...other words, the ups and downs that occur in a relationship may sometimes push marriages to their breaking point. The idea of tragic situations hurting relationships behind Donalds quote is also true in the fictional story, A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri and the article Life Events That Can Lead to Divorce by Amanda Macmillan. The theme of tragedy is exploited through both of these sources when they express the concept of life’s hardships...
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...In the short story “This Is what It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” by Sherman Alexie, the reader sees protagonist Victor Joseph and an acquaintance, Thomas Builds-the-Fire take a journey to collect the body of his father. Throughout the story, the reader is able to see that Victor and Thomas were very different people yet had some similarities and while the story progressed, the reader sees Victor Joseph change into a different person. While this story is a work of fiction, we see hints of personal experiences from Sherman Alexie’s life. Victor and Thomas were both very different people. Victor is someone who is seen as selfish, self-conscious, and impatient. When Victor goes to cash the check he had received from the council, he sees Thomas. The narrator describes the scene as, “Nobody talked to Thomas...
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...ASD, the diagnostic guidelines, the difference between ASD and Acute Stress Reaction (ASR), symptoms and effective treatments, the impact of ASD and the coping skills needed to successfully get through it, and a biblical story and perspective about stress disorders. What is ASD and is it an appropriate response to trauma? Key words: Acute Stress Disorder, Acute Stress Response, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, DSM-IV, DSM-V, Symptoms, Treatment, God Acute Stress Disorder Introduction Acute Stress Disorder (ASD) was introduced in the DSM-IV as a way to describe reactions a short time after a traumatic event, usually within the first month and possible precursor to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). ASD is the official diagnosis to evaluate the Acute Stress Response (ASR) but there are some differences. ASD is defined as symptoms that manifest during the time period of two days to four weeks after a traumatic event. There has been some changes to ASD as the DSM has been updated in the past year to DSM-V. Also it is important to mention that ASD is not necessarily a precursor to PTSD (Bryant et al, 2011, p. 802). In the article Acute Stress Reactions to a patient threat, suggests by many clinicians that many people do not experience ASD after a trauma but as many as 65% require at least a week of down time prior to feeling normal again, where the author suggests that at least a week with symptoms is congruent with ASD (Koopman et al,...
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...reader. These rhetorical strategies are particularly important because they help with the clarity of complex ideas and assist the writer in getting their point across. In doing so, writers are able to make their text more effective for a wider range of people to read. In the article “Iraq, Afghanistan War Veterans Struggle With Combat Trauma,” by David Wood, and in the short story, “Gold Star,” by Siobhan Fallon, the authors use numerous amounts of rhetorical tools to help guide the reader through the text. While “Gold Star” is a short story about a wife who has lost her husband due to the war and “Iraq, Afghanistan War Veterans Struggle With Combat Trauma,” is an informative newspaper article about how the war can have severe consequences on not only the soldiers themselves but their loved ones back at home too, both text use emotive appeals that aim to inform the general public of the various emotional and psychological tolls faced by veterans and their families today. Furthermore, throughout both texts the authors delivered a nearly identical purpose for their text. In “Gold Star,” and in “Iraq, Afghanistan War Veterans Struggle With Combat Trauma,” Fallon and Wood’s purpose are to expand on the common theme on how going to war can have severe emotional consequences on the soldiers, and as well as their families too. The authors work to get a clear message across about how the war equally...
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...“Remembering My Childhood on the Continent of Africa”, David Sedaris wrote this short story with the use of subject by subject pattern method of compare and contrast. The author uses great examples of compare and contrast. In this piece of work by Sedaris, describes the author's childhood who is jealous of Hugh’s life and fills the story with humorous moments. In this story, Sedaris compares his life to his friend Hugh. The author compares his unexciting childhood that was in North Carolina to Hugh’s interesting childhood that was in Africa. He also compares his dog that’s a collie and cat to his significant others two horses named Charlie Brown and Satan as well as his pet monkey. All through the story the author compares how their pets do...
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...by a strong faith. In order for a person to truly have a high level of resilience, they must also have a strong faith. That faith does not have to be in God but it does have to be a faith in something that you believe with protect you and see you through life’s trials. While a belief in something other than God many help a person in the short term, it will ultimately fail them as everything falls short of the Lord. What is Resilience? Simply defined, resilience is the ability bounce back or recoil after being mashed, twisted, or bent. This is a fitting definition as I know that when I have been faced with trauma, I often felt mashed, twisted, or bent. It is such a simple word with a simple meaning but putting into action can often feel almost impossible. Putting this into action requires strength. A person needs to have a strong resolve and a strong faith in order to bounce back in the face of trauma. We are faced with some sort of trauma on an almost daily basis (Maddi, 2013). From the moment we are born we are participating in the Resilience Life Cycle (Dees & Huckabee, 2011). This applies to people of all ages. Trauma and the ability to recover from it start the minute we are born. The actual act of being born is a traumatic experience in and of itself. Resilience is something we are born with and also something we can strengthen and grow as we get older. Many studies have shown the resilience of children to recover from serious traumatic events. However...
