...portrayed through the themes of novels and short stories. These themes include race, good vs. evil, unrequited love, being an outsider, and violence. Some stories that would fall into the true Southern Gothic genre include “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’connor, “The Possibility of Evil” by Shirley Jackson, and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. The short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor is about a family that plans a trip to Florida...
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...the writer of the short story “The Outsider” by H.P Lovecraft has tried to give you this sense of eeriness and self unaware fear that strikes you deep. The ambiance of the story is a weary man not knowing where he is at and not knowing who or what he is. The author used very descriptive imagery words so the reader would feel the same as if he or she reading it would feel as if they were also in the story. This story entails a series of horrible events that are used so the reader may feel the same as if they were in the story. It unfolds on the viewpoint of a sadly confused man wondering around what is perceived to be a mansion. The man scared and confused tries to figure out what exactly has happened to him. As the story progresses, he looks into a mirror and sees what he thought was a “monster”. H.P Lovecraft uses very descriptive words in order to paint an image in the head of the reader using terms and phrases such as, “thickly wooded parks”, “a venerable wide castle … which seemed madly familiar”. These words and phrases used create a visual image in the head of the reader....
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...Cowboys and Indians Summary (150 words): This is a short story written by Lorien Crowe. The story is mainly about the narrator and her cousin. The story is set in New Mexico where their Grandmother used to live but she passed away. In the beginning of the story, the narrator is attending the funeral, there are many family members there and she thinks it is a little bit dull and crowded. Finally, Daniel arrives, her favorite cousin. They decide to take off from the arrangement and head to a bar on David’s new Ducati motorbike. They have a couple of drinks and head to a remote place to enjoy the sunset. They enjoy their time there, light a joint and become hungry therefore, they decide to go to a takeout stand at the highway. After this, they go home and David takes off before the family sees him, it was as if he was never there. Characterize the narrator: The Narrator has two sides to her. When she was at the funeral, she seemed very calm and didn’t really try to fit in with anyone at the arrangement. However, when David shows up she feels more alive and wants to do things that she normally would not do. But now that she’s with David she feels free and suddenly wants to go to a bar get a couple of drinks, then afterwards go up, and look at the sunset whilst smoking a joint. It seems like she is keeping a façade when she’s with the family she can first really be herself when she is with David. Comment on similarities and differences between David and the Narrator: ...
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...The Fat Boy By: Owen Marshall ‘The Fat Boy’ is a short story by Owen Marshall about an anonymous, nameless boy who mysteriously appears in a small town in New Zealand and was hated by the townspeople. In the text, I noticed how the author used various symbolisms and themes that are seen in real life. There are three symbolisms in ‘the Fat boy’ that caught my attention. These are religious figures, conscience, and outsider. There were various points in the story where the author made used of a religious figure. The fat boy, for instance, has been described as monk-like. The fat boy is also like a shepherd tending his flock. “The fat boy stood before the railings and held one of the iron bars like a staff”. The fat boy, being a symbol of the Shepherd, looks after and protects the innocent, “The children smiled at him as he watched, and were content at his presence…”. At the end of the story, the fat boy ‘dies’ and his body mysteriously disappeared. I thought of how the fat boy’s fate resembles Jesus Christ who was also blamed for things he didn’t commit, was ridiculed and accused by the public and whose body also disappeared when he died. The fat boy seems to act as the townspeople’s conscience which is why he appears at or before each crime is committed "the fat boy had the knack of being where he was least desired". I think this is maybe one of the reasons why he is described by the town people as having such unattractive figure “A very fat, ugly boy, the music teacher...
