...It was a cold winter morning, the windows are frosty, the dew is forming in the grass, and the snow is just starting to fall in Sioux Falls. It is 7:30 in the morning and everyone is awake and my brother is running around like a mouse. My dad looks over and joked, “Good morning sleepy head.” I get my breakfast and my mom tells me, “Don’t worry if you lose today as long as you have fun you're a winner.” I start to wonder does she think we are going to lose? But I don’t think of it, I just go along with my day. Later I was just watching T.V and my brother starts to run around and jump on me. I push him off and tell him to stop but he won't. I call to my mom who gets him off me. Later I get into my basketball shorts, shoes, and jersey,...
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...When I was younger, I always assumed that anytime someone I loved needed help or support there would always be a obvious right choice that I could make or action that I could take to help them. However, this idea was shattered one fall night as I saw my best friend kneeling on the bathroom floor with her finger down her throat. Tears were streaming down her face and the thick scent of vomit lingered in the air. And all I, her closest friend since second grade, could do was stand there, paralyzed by uncertainty. Frozen there, dozens of thoughts passed through my mind at once. This cannot be what I think it is. Why would she be doing this? And the most crushing thought of all: How did I not know? I’m her best friend. Why couldn’t I do anything?...
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...When Ellis arrived at the Coffee Cup, he could barely believe his eyes. The coffee shop was tiny! It was long, narrow, and relatively crowded. There were people of all ages sitting around and chatting. All the stools at the bar were taken, and there was no space on the benches. The worst part was the color. All the seats were bright red and vinyl. However, Ellis was not one to give up, so he surged forward into the restaurant. Ellis was met with a delicious aroma as he stepped through the door. The smell of coffee and pastries wafted through the air, making Ellis even hungrier. The hostess approached him with a menu in her hand. “Table for one?” she asked with a smile. Ellis simply nodded, too distracted by all the people to speak. Ellis followed the woman to a small table in the back. At first, nothing seemed too unusual about the table, but when Ellis looked up, he started in surprise. There was a swordfish hanging on the wall that looked identical to the swordfish in his pond. Maybe his swordfish had a friend that got killed, and was now displayed on the wall of a coffee shop. The hostess chuckled lightly at Ellis’ surprise. Anyone who’d never been to the Coffee Cup before always got scared by the swordfish. She placed the menu on the table and walked away. Ellis sat down in a stupor, still confused. While Ellis stared at the menu, trying to decide what to get, people started to leave. Soon, there were only a handful of people left, and the volume of the restaurant decreased...
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...the characters live, and sometimes even plays a part in the story. In the short stories “The Devil and Tom Walker” by Washington Irving and “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe the setting affects the characters and storyline. The setting in the two short stories have many similarities throughout the settings. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Devil and Tom Walker” both talk about nature in their settings. Examples are, "Tom had long been picking his way cautiously through this treacherous forest; stepping from tuft to tuft of rushes and roots, which afforded precarious footholds among deep sloughs; or pacing carefully, like a cat, along the prostrate trunks of trees; startled now and then by the sudden screaming of the...
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...The Fall of the House of Usher is a short story by Edgar Allen Poe that details the remainder of Roderick Usher’s life with his mental disorder alongside the narrator and how his mental disorder affects him and those around him. The short story is a literal tale of Rodericks decent into insanity which is paralleled by the fleeting conditions of the house as well as causes supernatural occurrences at the end of the story as well as, the fall of the house of usher in two ways. In the beginning of the short story the reader finds out that the narrator and Usher were childhood friends and that the narrator was on his way to be with Usher upon his request. The narrator proceeds to describe the house detailing its macabre exterior as a “remodelled...
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...The Prude Traditional world meets modern world, staying pure until marriage, reconsidering the way of thinking and trying to keep up to date is just to name a few of those dilemmas brought up in the short story “The Prude” written by Patricia Highsmith from 1975. It is about a woman, called Sharon, who along with her husband, Matthew, remained virgins until marriage. Sharon and Matthew now have three daughters but Sharon refuges to believe that they might not want to follow her example and her belief of being pure until marriage. So the one million dollar question is: Will they stay virgins until marriage? The main character of this short story is undebatable, the conservative mother, Sharon. She is very strict, stubborn and traditional when it has something with family virtues to do. She finds herself simply respectable and wanted to live with her mother’s rhetorical dictums, before she got married with Matthew. Sharon thinks that the most important purpose of life is to keep her three daughters virgins until they’re married, and even though her friends thought to themselves that Sharon was old-fashioned, she was determined to achieve her goal of life. Despite the fact that Sharon has this traditional and old-fashioned mind and has tried to get her daughters to live with the same values as her, it is only their eldest daughter, Gwen and her boyfriend Toby who defies her. We see that during “the interview” between Toby and Sharon. It is clearly that they do not share the...
