Opening Chapter Essays

  • The Opening Chapter of Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

    1363 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Opening Chapter of Enduring Love by Ian McEwan A dictionary defines the word addictive as being: wholly devoted to something, a slave to another and in a state of wanting more. Ian McEwan claimed that he wanted to write an opening chapter that had the same effect as a highly addictive drug. In my opinion he has achieved in doing this. At the end of chapter one the reader is left needing more information about the characters introduced and what tragedy actually occurred. McEwan took

  • What is the Significance of the Heath in Return of the Native?

    772 Words  | 2 Pages

    novel “Return of the Native”, this is because the opening chapter is exclusively about the heath. The heath assists in creating the feelings of both central characters and the background heath folk, the first chapter is titled “A Face on which Time makes but little Impression”, meaning that Egdon Heath is timeless and everybody on it has little significance. The reader gains an insight of the novel and its genre through the first chapter, “It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities

  • The Simplicity of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep

    1543 Words  | 4 Pages

    of the chessboard. Chandler assumes that the reader will fall into the easy trap of assigning Marlowe to the role of the knight. After all, he is the main man in the novel, the one who needs to solve the case. His self-description in the opening chapter lures the reader into believing he is a typical white knight hero. "I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be" (3). This is a fitting description of a

  • Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court as a Dystopian Work

    1395 Words  | 3 Pages

    aristocratic system -- a system void of democratic mechanism. As a work of social satire, the beginning of the novel is fairly successful. At the outset of the work, Twain accomplishes what must have been his original task. "The opening chapters, the direct attack, the... ... middle of paper ... ...mbolic of American innocence and the Morgan and his machines of destruction as symbols of capitalism and industrialization, the novel becomes not chaotic literary failure, but dystopian

  • Atmosphere through Detailed Language in Snow Falling On Cedars

    1396 Words  | 3 Pages

    and the World War II Japanese Internment story unfolds as part of the romance. David Guterson creates atmosphere in the opening chapters through detailed language. The story is set on a pacific island where society is very small and the fishing community is very important to islanders. Guterson uses the sea, weather and landscape to describe many features in the opening chapters; this creates links between the setting and story. The use of flashbacks creates an interesting aspect to the novel. Guterson

  • George Bluestone’s Novels into Film

    693 Words  | 2 Pages

    George Bluestone’s Novels into Film The first chapter of George Bluestone’s book Novels into Film starts to point out the basic differences that exist between the written word and the visual picture. It is in the chapter "Limits of the Novel and Limits of the Film," that Bluestone attempts to theorize on the things that shape the movie/film from a work of literature. Film and literature appear to share so much, but in the process of changing a work into film, he states important changes are

  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

    628 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the opening chapters of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Harper Lee introduces several subtle instances of racism. However, when Jem and Scout are welcomed into Cal’s Church in chapter 12, the reader really gets to travel behind the false disguise of Maycomb County’s white society to see the harsh realities of the injustices suffered by the blacks. The black community is completely separate from the whites -- in fact, Cal lives in a totally different part of town! Another example of total racial segregation

  • Kate Chopins' Awakening is Not a Tragedy

    1322 Words  | 3 Pages

    him, and wanting him to overcome the obstacles which block his path. He motivates the emotion of the audience and controls their feelings. Edna Pontellier does not have the depth of character or ability to be a tragic figure. From the opening chapters she is portrayed as a troubled woman, one who is captured within a society where she does not belong. Her marriage to Leonce is one of convenience, there is no love, no passion, and no affection between them. Edna portrays a woman

  • Women and Families

    922 Words  | 2 Pages

    Women and Families One of the most interesting concepts in the opening chapter The Nuclear Family is the insistence of society to continue to hold the traditional family structure in highest regard. It’s like the saying ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks’. Even though most families are non- traditional we haven’t accepted it. It was a good point by Coontz(1997) to say that “holding on to these nostalgic ideas creates problems for contemporary families.” By hanging on to this notion that families

  • The Maturation of Bayard in Faulkner’s The Unvanquished

    640 Words  | 2 Pages

    narrator. The character of Bayard matures into a young adult within the work, while narrator Bayard relays the events of the story many years later. Several details within the work clue the reader to Bayard’s actual maturity. Diction from the opening chapter provides immediate clues. Although only twelve, the descriptions of Bayard’s mock-battlefield contain vocabulary far beyond his years (recalcitrance, topography, recapitulant) (p. 3-4), and Bayard admits his earlier shortcoming with words: “I

  • Judgment in Anna Karenina

    1793 Words  | 4 Pages

    tone for us before we even begin reading; the biblically inflected "Vengeance is mine; I will repay," plants in our heads the idea that wrong will be done and punishment exacted. Indeed, we come across a wrong in the very first lines of the opening chapter, in Stepan Arkadyich's dalliance with the French governess, which has thrown the Oblonsky house into "confusion."(1) Tolstoy's descriptions of Stepan Arkadyich as a pleasant, honest, well-liked bon vivant seem at times to drip with contempt