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...An Outsider is an individual who is often treated poorly or excluded from activities or events based on certain qualities that normally one cannot control. Outsiders often have a few things in common as a group such as they are not included in their families, have a hard time in social interactions or even social class. Reasons such as there can often be harmful to an individual's self-esteem. Feeling like Outsider often can stem from not feeling included in your family. Your family is supposed to be the people you can count on to love you and include you, but unfortunately, if you don't have that support system it can be difficult. Harry Potter and Cinderella are excellent examples. Harry is not included because he is different, which makes him hard to understand for his "family". Cinderella, on the other hand, had a change occur and her differences from her new family make her hard to understand. Often, when you don't have the same qualities or characteristics as your family, it could make you an outsider....
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...The Outsider by H.P. Lovecraft Some say that living in a castle is great and you get treated like royalty. Others might even say that living in a castle would lead you to be the ruler over everything and everyone. According to the short story by H.P. Lovecraft, called “The Outsider,”the main character explains in further detail how he hasn’t seen the outside world, apart from the photos in the books he has read. Throughout the fantasy story it is easy to identify the sense of horror because of its good sense of imagery, that gives the reader a true appearance on what the character is seeing and feeling. Lovecraft’s use of words clearly state that the atmosphere is giving off more feeling than visualization of eeriness along with a gloomy feeling...
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...Cowboys and Indians Summary: In the beginning the short story takes place at a funeral where the narrator’s grandmother, Ellen, is about to be buried. Afterwards the narrator goes to her grandmother’s house where she later meets her cousin, David, and decides to take a ride on his motorbike to find bar nearby to get a drink. David is adopted by the narrator’s uncle and has therefore made up a story about him being related to outlaws. After getting a drink they decide to go see the sunset, where they talk about their grandmother’s life, and suddenly David starts to think of his life and how he wants to get away from where he lives. They get hungry and find a nearby take out stand by the highway. At the stand they meet two native-American looking women. David says that the wind is picking up, and one of the women reply by that the wind brings devil spirits with it, and refers to David as a devil spirit. David doesn’t take their words kindly and both he and the narrator decide to go back, and from there they split up. The narrator: We don’t get a name of the narrator but when they get to the bar we find out that she is a female in the sentence: “I’m the only female in the place”. We don’t get her exact age either but to me it seems like she is in her post-teenage years around 17-19 years. The narrator got 2 different kinds of personalities. When she’s with David she´s comfortable, relaxed and stops thinking about all the bad things in her mind. She´s no insurgent at all...
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...Cowboys and Indians 1. “Cowboys and Indians” is a short story written by Lorien Crow in 2008. We are in New Mexico; it’s a warm day in February. The narrator is a young girl/woman, and she is at her grandmother’s funeral. She is old enough to attend this funeral as an adult, and she is expected to be there to shake hands with the last people leaving. But she still feels like a teenager that needs to escape. This longing to escape drives her to call her rebellion cousin, David. Together they ride on his Ducati. David is half outlaw – half Indian. After a stop at a local bar, they decide to watch the sunset up in the bluffs. As the sun goes down, they start to talk about their grandmother and her life. We hear about David’s quilt, we get to know her thoughts about their grandmother’s life and we start to notice the difference between them. 2. The narrator is no longer a teenager, but not a completely adult yet. David is her idol. She looks up to him, she feels protected and safe with him, and at some point she wants to be like him. He amazes her, scares her and challenges her. When she thinks about her grandmother, she believes that she had a full life. She understands the great meaning of hard work and she has a great respect towards her grandmother for all the work she did throughout her whole life. She, like David, is the black sheep of the family – hated by the dead grandfather. She doesn’t appear to be an ordinary girl. She has some half-vanished nail polish, but she...
