Haunting Past Essays

  • Beloved: The Haunting Past of America

    2841 Words  | 6 Pages

    unspoken stories had to be told and remembered.  No matter how it hurts to "rememory" the past, Toni Morrison had to write about it, and she did.  She had to give a voice to the "Sixty Million and more" slaves and names to those who had been buried nameless.3[3]  She said, "It was an era I didn't want to get into - going back into and through grief," yet she had to, because America has been still haunted by the past of slavery and burdened by the weight of the memory.  Through Beloved, Morrison brought

  • A Haunting Past

    978 Words  | 2 Pages

    A Haunting Past Life is a series of frequent changes. At some point in life one will be tossed into circumstances that urges one to make decisive life choices and adjust particular behavior for the aim of becoming a better form of oneself. Despite one’s recognition that modifications have to be done, the process of changing is difficult. Thus, some individuals are scared to change and refuse to do so. In “ A Rose for Emily”, William Faulkner uses literary tools such as the setting, symbolisms

  • Effects Of A Haunting Past

    682 Words  | 2 Pages

    Side-Effects of a Haunting Past It’s 11:10 at Columbine High School. Two senior boys get out of their cars, each carrying a bulky, black duffel bag over his shoulder. One of the boys with spiky hair innocently waves to a cluster of pretty blonde girls. Nine minutes later gunshot fire pierces the air. A young girl, eating lunch with her friend, dies instantly when one of the killers’ bullets enters her skull. A teacher, after having saved as many students as possible, is reunited with his family

  • Genre Criticism of Stanley Kubricks The Shining

    1815 Words  | 4 Pages

    genre to create a unique and captivating film experience. At its core, The Shining is a narrative about a haunted house. Jack, played by Jack Nicholson, is a man who takes on a job as an off-season caretaker at a huge, isolated resort with a haunting past and brings his wife, Wendy, and son, Danny, along to spend a winter alone at the Overlook Hotel. As a struggling writer, he sees the job as an opportunity to work on his writing in a peaceful, serene setting. The supernatural powers of the house

  • The Punishment of a Sinner in The Scarlet Letter

    586 Words  | 2 Pages

    Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter all three affect the main character Hester Prynne.  Religion punishes her with the Scarlet Letter, society ostracizes her as punishment, and individually she was able to move on in life but still returned to her haunting past where she died. Religion plays a big part in the Scarlet Letter.  Hester Prynne wore the Scarlet Letter to remind her of the mistake ahe made.  Instaed of taking Pearl away the people wanted her to wear the "A" for adultry.  Hester brought

  • Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken - The Ambiguous Road

    1023 Words  | 3 Pages

    throughout Europe and the United States; however, most people do not know the kind of life Frost led. On the surface, Frost seems to be a skilled writer filled with ambition and determination, yet, on the inside, he is a man constantly tormented by a haunting past and many unknown tragedies. Frost often conveys his feelings in his poetry; thus, just as Frost's life has an underlying meaning, so do many of his poems. Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is a poem that is often studied on its obvious surface level;

  • A Haunting Past in Faulkner's A Rose of Emily

    1142 Words  | 3 Pages

    A Haunting Past In William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” Miss Emily Grierson holds on to the past with a grip of death. Miss Emily seems to reside in her own world, untarnished by the present time around her, maintaining her homestead as it was when her father was alive. Miss Emily’s father, the manservant, the townspeople, and even the house she lives in, shows that she remains stuck in the past incapable and perhaps reluctant to face the present. At the beginning of the story, the

  • I have studied poems of World War II. I found that the poems fell into

    1129 Words  | 3 Pages

    a reality poem written by Wilfred Owen describes the struggle of a group of people who have to fight through the extraordinary events of war day in day out. Wilfred Owen frequently uses highly emotive language throughout the poem for example "haunting", "limped" and "guttering, choking, drowning". These help the reader imagine the terrible pain the soldiers suffered. Owen uses rhetorical devices such as "you too could pace behind the wagon that we flung him in" The title, in English means

  • Beloved: Analysis

    7004 Words  | 15 Pages

    From the beginning, Beloved focuses on the import of memory and history. Sethe struggles daily with the haunting legacy of slavery, in the form of her threatening memories and also in the form of her daughter’s aggressive ghost. For Sethe, the present is mostly a struggle to beat back the past, because the memories of her daughter’s death and the experiences at Sweet Home are too painful for her to recall consciously. But Sethe’s repression is problematic, because the absence of history and memory

  • Beloved

    1045 Words  | 3 Pages

    Beloved is a novel set in Ohio during 1873, several years after the Civil War. The book centers on characters that struggle to keep their painful recollections of the past at bay. The whole story revolves around issues of race, gender, family relationships and the supernatural, covering two generations and three decades up to the 19th century. Concentrating on events arising from the Fugitive Slave Act of 1856, it describes the consequences of an escape from slavery for Sethe, her children and Paul