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...Edgar Allan Poe’s stature as a successful figure in world literature is mainly due to his profound and ingenious poems, critical theories and short stories. His stories share a familiar theme of being of a gothic nature. The gothic theme usually entails an emphasis on the desolate, the grotesque, the mysterious, the ghostly, the horrible and the horrible fear that they may arouse in the viewer or the reader. The author of any gothic horror story aims to create a setting that will bring about eerie sensations in the reader, which keep him or her on the edge. This includes having effects such as menacing shadows, smelly, foul or smelly underground passages and of course, characters that match the setting. Edgar Allan Poe achieves his gothic theme in his short stories by using characters...
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...Poe’s stories, but also share some similarities. In Bradbury’s story, major themes include the influence censorship has on societies, the violent nature of human beings, and the discovery of self identity. Many of the themes in Poe’s stories include the effect of the loss of a loved one and the impacts of death on others. While the themes are not completely connected, Bradbury uses the death of one of Montag’s neighbors to spark a disgust in his current society which in turn leads to his discovery of his self identity. The violent nature of human beings drove others to kill Montag’s neighbor through a violent car chase. In stories such as “The Fall of The House...
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...Without a heart your body is useless. When your heart stops beating, you live until your brain dies from lack of oxygen, but in this short story the narrator lives perfectly fine while changing hearts. This short story is basically about restarting peoples’ ability to love, but also of how real love can overcome technology in place to fake it. This subject is exactly what the main character is dealing with in the short story “The Rental Heart”. That leads me to the setting of the story. The shorty, “The Rental Heart” is written by Kirsten Logan in 2010. We do not know where and when the short story takes place. Neither do we know if the main character is a he or she. In my interpretation of the short story, I have interpreted the main character as being a she. The main character is portrayed by a third person limited narrator, because we hear the story from the main characters point of view. Seen from the main characters point of view we get a description of the surroundings and feelings the main person is dealing with. The short story has two big flashbacks. Grace is first presented as the girl the main character falls in love with, with no risk of being hurt. On the way to the rental place the narrator looks back and remembers all the times it has been done before and in the end we see the narrator in Grace’s arms again. In the beginning of the short story, we get introduced to the “heart rental place”. This is a place where u can rent a heart and change it when you change partners...
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...“Not So Happy Endings” In the unusually written short story, “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood, Atwood gives the reader six very different possible storylines using many stereotypes and a good deal of cliché to propel a few main themes of the story. Atwood’s story is not only unusually written, it is also funny, thought provoking, and interesting despite the lack of detail and odd structure. After she has presented the six different storylines Atwood suddenly moves to the ending, which ironically, does not provoke any happy feelings as the title would indicate. The following literary analysis presented will discuss Atwood’s use of short scenarios, point of view, lack of detail, flat characters, and a flat tone which all together help to get one of her themes across. In “Happy Endings” Atwood uses theme to illustrate to the reader that everyone’s beginning and ending are the predictable skeleton of a story; the how and why you go through life to create your journey to the end are the important parts of life. Atwood’s six storylines, A through F, range from the stereotypical life in version A to the completely eccentric version F. In the first line of the story Atwood introduces John and Mary by simply stating that they meet (395). Atwood goes on to bring the reader into the story by asking the reader “What happens next?” (395), and then goes on to Version A. Version A is the “happy ending,” with John and Mary who live a flawless life. John and Mary are happy, healthy...
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...Friends come with all personalities, most are nice, some are funny, some can be the ones that you never want to lose, others can be those that you wouldn’t mind losing, most can be those that pick you up when you’re down, others will leave you there to keep getting walked on. With friends, they seem to do things that help you and themselves at the same time. In the short story by Edgar Allan Poe called “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the narrator is a friend who decides to go help his childhood buddy with his disease and depression, due to old age and the last of his family died. The two main characters, one who doesn’t give his name and the other being Roderick Usher- who is sick and dying - are at the Usher house that the narrator describes...