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...Analysis of Joanne Fedler’s short story “A Simple Exchange of Niceties” There are many great moment of every humans life. But one of the biggest moments – maybe the biggest of all – in a woman’s life is the time when her first baby enters the world, and she hold the baby in her arms for the first time. The feelings in a moment like this can’t be described – they have to be felt, to be understood. Those are the feelings our main character in Joanne Fedler’s short story “A Simple Exchange of Niceties” faces in the end of the story. But before she is ready for those feelings, an important meeting with another woman takes place. When we first meet the narrator, she seems like a woman with low self-esteem. A misunderstood soul in a world she doesn’t fit in to. She is alone in the park, confused and miserable; she has just realized that she is pregnant, and has decided to get an abortion. She doesn’t feel like she is worth loving; neither by the man who got her pregnant, and afterwards referred to her as a trashy whore, or by her mother, who has never cared much for her. She went to prison for three months, when she was caught in shoplifting. She feels like she haven’s achieved much in life: “I’ve never done anything with my life”, she says on page 11, line 37. During the story, she only mentions her friend Barbie as an important person in her life, which makes her seem a bit lonely. She fits in in the box of outsiders which exists in every community. The bench plays an important...
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...William Trevor is a short-story writer who creates novels. William Trevor uses many things to create an amazing novel. Some of these things include his portraying of evil, his love for his characters, and his perspective. William Trevor does all these things to create a very wonderful story. William Trevor also has the ability to invoke great feeling in the reader. William Trevor was born on May 24, 1928, his father was a bank manager. His father’s occupation was accompanied by the need to move often and as a result William Trevor attended many different school throughout his childhood.(Bourgoin) This moving from town to town, which were usually small towns, provided Trevor with material for his stories.(Storey) He was one of three children in a very lonely household. His parents did not like each other and had no respect for one another. Family meals often went without any words. Trevor went to college and at Trinity College Dublin he met Jane, who he married. He tried his hand at sculpting but realized he was not going to make any money doing that.(Allardice) He abandoned sculpting and took a job with an advertising company in London. This is what Trevor said about his new job, “This was absurd. They would give me four lines or so to write and four or five days to write it in. It was so boring.(Morgan-Witts) Trevor took his extra time and used the typewriter that was given to him to write some of his first stories.(Allardice) William Trevor is a short story writer who happens...
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...Sixteen years after a sixteen-year-old wrote this book, Francis Ford Coppola turned this novel into a movie. The book is a coming-of-age novel, but the movie focuses on the characters' loss of innocence. The movie follows the story line very closely. The reader is only told that this story takes place in the southwest, but the movie places it in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the year 1966. It also changes the conflict from the East Side versus the West side to the northside versus the southside. This minor directional change was probably made due to the relative time proximity to the musical West Side Story, which won the best picture Academy Award in l961. However, as with all movies, character insight that is critical to understanding the story is lost when the format goes from the written word to the screen. Ponyboy is telling us the story, the same as in the book, but the 91-minute film only glosses over many character relationships. <a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/CNSite/;navArea=CLIFFSNOTES2_LITERATURE;type=Lit_Note;kword=SE_Hinton;kword=The_Outsiders;contentItemId=139;tile=3;sz=300x250;ord=123456789?" target="_blank"><img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/CNSite/;navArea=CLIFFSNOTES2_LITERATURE;type=Lit_Note;kword=SE_Hinton;kword=The_Outsiders;contentItemId=139;tile=3;sz=300x250;ord=123456789?" width="300" height="250" border="0" alt="" /></a> With the exception of Ponyboy, the viewer misses out on knowing most of the novel's characters. Darry and Soda...
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...A Rose for Emily is a short narrative written by William Faulkner, an American writer from Mississippi. This story tells the story of Emily Grierson who belongs to a southern aristocratic family. Emily was a weird but an extremely interesting woman who no one could be able to get the best of her. Even though she was a rude dissociable outsider who lost all her beloved ones and left alone in a society that outer appearances and social class were considered major aspects in people’s lives, she found a way to survive and maintain her strength. Through the events of the story you can realize the hardships Emily had gone through and all the unpleasant things that happened to her either from strangers or acquaintances. When I first read this story I gave a part of my time focusing on the title and what this piece of narrative might be about. Is it about roses? Is it a love story? Is it a funeral? Who is Emily and why she got flowers? Anyhow, for some reason, the word “Roses” stood up in the title and many questions came to my mind whether these roses symbolized something of what I thought it would. Are these roses from Emily’s beloved? Are they from people in a funeral? Or did she use to plant them in her garden? And what is really interesting is that the title was intriguing and encouraged me to read the story in order to find out what did those roses symbolize in William Faulkner’s short story. From the title, I came up with a scenario of what this story could be about. My first...