  • Supernatural in Toni Morrison's Beloved

    900 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Supernatural in Beloved One aspect in the novel Beloved is the presence of a supernatural theme. The novel is haunted. The characters are haunted by the past, the choices made, by tree branches growing on backs, by infanticide, by slavery. Sethe, Denver and Paul D are haunted by the past that stretches and grasps them in 124 in its extended digits. A haunt, Beloved, encompasses another supernatural realm, that of a vampire. She sucks the soul, heart and mind of her mother while draining

  • Hill House

    1209 Words  | 3 Pages

    others accept them. The story “Haunting of Hill House” has great examples of people changing just to fit in. The author Shirley Jackson, who died in 1965, was one of the most brilliant writers of her time. She was widely acclaimed for her hair-raising stories and novels of the supernatural. Although the “Haunting of Hill House” fits this description perfectly with its eerie description of supernatural tales of the happenings of Hill House; there is a more to it than hauntings. The story starts out with

  • Death of a Salesman

    1674 Words  | 4 Pages

    own it, and there is nobody to live in it” (Cohn 56). This quote shows how Willy strives his whole life to make a home for his family and by the time he sees the realization of that one dream, his family has drifted apart and he is alone with his haunting thoughts and his ghosts. Willy has such high expectations for himself and his sons, and when they all failed to accomplish their dreams, they were unable to accept each other for what they truly were. Willy raised Biff with the idea that success

  • Forgetting to Remember

    1838 Words  | 4 Pages

    intense, disturbing flashback of a traumatic event that you never knew you experienced? This bizarre scenario is more commonplace than might be supposed and is opening up all sorts of legal and therapeutic controversy. Repression is one of the most haunting concepts in psychology. The rationale is that some shocking occurrence is pushed back into an inaccessible corner of the unconscious only to be retrieved later by a most confounded consciousness (1). Is the memory really real? If it is, why was it

  • Sling Blade

    1506 Words  | 4 Pages

    but more so becomes Karl Childers. Karl, at the age of twelve murdered his mother and her lover, the local bully, with a sling blade in a fit of evangelical rage. In the first scene we come into contact with Karl. A soothing sythesiser plays slow haunting music to set the tone. We are introduced to Charles Bushman, played by J.T Walsh, a fellow psychiatric patient at the asylum. He likes to reminisce about his perverted ‘glory’ days with a sentimental yearning to re-live them. Charles slowly and deliberately

  • Comparing Beloved and Night

    2450 Words  | 5 Pages

    Comparing Beloved and Night The two novels I am writing about are "Night" by Elie Wiesel and "Beloved," by Toni Morrison.  Beloved tells about slavery and an ex-slave mother's struggle with a past which is projected as the haunting of her people.  It tells the story of Sethe, a mother compelled to kill her child, rather than let the child live a life of slavery.  Toni Morrison uses ghosts and the supernatural to create an enhanced acceptance of the human condition and the struggled survival of

  • Essay on Gwendolyn Brooks

    1116 Words  | 3 Pages

    Gwendolyn Brooks Writing with uncommon strength, Gwendolyn Brooks creates haunting images of black America, and their struggle in escaping the scathing hatred of many white Americans. Her stories, such as in the "Ballad of Rudolph Reed", portray courage and perseverance. In those like "The Boy Died in My Alley" Brooks portrays both the weakness of black America and the unfortunate lack of care spawned from oppression. In "The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie" Brooks unveils another aspect of

  • Young People, sexuality and relationship

    864 Words  | 2 Pages

    lives. Aggleton shows teens the truth about sex instead of something seen as romantic and a risk, and they seeing themselves as people who are experimenting with new things. However, to others it is not a sign of romance but a risk that keeps haunting teenagers with AIDS and pregnancy. Even though young people are stereotyped as being more negative when it comes to the issue of sex, not all teenagers are that concerned with it. The author states more teenagers are looking at the outcome of having

  • The Kite Runner Quotes

    1329 Words  | 3 Pages

    wrong what they say about the past, i've learned, about how you can bury it. because the past claws its way out." *the narrator is looking back on what he has once witnessed long ago, and it's haunting him, makes him feel guilty and ashamed. 2) "I thought about something Rahim khan had said just before he hung up... There is a way to be good again." *the narrator's friend, Rahim Khan, is expressing indirectly that no matter what the narrator has done in his past, he will forgive him, and help

  • Shirley Jackson

    1432 Words  | 3 Pages

    Edgar Hyman. As an editorial assistant for The New Republic he helped her publish “My Life with R.H Macy” (1941) as her first nationally published story. Jackson is most famous for writing “The Lottery”, a short story of communal savagery, and “The Haunting of Hill House”, a highly acclaimed horror novel. Author Unknown “Jackson, Shirley” Literary Encyclopedia 2005/11/15 Literary Reference Center. Seneca Libraries. November 18, 2007 (http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=18832980&site=ehost-live&scope=site)