osteen 413). It seems that Letricchia is using "primal" not to denote an animalistic sense, but more along the lines of a basic need. The first

  • “Primal Fear”: A Psychological Analysis

    529 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Primal Fear” (1996) is a masterfully crafted film based on the novel written by William Diehl. Aaron Stampler (the main character) was on trial for the murder of an archbishop. He cunningly convinces his psychiatrist as well as his defense attorney (Martin Vail) that he suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder. Stampler then plead for insanity successfully and was transferred to a mental institution for “help”. In the end, the audience shockingly discovers that Stampler had been lying the entire

  • A Minor Charater in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

    546 Words  | 2 Pages

    Darkness Heart of Darkness is a novel in which many relatively minor characters serve major functions in the overall meaning of the work. One such character is Kurtz's Intended who starkly contrasts against Kurtz's evil to better show the evil and primal side of man. The Intended is the embodiment of man's denial of the truth of inner evil. In the painting of the Intended, her blindfold shows her blindness to the truth, symbolized by the torch she holds. The truth of man's evil is within her

  • Analysis of Archibald Lampman's The City of the End of Things

    1529 Words  | 4 Pages

    Analysis of Archibald Lampman's The City of the End of Things Iron Towers. Terrible flames.  Inhuman music, rising and falling.  Grim depths and abysses, where only night holds sway and gruesome creatures crawl before their awesome Master.  Through these disturbing images, and a masterful adaptation of the sonnet structure, Archibald Lampman summons forth The City of the End of Things. The nameless City he creates is a place of mechanical slavery and despair, where Nature cannot exist

  • What Is Politics?

    1873 Words  | 4 Pages

    philosophies provided the first written recognition of politics. In his writings his "The Politics", Aristotle states that "Man is by nature a political animal"(The Politics, 1) in another words, it lies deep within the instinct of man. It is almost primal. Due to his nature man should consider and realise his role within the "polis". So according to Aristotle Politics is not a dreamt up concept, but rather an inherent feature of mankind. To begin with, the basest premise that underpins the notion

  • Comparing Heart of Darkness and Freud's Totem and Taboo

    1936 Words  | 4 Pages

    African barbarism.  Thus he becomes emblematic of the European experience in this environment, and his fate looms as a possibility for Marlow.  What emerges as more interesting, however, are the parallels between Marlow's understanding of Kurtz and the primal family in Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo.  Marlow's attitudes toward Kurtz develop in the same pattern as Freud's description of the original dynamic between father and son;  this parallel consequently implies the connection of Kurtz to the primitive

  • Nine Stages of Divine Vision

    822 Words  | 2 Pages

    the ideal condition for the realization of bliss. The womb provides for the need before it even suffers the need. The bliss is the idea that self-sufficient awareness that precedes desire and satisfaction, and still haunts after birth has broken the primal serenity. The second part of the first stage is the Lakshm and Vishnu within the comic serpent. The unborn bliss is the first taste of paradise, which we all seek to recover. Each succeeding stage builds upon this infinite awareness adding its own

  • Understanding The Misunderstood Art From Different Cultures

    658 Words  | 2 Pages

    and stereotyped aspects From the prehistoric times of the cave man to present day, art has depicted religious scenes native to a specific culture. This is where most of the cultural boundaries lie. To one person, a smiling monkey can instill a primal feeling of fear, while to another the first reaction is one of amusement. This difference in reaction is based upon religious upbringing, and nothing more. To certain culture, a smiling monkey is the scariest thing they could ever imagine, and

  • A Study of Joe Christmas in Faulkner's Light in August

    2557 Words  | 6 Pages

    to the feminine) in Light in August also can be traced back to the primal scene in the dietitian's room.  However, the primal scene is not the final piece of the puzzle in the novel.  The primal scene is already given as a working condition for a further analysis of Joe's psychology.  Readers are first invited to interrelate the scene and Joe's behavior in the rest of the novel.1  Yet drawing one-to-one relations between the primal scene and Joe's symptomatic behavior merely repeats Freud's theory

  • Symbols and Symbolism in The Great Gatsby

    534 Words  | 2 Pages

    Symbolism in The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby is filled with symbols and symbolism, which try to convey Fitzgerald's ideas to the reader. The symbols are uniquely involved in the plot of the story, which makes their implications more real. There are three major symbols that serve very important significance in the symbolism of the novel. They are "the valley of the ashes," the reality that represents the corruption in the world, the green light of Daisy's lap that Gatsby sees across the bay

