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Rizchel Dayao

Literary Reference Center - powered by EBSCOhost: Tragic Form - 0 views

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    Argument: Shakespeare's use of foil characters having differing traditional views concern the origin of suffering. Claim: Shakespeare purposely creates contradicting characters and their actions usually result in a tragedy of chance. The structure also has a role in his tragedy. Evidence: "The play however eludes both the 'providential' and the 'fatal' formulae and offers us an early, but fully articulated Shakespearean tragic structure."
Alysa Herchet

Literary Analysis 2 - 0 views

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    Argument: The article was proving that Farewell to Arms is a tragedy. It was not written with the same structure of a traditional tragedy, so it has been argued on weather or not it is. The critic claims that the novel is because of Catherine's death. Others say that her death was pointless and uncalled for, but the critic points out that her death was part of the tragic plot. Hemingway constructs a unique relationship between Catherine and Frederic so you have sympathy toward them so he can create a tragic emotion in the end. Evidence: "Hemingway has fashioned a new form of tragedy in which the hero acts not mistakenly but supremely well, and suffers a doom which is not directly caused by his actions at all. The belief that life is a tragedy, lip itself, has become the backbone for a new literary structure." (Merrill). "…in A Farewell to Arms, as in any tragic work, we are made to feel that the hero's doom is inevitable. If the reader doubts that Hemingway has achieved this sense of tragic inevitability, let him consider whether the book could have ended with the lovers' escape to Switzerland rather than Catherine's death." (Merrill). Thoughts: Hemingway created a different style that no one had ever tried before making it open for argument. Merrill provides the reader with a detailed background and analysis of A Farewell to Arms, which supports and proves his claim to be right. He gives insight into who Hemingway was, and why he wrote the novel in a nontraditional manner. By proving his understanding of the novel I was able to see connections to what he was saying and what happened in the story. I think that because his analysis was so in depth it was hard to find a way to disagree.
Amber Henry

Tragedies Provide Meaning To Life - 0 views

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    Jenny Turner, the author of the article entitled, "Top Of The World," discusses the variety of novels that Douglas Coupland has written and analyzes their purposes. Miss Wyoming, being one of Coupland's novels, is focused on the majority of the article and is summarized as well as criticized. Jenny Turner's main purpose of the article is to argue that Miss Wyoming is a novel that is "structured around fantasies of escape" due to the fact that the two main characters in Miss Wyoming are constantly searching for an escape route to life. Although, the organization of the article itself does not make the argument as effective as it could be. Statements related to Miss Wyoming are scattered around the article and therefore the reader has to search for the sections that Miss Wyoming is talked about. This makes the article confusing to navigate as well as unorganized. Fortunately, Jenny Turner places valid statements within the article in which forces the reader to make conclusions about Douglas's novel and utilizes the text as evidence. Throughout the piece, Turner takes quotes from Miss Wyoming in order to support the claims being noted and the quotes that are chosen do effectively support the arguments. Although it is not directly stated, one can infer that an argument in which Jenny Turner is defending is that due to the events that take place in Miss Wyoming, in order to discover the true meaning of life, one must witness a tragedy. Jenny Turner attempts to prove that Coupland writes novels that consist of a series of tragedies in which the characters go through in order to find meaning in their lives. The two novels that Turner utilizes to support this argument are Girlfriend In A Coma and Miss Wyoming. By connecting the two novels in her article, one is able to see the common situations and themes in the majority of Coupland's novels.
jamara

The Lady from the Sea - 8 views

The Ibsen Hero Argument: There are three different heroes in Ibsen's plays. There is the literary hero, the modern hero, and the Ibsen hero. Claim: The Ibsen hero is a tragic hero. Evidence: "Th...