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...The Last Leaf by O. Henry from The Gift of the Magi and Other Stories This Level 1 ELLSA lesson can be accessed on the internet at http://www.rdlthai.com/ellsa_lastleaf1.html Lesson plan and text: Jeffrey Taschner, 1999 Print and web-adaptation: John Morgan, 1999 © USIA, 1999. All rights reserved 1. SYNOPSIS 1a) Synopsis Johnsy and Sue are artists who move into Greenwich Village in New York City. As Winter approaches and the weather gets colder, Johnsy becomes ill with pneumonia. She gets so sick that she believes that when the last leaf falls from the vine outside her window, she will die. An old artist, named Behrman, who lives in the same building as the girls, braves a storm one night to paint a leaf on the wall — a leaf that will never fall. Cold and wet from painting in the icy rain, he catches pneumonia and dies. This gives Johnsy the hope to survive her illness, and it also creates the masterpiece Behrman had always dreamed of painting. 1b) Vocab checkpoint • approaches (verb) To approach is to move towards. It is often used with seasons and special occasions (New Year, Christmas, birthdays) as in the example here, as well as with people and moving objects (vehicles, etc). • becomes (verb) In this example, becomes has the same meaning as "gets". With illnesses, we often use "to fall", or "to be taken": Johnsy fell ill/Johnsy was taken ill • pneumonia (noun) Pneumonia is a serious illness of the lungs. • vine (noun) A vine is like a...
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...The Last Leaf by O. Henry from The Gift of the Magi and Other Stories This Level 1 ELLSA lesson can be accessed on the internet at http://www.rdlthai.com/ellsa_lastleaf1.html Lesson plan and text: Jeffrey Taschner, 1999 Print and web-adaptation: John Morgan, 1999 © USIA, 1999. All rights reserved 1. SYNOPSIS 1a) Synopsis Johnsy and Sue are artists who move into Greenwich Village in New York City. As Winter approaches and the weather gets colder, Johnsy becomes ill with pneumonia. She gets so sick that she believes that when the last leaf falls from the vine outside her window, she will die. An old artist, named Behrman, who lives in the same building as the girls, braves a storm one night to paint a leaf on the wall — a leaf that will never fall. Cold and wet from painting in the icy rain, he catches pneumonia and dies. This gives Johnsy the hope to survive her illness, and it also creates the masterpiece Behrman had always dreamed of painting. 1b) Vocab checkpoint • approaches (verb) To approach is to move towards. It is often used with seasons and special occasions (New Year, Christmas, birthdays) as in the example here, as well as with people and moving objects (vehicles, etc). • becomes (verb) In this example, becomes has the same meaning as "gets". With illnesses, we often use "to fall", or "to be taken": Johnsy fell ill/Johnsy was taken ill • pneumonia (noun) Pneumonia is a serious illness of the lungs. • vine (noun) A vine is like...
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...Reactions to “Salvation” This short story by Langston Hughes left me confused. I still wonder if he was saved or not; whether “salvation” should be the title of the story or not. “I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. But not really saved.” (Salvation, 351). This is how the story begins, with a contradiction. I suppose this some what grabbed me in interest for a while, but I do have to admit that I never truly understood if Hughes was “saved” or not. It almost seemed to me that there were missing components, that this short story was maybe an excerpt from a larger story. I did not take the time to confirm this or not because I think if I knew for sure, it may take away from my true interpretation of this piece. I found this short story interesting. However, it was very difficult for me to connect with the author. The story was obviously written as recollection of a significant event in Hughes life when he was younger, perhaps because this particular event has affected him throughout his entire life. It is difficult for me to say for sure mostly because I have very little knowledge and understanding of church, religion, or being “saved” even means. So going off of my reaction purely from the way Hughes wrote it, I would have to say that I think he might have spent a long part of his life confused about what happened that day in the church. Hughes was very young this day where he was supposed to “see” Jesus. Being so young I figure he would have taken things...
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...the short story “EPICAC” author Kurt Vonnegut uses satire, personification, and the character of the narrator to imply the idea that the size for individuality is invaluable, although too little can be disastrous. EPICAC is a supercomputer capable of solving the most advance problems for mankind, but the computer is not exceeding the expectations the government had in mind. EPICAC does not find it’s true purpose until the narrator introduces the supercomputer to poetry, which ultimately influence’s its downfall. Throughout “EPICAC”, Vonnegut leaves the reader with an unnamed narrator who helps demonstrate the idea of individuality throughout the story. The narrator had become increasingly reliant on the supercomputer until the machine short circuited and died. Amongst EPICAC’s life, the narrator can be viewed as cold hearted. The narrator’s wife, Pat, even refuses the narrators marriage proposal stating: “I could get more warmth out of a sack of...
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