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...self-sacrifice to people of all ages and places. The fiction short story Through The Tunnel, by Doris Lessing, has a great example of self-sacrifice. Jerry is an 11 year old little boy, him and his mother are vacationing and he spends most of his time on the big kid side of the bay. Of course him being 11 and hanging around the bigger kids can make people do some silly things. Long story short, Jerry risked getting hurt swimming through a small, rocky tunnel to make the bigger kids like him. This relates to self-sacrifice and common experiences because many people sacrifice losing themselves to fit in with another group that may not be worth it in the end anyway. In the end the older boys’ attention didn’t even matter to Jerry, he felt like he didn’t need them anymore, he gained more confidence. Raven, from the fiction novel Vampire Kisses by Ellen Schreiber, is dating a vampire named Alexander. He leaves Raven to keep her from getting harmed by other vampires, but she risks her life to search for Alex anyway. Ravens self-sacrifice was to be with the person she loved no matter what, and that relates to a mass of fiction love stories’ common experiences. Arland D. Williams, Jr. was a passenger aboard a plane that crashed into the Potomac River on January 13, 1982. “He was of the six people to initially survive the crash” says his wikipedia. Arland is also known as the Man in the Water. In the short non-fiction story Man in the Water it says that this man saved 5...
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...Tramond Taylor Dr. Clements Popular Literature February 27, 2011 Eduora Welty Delta Wedding In the Short Story by Eduora Welty Delta Wedding the family seems to build this boundary that seperates them from the outside world. In my paper I will discuss some of the things I believe to be members stepping over the boundary that the family has seemed to build over the years. There is a character named George. George is spoken in a positive manner by the Fairchild family. It is because George, in my opinion, is the only family member to be “sane” for lack of a better word and appears to be the “hero” to the family. Everyone takes a liking to George but, George has separated himself from the family by moving away and he learns to decipher the family members from the whole family in its entirety. Geroge meets the love of his life a woman named Robbie Reid. To the family George has now stepped over that boundary and married Robbie. Robbie seems to pose a threat to their social position. Before she married George she was a clerk at the family store. To the family this seems to be very embarrassing to know that a member of your family is marrying someone who used to work under you. Robbie does not want to comply with the family traditions and she is seen as an unfit wife for George who is put up on a petal stool by the family. Dabney, another member of the Fairchild family, is able to understand why George has separated himself from the family and is concerned about the...
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...he had scissors for fingers. The story symbolizes many things, such as the ability to show that outsiders can change lives, and much more. The psychology of the characters, progressive changes to the town and much more all show that Edward changes their lives, but they also change his. Kim is Edward’s love life, he helped her see the truth in Jim and what she really wanted. Edward’s underdeveloped personality introduces her to new concepts and ideas. To show the change in Kim, doubtful music fills along with panoramic low shots set the suspense when Jim hits Edward and Kim breaks up with him. ‘Jim. I don't love you anymore. I just want you to go. Okay? Just go!’ Edward shows the truth about Jim, exposing him to what Jim truly cares about. Whether accidental shocks (‘It was a little shock. Ha! Ha! Ha!’) or death threats (‘Jim. Stop! Stop it, or I'll kill you myself’), Jim truly is an inside monster. And that’s what Kim realised, she saw the beauty in Edward and the monster in Jim. As it says on the promotional poster, innocence is what he knows. Beauty is what she sees. But what if Edward never was down there? What if Edward was never invited into town from his mansion on the hill? If we accept the multiverse theory, and assuming that this multiverse plays out the same. Jim and Kim would most likely be arrested for breaking into Jim’s father’s room of special items. To be...
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