Keshet Miller

F.Scott Fitzgerald - 1 views

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    Argument: Despite raging criticisms that Fitzgerald work as a American writer had failed miserably, but analyzing his success after his death, the importance and significance of his novels are proven prevalent when observing American Culture during the Jazz Age. Claim: There was much critical neglect during Fitzgerald life, much ridicule and shame brought upon Fitzgerald. His life ended with misery, yet does not lessen the writers contribution to literary representation of American culture. Evidence: "...the days and months of his private world began to descend into tragedy. He could not bring the order into his life that would allow him to write his next novel. By the end of the twenties he was living too high and drinking too much" (Shain). "...he did the final complexity of our society and to recognize that we create a large part of our moral selves as we become engaged in that society. This is the theme that runs through his fiction · and through his life" (Shain). http://go.galegroup.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None&sort=RELEVANCE&inPS=true&prodId=LitRC&userGroupName=chandler_main&tabID=T001&searchId=R1&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSegment=&searchType=BasicSearchForm&currentPosition=6&contentSet=GALE|H1479001146&&docId=GALE|H1479001146&docType=GALE&role=Scribner
Dean Jacomini

Article Analysis #4 - 0 views

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    The author's purpose of the article is to show how Long Day's Journey into Night is more so of an tragedy than a melodrama. Some perceive the play as a melodrama of an addicts life which includes both good and evil outcomes, while Michael Manheim believes the play does not show both good and evil but is a mere tragedy. The author of the article demonstrates a logical organization of his argument. Both consistency and focus are evident, but due to his terminology the coherence can be a bit difficult at times. The author provides enough if not more typical evidence like how Mary had tendencies toward an addictive personality before she became hooked on morphine after childbirth. Even thought the author says the play us very repetitious of the many problems of the Tyrone family he finds that the ending is in his opinion very open ended and imaginative. If the author had biases and beliefs they were not very apparent to me which is not to say he didn't have any just I could not find them. Although he does state a little I believe the author thinks that most critics do not go into enough detail like himself. The author vividly states info gathered from his conclusions about the addict Mary. This is how he specifically states his mind about the article.
Ashley Cox

Lovely Bones and coping - 4 views

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    This article is showing how different people cope with the tragedy in lovely bones. How everyone deals with things in their own ways. In this article it states all the different ways the family coped in the situation of their daughter or sisters death. How their parents never learned to move on from the tragic death of their daughter but how the two living children learned to move on with their own lives and still connect with their sister
Mariah Love

Religion and Happiness - 4 views

Mariah Love Ms. Jensen AP Literature - 1 2 Feb. 2011 Final Thought Paper Ahead of its time in both societal psychology and advances in technology, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World inhibits the soci...

started by Mariah Love on 03 Mar 11 no follow-up yet
Janine Vanlandingham

Literary Analysis #4: A Thousand Splendid Suns - 1 views

  • . Socially, Mariam is from the rural lower class; Laila, the urban middle class. Psychologically, Mariam is accustomed to humiliation; Laila, to consideration. Physically, Mariam’s features are “unshapely,” “flat,” “unmemorable,” “coarse,” while Laila is a green-eyed blond beauty.
    • Janine Vanlandingham
       
      The stark contrasts Hosseini makes in these women show that regardless of who someone is, we can all get along.
  • This defining trauma, then, teaches Mariam that to assert oneself, to dare, to take the initiative is to suffer pain, cause hurt to others, and precipitate tragedy. Better to bear and forbear. Hosseini thus prepares the psyche of this character for the almost incredible burden of abuse and suffering that she has to bear in her marriage.
    • Janine Vanlandingham
       
