In an extract from Ian McEwan’s ‘Enduring Love’ the main character, Joe, faces many conflicts emotionally. In Joe’s mind, his emotions and rational thought pull him in two different directions when all he seeks is a common answer. In order to portray Joe’s emotional distress, ‘Enduring Love’ is told through first person narration. Joe searches for logical explanations but the more he looks, the further the truth seems to be.
The day after John Logan’s death, Joe’s conscious makes the whole event ‘illumined and animated’ in his mind. He begins to relive the nightmare, trying to find the right answers. His guilty conscious accuses him of ‘kill[ing] (John Logan)’. Joe cannot deal with his new-found responsibility and tries to find what he believes to be the ‘truth’. On one hand, he wants the truth to be that he was not an accomplice in a man’s death yet on the other hand he wants to know what actually happened and who was the cause of it. However, the truth is, he will never know. He is left with questions and he who believes entirely in science, math and the nature of knowing, can’t comprehend this fact.
Joe analyzes the situation using his mathematical and scientific knowledge. He believes that ‘eight hundred pounds would have kept [them] close to the ground’ and therefore, the ‘first person’ to let go is at fault. He is looking for someone to blame and so places all the responsibility on this one soul. Yet he does not want to be this person, when he knows he very well could be. The thought of this being possible is excruciating and he obsessively tells himself that it was ‘not [him]’. He only wants the truth if the person turned out to be him. Joe tries manipulating mathematics to make ‘calculations’ regarding the balloon incident and uses his analytical mind to find answers yet he never allows his feelings to consume him. He’s always analyzing his own thoughts. He wants a selected truth not reality.
Joe’s conflict is also shown through a repetition of certain words. They show his feelings transition from self- blame to searching for the culprit. While trying to ease his mind, Joe no longer uses the word ‘I’. He can’t take his own accusations and so places the blame on the group as a whole. He repetitively uses the word ‘we’ when referring to what could have been done but was not.
...more overpowering and overwhelming than any general feeling of Southern pride. America has obtained a reputation to be an accepting and open minded country, welcoming all of any race, couture and religion. The Preamble states clearly that America will establish justice and insure domestic tranquility for all. Neither of these entities are accomplished in America as long as the Confederate flag remains raised. Our nation is furthermore divided by racism through a flag that is possibly being used as a degradation tool. This battle with racism has become far too large for American citizens and anything that is viewed as racist in such a manner as the Confederate flag is, should be censored from society, in only a helpful practice. A state flag should be capable of uniting its citizens, instead of dividing them. The Confederate flag should be lowered immediately.
It only took one sentence to show how this “heritage” that many wish to preserve and hold dear was never harmless. The history that the Nazi flag holds is well known to be racist and is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people. When someone looks at the Nazi flag, they remember the concentration camps, the gas chambers, and the starving and diseased people. When someone looks at the Klu Klux Klan’s hood and cloak, they remember the lynchings, the murders, and the place that it still holds in today’s society. With the Confederate flag being coupled with a member of the KKK, it is hard to deny that the history that the flag holds is undoubtedly
The Civil War was partly about slavery. Therefore, many use the flag as a symbol of hatred towards people of different descent, especially African Americans. The idea that “negro is not equal to the white man,” or white supremacy, has caused many racist attacks (Coates, 2015). Most of these attacks have involved the presence of a Confederate flag. Recently, Dylann Roof committed a gruesome attack on nine African American congregants at their local church during a bible study (Henderson, 2015). He claimed to have been motivated by the Confederate flag. Sadly, this violent attack provides a perfect example of the racism symbolically presented by the Confederate flag.
New love is a powerful force. It can be overwhelming, inspiring, and a bit scary. Ultimately, though, as REO Speedwagon once said, it can “make everything so clear” (“Can’t Fight This Feeling”). In “since feeling is first,” e. e. cummings utilizes contrasting metaphors, as well as unconventional syntax and form, in order to portray this sentiment. The speaker, in a flash of romantic interest, experiences a sudden realization of his past follies in the way he has approached love, and shares this new understanding with both the reader and the object of his desire. Through this, cummings conveys a centralized dogma which holds living without inhibitions to be not simply recommended, but the only honest way of experiencing human interaction.
In the beginning of the story Joe Jones seems like he just wants to get this project over with and not put any effort into his writing. In the beginning of the story Joe says,” Aw come on. It’s bad enough I have to do this lame assignment ” (106). This shows how Joe really does not care about the assignment and has a very negative attitude toward it.
consistently arrogant and haughty to the point that his social behaviors are being affected negatively. Joe is seen as irritating by many of his social acquaintances due to his arrogant behavior and attitude.
Imagine standing in front of the defaced statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee only to hear two sides of people curse, hurt each other. This situation is too familiar for people who visit Charlottesville, VA, the formerly peaceful town. The controversy between Confederate memorials never ends. Many people argue that Confederate monuments should be taken down because they become the flashpoints of unrest and violence. As far as I am concerned, confederate memorials should remain as these memorials are the legacy of history; history is value-neutral and innocent.