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...A Psychoanalytic Approach to “The Yellow Wallpaper” The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” first appeared in the January 1882 publication of The New England Magazine, a monthly literary magazine published in Boston. Authored by Charlotte Perkins Gilman this short story was not well received at printing and was not reprinted until twenty-eight years later in William Dean Howell’s collection,The Great American Short Stories in 1920. As part of the collection it gained some popularity for a time and then just died out again. Unfortunately this was the extent of the life of her work while she was still alive. However in 1973 the story was reissued by the Feminist Press with an exceptional commentary by Elaine Hedges and finally became popularly rediscovered. Elaine Hedges explained the work as a “pioneering masterpiece of feminist literature” (Pompele 61). Since the publication, theorists using a Feminist approach most overwhelmingly study the story.Gilman’s emphasis on the importance of language and text, and the fact that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a tale of mental breakdown, make Lacanian psychoanalytic a natural way to consider the work in order to help readers understand the author’s use of language as a manifestation not of herself but the “other” as a means to safely express herself. As an autobiographical story there exist very undeniable connections between Gilman’s personal life and that of the narrator. A study of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is quite remiss if not...
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...Monty Miller Literature Comparison Robert Browning's poems “Porphyria's Lover” and William Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily” are stories of where the characters Emily Grierson (“A Rose for Emily”) and Porphyria’s lover ('Porphyria's Lover') are so insanely in love to the point they cannot live without the one they feel so strongly for, which drives them to insanity and murder. Emily Grierson and Porphyria’s lovers insanity are brought on from different emotional states. Insanity or mental illness is defined as “any disease or condition affecting the brain that influences the way a person thinks, feels, behaves, and/or relates to others and to his or her surroundings” (Amal Chakraburtty). According to the website WebMD Amal Chakraburtty, MD, Mental illness may be caused from many factors such as: Heredity (genetics), Biology, Psychological trauma, and Environmental stressors. The character Emily’s illness may be caused from either heredity, Psychological trauma, and or Environmental stressors. Porphyria's Lovers mental illness appears to be brought on by Psychological trauma. An analysis of Emily Grierson and Porphyria’s lovers emotional state will provide in contrast the reason that drove them both to murder. Robert Browning's “Porphyria's Lover” is a dramatic monologue poem about an insecure, possessive and egotistical lover who, upon finding a moment in which he is reassured of his partner’s love for him; attempts to preserve the moment by killing her. The poem has a very...
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...that the violence of war is a trauma that is utterly unrepresentable. In majority of Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim’s explanations are done in a matter-of-fact way. Whether this be about time travel, his family’s tragedies, or about the...
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...Soldiers are often idolized in society for their bravery. While this is positive because they courageously risk their lives to protect others, the trauma soldiers face is rarely addressed. Often the stories one is told will not be used to incite fear, but to encourage a person to enlist, similar to the many others soldiers who have patriotically fought before them. In Luigi Pirandello’s War and Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, they criticize society’s use of patriotism as a means to manipulate people into suffering in service of their country. The author’s take different approaches to conveying this message, resulting in the texts having different tones. Patriotism as a rationale may convince a person to do something, but it is not enough...
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...I believe the two story features that are most essential to developing and telling a successful short story are descriptive detail and emphasis on a single character. Considering that these stories are short in nature these features, I believe, most greatly help to expedite the author’s intent. In short stories there is little time to fully develop more than one character. One character must drive the story without much aid from other characters, so descriptive detail has to help fill in the blanks. Emphasis on a single character is also vital. Contrasting with an antagonist or ushering in some form of conflict helps to develop a character without taking the attention away from them. This contrast brings out character flaws or highlights which makes the character and story more dynamic. Descriptive detail is highlighted in “Royal Beatings”. In this short story the detail helps to fill-out the character, to develop her; to give you a peak into her psyche. Rose’s imagination gives a great example of descriptive detail as it relates to her beatings “the blood came leaping out like banners” is a line that resonated with me. There is a sense of theatricality to the part she has to play in this story; “She plays his victim with self-indulgence that arouses, and maybe hopes to arouse” is a line that also lends heed to this notion. The descriptive detail in her thoughts are so vivid that you can’t help but visualize what she is thinking. You can understand and relate to her...