      The whole psyche of Mariam draws a reader in right away and it makes one wonder why Hosseini created a character that has had such a terrible upbringing and it doesn't get any better for her.
  • he felt impelled to tell an Afghan story different from The Kite Runner’s. That book had been about men—fathers and sons, male friendship, male treachery. Hosseini now felt drawn to tell a contemporaneous story about Afghanistan’s women.
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    C. L. Chua analyzes A Thousand Splendid Suns in an attempt to find out if it was as much of a success as The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini's first novel. The different literary devices that Hosseini used are mentioned to perhaps give validity to the various arguments Chua makes. A shortfall of the critique is that perhaps not enough emphasis was actually placed on an argument; a majority of the essay was a very well written summary of the novel with only a light touch at the very beginning and end of the essay on the actual argument. "He [Hosseini] felt impelled to tell an Afghan story different from The Kite Runner's. That book had been about men-fathers and sons, male friendship, male treachery. Hosseini now felt drawn to tell a contemporaneous story about Afghanistan's women." Chua uses a clear and logical argument to assert his opinion that Hosseini really delved into the life of an Afghanistan woman in the current times. The critique remains coherent but I wish it was more focused and consistent in the argument. It would have been overall better if Chua has also given more of their insight of this novel. I'm not sure if the author of this article is male or female but depending on their gender, it could create a bias. Another bias that may exist is that the author of this critique really enjoy Hosseini's first novel The Kite Runner so they may be more inclined to say that his second novel was just as good since they are already a fan. "Hosseini's two women are strategic contrasts physically, socially, and psychologically. Socially, Mariam is from the rural lower class; Laila, the urban middle class. Psychologically, Mariam is accustomed to humiliation; Laila, to consideration. Physically, Mariam's features are "unshapely," "flat," "unmemorable," "coarse," while Laila is a green-eyed blond beauty." The stark differences that Chua notes about Hosseini's protagonists help to understand a main theme of the novel which could
Alan Adjei

Literature Resource Center - Document - 0 views

  • is an anti-hero, indeed the most classic of anti-heroes.
    • Alan Adjei
       
      Anti-hero is a main character in a dramatic or narrative work who is characterized by a lack of traditional heroic qualities, such as idealism or courage.
  • In this play, the themes of guilt and innocence and of truth and falsehood are considered through the lens of family roles.
    • Alan Adjei
       
      The themes in this novel are all connected to the Lohman family
  • .” Although he is ordinary and his life in some ways tragic, he also chooses his fate.
    • Alan Adjei
       
      Most hero's fate are bestowed on them but unlike Willy he decided his fate, which fits into the role of anti hero.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • play's qualification as genuine tragedy,
  • Although Willy is dead by the end of the play, that is, not all deaths are truly tragic. The other characters respond to Willy's situation in the ways they do because they have different levels of access to knowledge about Willy and hence about themselves. An analysis of the relationships among these characters' insights and their responses will reveal the nature of their flawed family structure.
    • Alan Adjei
       
      Willy's death was not considered tragic because of how the other characters responded to the situation.
  • iff, the older son of Willy and Linda, is the clearest failure. Despite the fact that he had been viewed as a gifted athlete and a boy with a potentially great future, Biff has been unable as an adult to succeed or even persevere at any professional challenge.
    • Alan Adjei
       
      Biff is considered the failure as he wasted all the gifts he had been giving.
  • Yet Biff shares this knowledge with no one; instead this secret becomes the controlling element of his own life.
  • When Biff does attempt to tell the truth, not about Willy's affair but about his own life, Willy and Happy both resist him.
    • Alan Adjei
       
      They restrict him for letting out his feeling even though those feelings are holding him back
  • This inability to acknowledge the truth affects the family on many levels but most particularly in terms of their intimacy with one another and their intimate relationships with others.
    • Alan Adjei
       
      Trust is a major dilemma in the Lohman household and it prevents them from letting in new people into their lives.
  • The most profound secret of the play, however, is of course Willy's apparent obsession with suicid
    • Alan Adjei
       
      The lack of truth in the household eventually lead to secrets and then death because Willy could not share his secrets about suicide.
  • but she forbids them from addressing the subject directly with Willy, for she believes such a confrontation will make him feel ashamed.
    • Alan Adjei
       
      In not talking about his problems lead Willy to his death.
  • Willy. When he does finally succeed in killing himself, his act can be interpreted as a culmination of secrets, secrets which are compounded through lies because they have been created through lies.
  • they also include his failure as a salesman and the subsequent failures of his sons.
Carlos Caraveo