  • Dickens and his Stucture Of Hard Times

    875 Words  | 2 Pages

    further twist in Gradgrind’s recommendation to ‘Plant nothing else and root out everything else’ (except facts)” (Lodge 91). In the first book, titled “Sowing, ” we are introduced to those that Dickens creates a firm character basis with. The opening chapter emphasizes on Thomas Gradgrind Sr., and his students fittingly referred to as “vessels before him ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they are filled to the brim” (Dickens 12). Gradgrind’s methods of education are

  • The Need for Brutality in A Clockwork Orange

    4660 Words  | 10 Pages

    merely uses brutality, as well as linguistics and a contentious dénouement, as a vehicle for deeper themes. Although attacks on A Clockwork Orange are often unwarranted, it is fatuous to defend the novel as nonviolent; in lurid content, its opening chapters are trumped only by wanton killfests like Natural Born Killers. Burgess' Ted Bundy, a teenage Lucifer named Alex, is a far cry from the typical, spray paint-wielding juvenile delinquent. With his band of "droogs," or friends, Alex goes on a rampage

  • On the Road Essay: The Motif of Inadequacy of the Language

    1552 Words  | 4 Pages

    eighteen year old jail-bird is truly funny. The comic effect here is based on the discrepancy between the standard meaning and contextual use of the word "to signify." There is a number of episodes in the novel with the same kind of humor: in the opening chapter of the novel, which describes his first visit to New York, Dean comes up with some absolutely moronic tirades. E.g., talking to Marilou, he mentions the necessity to "postpone all those leftover things concerning our personal lovethings and at

  • Penelope in The Odyssey

    1093 Words  | 3 Pages

    Penelope: In the opening chapters of The Odyssey Penelope is angry, frustrated, and helpless. She misses her husband, Odysseus. She worries about the safety of her son, Telemakhos. Her house is overrun with arrogant men who are making love to her servants and eating her out of house and home, all the while saying that they are courting her. She doesn't want to marry any of them, and their rude behavior can hardly be called proper courtship. She has wealth and position; she has beauty and intelligence;

  • The Republic: Protagoras, Gorgias, and Meno

    4435 Words  | 9 Pages

    his earlier dialogues "Plato is pointing to a general state of incoherence in the use of evaluative language in Athenian culture" (AV 131)? Mutatis mutandis, isn’t this precisely what the opening chapters of After Virtue attempt to show? And to what extent must MacIntyre’s "quest for the good" in his crucial chapter "The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life and the Concept of a Tradition" be committed to a Platonic, rather than Aristotelian, notion of the good? When he says "now it is important to emphasize

  • North and South and Hard Times

    3011 Words  | 7 Pages

    this "shift" one which  Elizabeth Gaskell in North and South and Charles Dickens in Hard Times not only reflect but one which they endorse? If the public  sphere is masculine then the opening chapters of HardTimes immediately confronts us with this masculinity in the form of Gradgrind. The  opening line of the novel, "Now what I want is facts", is assertive and  authorative, the masculine manifestation of public speech. The demand for facts  can be articulated by Gradgrind and responded

  • Tension in the Opening Chapter of Great Expectations

    1566 Words  | 4 Pages

    Victorian society and the conclusion the characters come to such as, becoming a gentleman, then changing completely, like Dickens says ‘snob’. The opening chapter is set in a graveyard, this immediately hints at an air of anxiety because it is desolated and sinister, representing the whole story in only the first few paragraphs of the novel. The opening chapter is set in the middle of the “marsh country, down by the river, within … twenty miles of the sea”. Dickens creates a rough surrounding throughout

  • Analyse the Opening Chapter of Great Expectations

    578 Words  | 2 Pages

    Analyse the opening chapter of Great Expectations The author Charles Dickens wrote ‘Great Expectations’ as a series of instalments, which then put together and turned into a novel. It has been written in first person narrative, which is good because you get to know pip very well. My expectations of the opening chapter of ‘Great Expectations’ Where far from what I experienced when we actually read the book. It was also set in the olden days. By the end of the story I found it quite entertaining

  • The Opening Chapters of Great Expectation by Dickens

    642 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Opening Chapters of Great Expectation by Dickens "Great Expectation" is a book by Charles Dickens written in weekly instalments between December 1860 and August 1861. Charles Dickens has also written many other famous books such as "Oliver Twist", "The christmas carols", and "David Copperfield". When I read the opening chapters to a book, I like to read one with a bit of mystery in it, keeping it realistic but still having a strange and odd feel about it too. It must be able to give