There exists no power as inexplicable as that of love. Love cannot be described in a traditional fashion; it is something that must be experienced in order for one to truly grasp its full enormity. It is the one emotion that can lead human beings to perform acts they are not usually capable of and to make sacrifices with no thought of the outcome or repercussions. Though love is full of unanswered questions and indescribable emotions, one of the most mystifying aspects of love is its timeless nature. Love is the one emotion, unlike superficial sentiments such as lust or jealousy, which can survive for years, or even generations. In the novel The Gargoyle, the author, Andrew Davidson, explores the idea of eternal love between two people, a union that spans over centuries spent both together and apart. Davidson, through the use of flashbacks, intricate plot development and foreshadowing, and dynamic characterization, creates a story that challenges the reader’s preconceived notions regarding whether eternal love can survive even when time’s inevitable grasp separates the individuals in question.
Some may say love is just an emotion while others may say it is a living and breathing creature. Songs and poems have been written about love for hundreds and thousands of years. Love has been around since the beginning of time, whether someone believes in the Big Bang or Adam and Eve. Without love, there wouldn’t be a world like it is known today. But with love, comes pain with it. Both William Shakespeare and Max Martin know and knew this. Both ingenious poets wrote love songs of pain and suffering as well as blossoming, newfound love. The eccentric ideal is both writers were born centuries apart. How could both know that love and pain work hand in hand when they were born 407 years apart? Love must never change then. Love survives and stays its original self through the hundreds and thousands of years it has been thriving. Though centuries apart, William Shakespeare and Max Martin share the same view on love whether i...
In Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, Joe Rose's psychological state understates his insanity. Throughout the novel, Joe Rose, the main character, misinterprets the events occurring right in front of his eyes to make his account more interesting. His tone reveals that he faces difficulty expressing himself in social situations. Although Rose's different view may be the result of a personal problem, his narration leave the reader wondering if his unreliability was caused by a deeper mental illness. Through postmodernity, events in the story and character interaction, Joe shows symptoms of a newly-developed disorder more specifically of: schizophrenia.
Relationships between two people can have a strong bond and through poetry can have an everlasting life. The relationship can be between a mother and a child, a man and a woman, or of one person reaching out to their love. No matter what kind of relationship there is, the bond between the two people is shown through literary devices to enhance the romantic impression upon the reader. Through Dudley Randall’s “Ballad of Birmingham,” Ben Jonson’s “To Celia,” and William Shakespeare’s “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” relationships are viewed as a powerful bond, an everlasting love, and even a romantic hymn.
Paul D’s assertion that Sethe’s “love is too thick” is complex and powerful, as a result of Morrison’s use of short syntax and carefully selected diction (193). Short sentences are often perceived as simple, but in Morrison’s style of writing this is far from...
Gaitskill’s “Tiny, Smiling Daddy” focuses on the father and his downward spiral of feeling further disconnected with his family, especially his lesbian daughter, whose article on father-daughter relationships stands as the catalyst for the father’s realization that he’d wronged his daughter and destroyed their relationship. Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” focuses on Mel and his attempt to define, compare, and contrast romantic love, while leaving him drunk and confused as he was before. While both of my stories explore how afflicted love traumatizes the psyche and seem to agree that love poses the greatest dilemma in life, and at the same time that it’s the most valued prospect of life, the two stories differ in that frustrated familial love causes Gaitskill's protagonist to become understandable and consequently evokes sympathy from the reader, but on the other hand frustrated romantic love does nothing for Carver's Protagonist, except keep him disconnected from his wife and leaving him unchanged, remaining static as a character and overall unlikable. In comparing “Tiny, Smiling Daddy” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, together they suggest that familial love is more important than romantic love, which we relentlessly strive to achieve often forgetting that we’ll forever feel alone without familial love, arguably the origin of love itself.
As Ross argues, Love represents Munro’s return “to earlier material…[but] in a form that is more complex and multilayered” (786). The collection thus “offers her readers eight stories that seize us by the throat.” In so confining itself to “Love,” therefore, the criticism I have cited above has missed the equally multi-faceted enigma that is the volume’s next story, “Jakarta.” Rather than provide three seemingly disparate timelines that eventually centre on a single act, “Jakarta’s” competing narratives significantly examine one major sequence of events — a series of summer get-togethers that a pair of couples share with their friends sometime around 1959. Its four sections move twice between the internal focalization of Kath Mayberry in the years before 1960, and that of her husband Kent as he strives to recall the same summer (though not necessarily the same sequence of events) in the 1990s — at a distance of more than thirty years and a divorce. Thus, while Munro again employs a third-person narrator throughout the story, the reader instead experiences “Jakarta” as two iterations of one unique narrative, focalized through two distinct perspectives that experience the narrative’s key moments either in the present, or by distant recollection. This way, Michael Gorra’s argument that “Munro will not…allow us to see one moment as the background to the other, to say that the story is about one and not the
Victor Hugo once said, “The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.” Whether in Shakespeare’s tragic play about lovers doomed by fate, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s sonnet describing love, “Sonnet 116”, or O. Henry’s age old The Gift of the Magi, love motivates the characters and authors to make decisions that have a weighty impact on their lives. Throughout these works of literature, authors use love’s power to drive the plot forward to create good events within the characters’ lives. Love is a force for good because it makes people willing to forgive each other, it brings the best out of people in bad situations, and it