Article Analysis #4 - 0 views

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    Argument: The references to western culture and the similarities as well as the differences between Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker and Gravity Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. During an interview Alice Walker made a comment that said, "Why would they want to?" in regards to "Why write a novel like the one Pynchon wrote? ". Walker refers to her book as "a romance of the last 500,000 years" when according to Adam (writer of the literary criticism) Walker's novel has the "ambition" of Pynchon text. Throughout the text, Adam uses quotes from Walker's novel to relate it to Pynchon's. His purpose for writing this literary criticism was to judge or prove to the public that Walker's novel is in fact similar the Pynchon's. Also, he writes about the difference they have in social views towards the government, and the culture of families. Evidence: "Walker has in common with Pynchon and Wallace a sweeping distrust of the current political, religious, and economic systems of domination prevalent in the world" (Adam). "The world view of The Temple of My Familiar also differs from that of Gravity's Rainbow and many other postmodern texts in its belief in the power of the spiritual to redeem and nourish, even in the midst of oppression and tragedy" (Adam). "Another difference between Walker's novel and Gravity's Rainbow is its concern with communal relationships. Families, tribes, and cultures are of primary importance to the novel, both in the ways that they support the various characters and in the ways in which the characters choose to perpetuate them" (Adam).
Colleen Quinn

Literary Analysis#4-Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult - 0 views

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    Literary Analysis #4-Nineteen Minutes Throughout the literary critic of Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, the main theme supported by author Jessica Stites was that Jodi Picoult uses background and further information than an average writer to convey her full story and add to it's depth as a whole. She states, "If empathy is an inoculation against violence, then Picoult's own compassion for her characters goes beyond good storytelling to political statement; she models the deep sympathy that might have averted the tragedy." Stites goes on to explain that in Picoult's writing she tends to convey a specific message to her readers, leaving them with a second opinion or thought on the overall conflict or main topic of the story. In Nineteen Minutes, Stite's states, "She takes us inside prickly adolescents whose every action screams "Keep out!" and inside the adults afraid to brave their children's barriers." Though several of Stite's comments on the novel and author are directed positively, the author also states that Picoult lacks in empathy. The author goes on to state that though Picoult analyzed numerous aspects of Nineteen Minutes and did a quantity of research, she yet lacks the characterization and development of main character Peter. Stites believes that in order to add dynamic perspective to the overall novel, Picoult should have developed Peter as a character by learning of the killing spree from Peter's perspective and reading why he shot a teacher that had been kind to him. Though Stite's emphasizes the lack of characterization from the perspective of Peter, she later goes on to support Picoult once more when saying that the lack of characterization should actually be intentional, stating that once you loose boys, they go somewhere you can not follow.
Ashley Cox

My Name Was Salmon, Like the Fish': Understanding Death, Grief, and Redemption in Alice... - 0 views