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...Anterograde amnesia refers to the inability to create new memories due to brain damage, while long-term memories from before the event remain intact. The brain damage can be caused by the effects of long-term alcoholism, severe malnutrition, stroke, head trauma, encephalitis, surgery, Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, cerebrovascular events, anoxia or other trauma.[12] The two brain regions related with this condition are medial temporal lobe and medial diencephalon. Anterograde amnesia cannot be treated with pharmacological methods due to neuronal loss.[13] However, treatment exists in educating patients to define their daily routines and after several steps they begin to benefit from their procedural memory. Likewise, social and emotional support is critical to improving quality of life for anterograde amnesia sufferers.[13] * Retrograde amnesia refers to inability to recall memories before onset of amnesia. One may be able to encode new memories after the incident. Retrograde is usually caused by head trauma or brain damage to parts of the brain besides the hippocampus. The hippocampus is responsible for encoding new memory. Episodic memory is more likely to be affected than semantic memory. The damage is usually caused by head trauma, cerebrovascular accident, stroke, tumor, hypoxia, encephalitis, or chronic alcoholism. People suffering from retrograde amnesia are more likely to remember general knowledge rather than specifics. Recent memories are less likely to be recovered, but...
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...Insignificant gestures “If I could peel back time, I would do things differently. But you don’t get second chances”- insignificant gestures (ll. 11-12). One wrong decision can haunt your mind for life – especially those decisions you take at a life-threatening point. These wrong decisions can be the cause of a long-term damage like Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and because of the emotional consequences; it can change our lives and personalities completely. That is the main theme in Jo Cannon’s short story insignificant gestures from 2007 – how one mistake can change a person’s life and personality. The narrator himself, who is the main character, tells us the story through his own flashbacks from his past. By the flashbacks we also get an insight of the reasons behind the cause of the narrator’s emotional trauma. Two different errors of judgements is the cause behind the trauma. Our narrator made these errors 10 years ago back in Africa, when he was a volunteer doctor. After his ten years of services in Africa he moved back to Britain, but not as a doctor – he changed his work to psychiatry. He did not leave his traumatic experience in Africa and cannot forgive himself. Before his misjudgements he had a passion for drawing, but now he is afraid of the places his mind will be when he draws. He also suffers from insomnia and anxiety “Even now, when a passing lights up my wall I jerk awake with hot rivulets of anxiety running through my limps” (ll. 74-75) all this is the consequences...
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...Essays and Studies 1.1 October 2010 Haunting Poetry: Trauma, Otherness and Textuality in Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days Olu Jenzen Early conceptions of trauma are intimately linked not only with modernity but specifically with the height of industrialisation (Micale and Lerner 2001). This is converged in the opening of Specimen Days particularly in the image of an industrial accident at the ironworks where a young man is killed by the stamping machine. His young brother, replacing him at the machine after the funeral, then experiences an apparition of the dead brother still trapped inside the machine, which leads him to believe that all machines house entrapped ghosts of the dead. Writing on the Victorians’ anxieties about internal disruption caused by the advent of the railway, Jill Matus (2001, 415) has pointed out that, Freud himself remarked in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), [that] there is ‘a condition [which] has long been known and described [and] which occurs after severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life; it has been given the name of traumatic neurosis’ (12). Freud’s remark brings to the fore the traumas of the industrial age as both individually and publicly experienced and negotiated. This condition of trauma as private and public, individual yet also societal is held in tension throughout Cunningham’s novel. Reflecting on the otherness of trauma and its vexed relationship to representation, this...
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...Jada Gray-Hernandez 1302.005 Prof C J Arevalo 17 April 2013 Research Essay The Lost One “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway is a story of a young man, Harold Krebs, who returns home in the summer of 1919 after fighting in Germany during World War I. After being away at war for two years, Krebs returns to his hometown in Oklahoma but does not get the welcome that he was expecting. As he attempts to readjust to society he embellishes his war stories in an attempt to make them more interesting, but grows tired and nauseated by them instead. At home things are not as they had been; his sisters see him as a hero and his parents see him as a man that needs to move on with his life yet they still treat him like a child. Although Krebs has been to war and has aged he does not share his family’s outlook regarding himself; instead he feels lost and cold, detached from the life he once knew. Hemingway illustrates how a soldier returning from war returns to a life and a family they no longer know and to a world they no longer recognize. Hemingway expresses the difficulties of adapting back into civilian life after being away at war and the effects on a soldier as well as a soldiers family. When a soldier returns home, the welcome they receive often helps them to reconnect to the civilian world. The townspeople had previously greeted soldiers upon returning from the war, but when Harold Krebs arrives he quickly realizes that the “greeting of heroes was over” (Hemingway 253). He...
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