  • The Dispossessed and Invisible Man

    1332 Words  | 3 Pages

    a rock that can never reach its target because "there's always half of the way left to go" (Le Guin 26). Shevek, Le Guin's protagonist and formulator of the general temporal theory, sees himself as one who "'unbuilds walls'" (Le Guin 289), as the "primal number, that [is] both unity and plurality" (Le Guin 30) crossing interfaces. Walls abound in The Dispossessed: the wall between Anarres and Urras (Le Guin 1-2), the wall that separates one individual from every other (Le Guin 6), the wall of social

  • Waste Land Essay: Ceremonies and Rituals

    1261 Words  | 3 Pages

    mountains He who was living is now dead" (ll. 322-328). The imagery of a primal ceremony is evident in this passage.  The last line of "He who was living is now dead" shows the passing of the primal ceremony; the connection to it that was once viable is now dead.  The language used to describe the event is very rich and vivid: red, sweaty, stony.  These words evoke an event that is without the cares of modern life- it is primal and hot.  A couple of lines later Eliot talks of "red sullen faces sneer

  • Apollonian and Dionysian Man

    2321 Words  | 5 Pages

    and form. The Dionysian man was given its name from the Greek god Dionysus. As the wine-god, he represents drunkenness and ecstasy. The Dionysian was the primal aspect of reality, as well as raw nature, life and death, pleasure and pain, desire, passion, sex, and aggression. It is the source of primal instincts. "The Dionysian with its primal pleasure-experienced even in pain- is the common womb of music and tragic myth...the Apolline is the realm of dreams and ideal forms."("The Birth of Tragedy"

  • Black Magic vs. White Magic in Shakespeare’s The Tempest

    577 Words  | 2 Pages

    line drawn between good and bad magic? Who decides which form of magic is evil and which is not. Why was there a Glenda the good witch and the wicked witch of the west (Wizard of Oz)? According to Robert S. Ellwood, Magic is widely practiced in primal and traditional societies. In such contexts magic is not simply a pre-scientific way of attaining practical ends- it may also involve at least a partial symbolic recognition of the society’s spiritual worldview and of its gods and myths. In this respect

  • lord of the flies

    955 Words  | 2 Pages

    fear of the unknown continually appear throughout the story. Some of the boys on the island did not survive the quarrels that they faced. They perished because they were lacking something that the surviving boys did not. The survivors had a natural primal instinct or a physical or mental advantage over the boys who did not make it. ‘Only the strong survive’ is an important element that runs through the novel Lord of the Flies because in order to survive the boys must turn to their primitive instincts

  • Comparison of Shakespeare's Tempest and Forbidden Planet

    1364 Words  | 3 Pages

    attention as to how it relates to The Tempest. In The Tempest, a man named Prospero and his daughter Miranda have been exiled to a remote island which is completely uninhabited, save for an evil monster and her son Caliban, and which is in a state of primal chaos.  Using the magical powers he has cultivated all his life, Prospero gradually brings the forces of nature on the island under his control, and manages to somehow enslave Caliban, whose mother has died in the interim.  (Some of these details

  • Reflection on Ethnicity

    562 Words  | 2 Pages

    down to matters of preference and socialization within each culture. The dominant themes that rule human nature persist in every society – wondering where we came from and why we exist, social mores to guide how we relate to people or situations, and primal motivations such as hunger, fear, and a need to be loved and accepted. People communicate with language, have a sense of family structure, practice culinary habits, beliefs, and social values that evolved concurrent with the compounded revisions of

  • Savagery, Power and Fear

    1503 Words  | 4 Pages

    when young children or any human if put in the same position lose the instincts of human ways. This is portrayed through the book Lord Of The Flies. The beast is one way this is shown. “ The imaginary beast that frightens all the boys stands for the primal instinct of savagery that exists within all human beings. The boys are afraid of the beast, but only Simon reaches the realization that they fear the beast because it exists within each of them. As the boys grow more savage, their belief in the beast

  • Reality and Illusion in Shakespeare's Hamlet - Appearance vs. Truth

    930 Words  | 2 Pages

    is not how Claudius truly feels about his brothers death, for Claudius is the one who murders elder Hamlet.  We see the proof of this in Claudius' soliloquy when he appears to be praying; "O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven./It hath the primal eldest curse upon't/A brother's murder" (Shakespeare III336-38). Another love which Claudius fakes is the love he has towards his nephew and stepson, Hamlet.  In his first speech to his court Claudius tells Hamlet not to leave for school but