  • As with so many other works of contemporary fiction and film, Alice Sebold's bestselling novel The Lovely Bones (2002) fulfills our fundamental and indelibly human desires for establishing vital interconnections with the lost friends and loved ones who adorn our personal pasts.
  • Time and time again, the most cherished works of our literary and popular culture reflect this abiding need to seek out our lost siblings, parents, and grandparents.
  • we long for the opportunity to wade back into the recesses of time in order to enjoy impossible reunions with the people who left their imprints upon our very souls
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • By narrating the events surrounding the Salmon family's tragic dislocation and heart-wrenching reunion, The Lovely Bones deftly taps into our yearnings to eclipse the laws of space and time. Even more powerfully, the novel depicts the many ways in which interpersonal tragedy possesses the capacity for tearing survivors' lives apart at the very moment in which they need familial companionship the most. The parlance of family systems therapy--with its accent upon the interpersonal dynamics that shape literary works as well as our own senses of self--provides us with a useful lens for understanding the Salmon family's trials and tribulations in The Lovely Bones.
  • as an inherently open system, the family must at once provide support for its individual members' integration into a solid family unit, as well as their differentiation, or emotional and psychological separation, into relatively autonomous selves. This mutual developmental process possesses the capacity for producing functional and dysfunctional families. In functional families, individual members evolve into fully realized selves that allow them to act, think, and feel for themselves. In dysfunctional families, however, family members develop pseudo-selves--often fostered by fear and anxiety within the system--and thus, such individuals frequently remain unable to maintain any real equilibrium between their inner feelings and their outward behavior
  • In the novel, Susie can only watch in horror as her family devolves from a functional system into a dysfunctional shadow of its former self. Family therapists describe the fashion in which the Salmons maintain their systemic dysfunctionality as a psychological state of homeostasis, which Barnard and Corrales define as a family's tendency
  • "In order to perceive change in one's life--to experience one's life as progressing--and in order to perceive oneself changing one's life, a person requires mechanisms that assist her to plot the events of her life within the context of coherent sequences across time--through the past, present, and future" (35). These mechanisms--works of narrative therapy--offer cogent methodologies that assist clients (or readers) in simultaneously identifying with and separating from the dilemmas that plague their lived experiences.
  • At the beginning of the novel, the Salmons' interpersonal relationship exists as a functional family system. Jack and Abigail Salmon enjoy a busy, albeit satisfying family life in eastern Pennsylvania, where they raise their three children--fourteen-year-old Susie, her younger sister Lindsey, and their four-year-old brother Buckley. After Susie's rape, murder, and dismemberment in December 1973, the family lapses into a dysfunctional spiral as they attempt to cope with a stultifying sense of grief. The effect of Susie's untimely death is rendered even more painful by the disappearance of her body save for a stray elbow, as well as by Jack's suspicions that a reclusive neighbor, George Harvey, is responsible for her demise.
  • "The reflective awareness of one's personal narrative provides the realization that past events are not meaningful in themselves but are given significance by the configuration of one's narrative," Polkinghorne observes. "This realization can release people from the control of past interpretations they have attached to events and open up the possibility of renewal and freedom for change" (182-83).
  • Told entirely from Susie's perspective, the novel details the post-traumatic experiences of her family as they attempt to make their various ways among the living. Existing in a form of atemporal limbo that she describes as a kind of heaven, Susie observes her family and friends as they try to understand her loss in terms of their own survivorship. In addition to her significant role as witness, Susie must also contend with her own anxieties about her untimely separation from her family unit, as well as her severance from the young life that she was only just beginning to comprehend.
  • "There is no question," they write, "that families devote considerable energy to maintain a certain amount of order and stability. Security," they add, "seems to be tied with a certain amount of stability and predictability"
  • In The Lovely Bones, Susie composes her narrative in an explicit attempt to make sense of her family's dysfunctionality and to explode the homeostasis of her former family system, thus allowing them to effect their own "new levels of functioning." Although feelings of morphogenesis for Susie will always be tempered by the finality of her death, she intuitively realizes that the sublimation of her family's homeostasis will allow both herself and her family to continue their progress toward selfhood--although obviously in decidedly different locales and through highly disparate states of being.
  • The particular manner in which Susie sorts through the tragic events of her family's post-traumatic experiences can be usefully understood by interpreting her act of narrative therapy in terms of the five "attitudes" toward death that Kübler-Ross postulates in On Death and Dying. These attitudes--which themselves mirror the five stages of dying that terminally ill patients undergo--include denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. "The one thing that usually persists through all these stages is hope," Kübler-Ross writes. "It is the feeling that all this must have some meaning, will pay off eventually if they can only endure it for a little while longer" (139).
  • Abigail isolates herself by delving into the workaday world of the suburban housewife. Her obsession with the preparation of the family's meals and her daily chores allows the time to pass more quickly, thus limiting her ability to reflect upon her daughter's ordeal.
  • In The Lovely Bones, the first portion of Susie's narrative highlights the narrator and her family's struggle with denial and isolation as they simultaneously come to grips with and attempt to disavow the unsettling reality of her murder.4 Their feelings of denial and isolation function as "coping mechanisms," according to Kübler-Ross, as well as the result of the "inability of [clients] to look at their situations realistically" (37, 41). Unable to make sense of Susie's sudden disappearance from their lives, the Salmons initially cleave to each other, hoping against hope that somehow she will return to their midst. After the police report to the family that Susie must be dead, given that so much blood had been found at the scene of the crime, they begin the difficult work of having to confront her fate, as well as their own. Like her family, Susie finds herself unable to accept her passing: "I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother," she reports. "That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it" (27).
  • While her father purposefully refuses to allow himself to cry for her loss--to do so, he reasons, would make Susie's death seem all the more real--Jack copes by attempting to establish normalcy in the Salmon household within only a few scant days of her disappearance.
  • Meanwhile, Lindsey and Buckley act as their father's accomplices in his efforts to trap Susie's killer. In one particularly harrowing instance, Lindsey slips into Mr. Harvey's house in order to search for evidence. She narrowly escapes from his clutches, ultimately becoming the object of Mr. Harvey's sociopathic fantasies herself. In each instance, the family members' behaviors serve to exacerbate their ability to come to terms with their grief, rather than to sate their enduring despair.
  • In this fashion, Jack, Abigail, and Lindsey each develop pseudo-selves in order to quell their devastating senses of anxiety and pain. As the youngest member of the family, little Buckley can hardly begin to comprehend his sister's fate. He only begins to understand the extent of her absence from his life during a game of Monopoly, when he realizes that there is no one to play with the shoe, Susie's favorite game piece. Unable to cope with the significance of the moment, Buckley hides the shoe in his bedroom. As with the rest of his family, Buckley can only consider the depth of her absence in isolation from the rest of the unit. To do anymore, it seems, would force them to contend with the awful reality of a world in which Susie simply no longer exists.
  • In the second stage of their confrontation with Susie's death and the slow, almost imperceptible collapse of their family system, the Salmons experience the anger about which Kübler-Ross remarks in On Death and Dying. "When the first stage of denial cannot be maintained any longer," she writes, "it is replaced by feelings of anger, rage, envy, and resentment." According to Kübler-Ross, people in such situations often find it difficult to control their anger or to differentiate logically between the various objects of their animus. "The reason for this," Kübler-Ross observes, "is the fact that this anger is displaced in all directions and projected onto the environment at times almost random" (50).5 In The Lovely Bones, the family's anger takes many
  • forms. Susie's own anger reaches a fever-pitch when she learns the maddening extent of her killer's depravity. As she recognizes that her own death was just the latest in a series of unsolved homicides, Susie seethes as she realizes that Mr. Harvey's house exists as a "town of floating graves, cold and whipped by the wind, where the victims of murder went in the minds of the living. I could see his other victims as they occupied his house--those trace memories left behind before they fled this Earth" (182).
  • While Susie's anger rages in heaven, her father's inability to come to terms with her death pushes the Salmon household to the brink of psychological disaster. His suspicions about his daughter's killer begin to emerge after he visits Mr. Harvey's home and assists his reclusive neighbor in the construction of a backyard bridal tent. Mr. Harvey's bizarre behavior--including his odd remark that "the neighbors saw us. We're friends now"--culminates in Jack's nearly round-the-clock surveillance of the murderer's behavior. Egged on by another neighbor's advice that he should find a covert way of avenging his daughter's homicide, Jack begins casing the cornfield where his daughter died. After he mistakenly accosts a young couple in the field, an altercation ensues that nearly results in Jack's own death. "
  • I wanted my father's vigil," Susie reports, "but also I wanted him to go away and leave me be" (140).
  • Having sublimated her grief for so long and with her husband's increasingly risky behavior testing the boundaries of her patience, Abigail indulges in an extramarital affair--with the local homicide detective, no less--in order to stave off her guarded emotions.
  • Lindsey and Buckley respond to their mother's departure by rallying around their father, whose physical deterioration in the wake of his daughter's murder has rendered him into a shadow of his former, pre-trauma self. Yet by opting to become their father's protector and ally, Lindsey and Buckley also succeed in erecting complicated emotional walls between themselves and their estranged mother.
  • In the third stage of their post-traumatic experiences, the Salmons engage in the act of "bargaining," the grieving phenomenon that Kübler-Ross describes as the product of a given client's irrational fears about the future and his or her "attempt to postpone," if only temporarily, the inevitable processes of life and death
  • In the Salmons' case, the third stage involves very explicit efforts to delay their acceptance of the finality of Susie's death. In so doing, they postpone their capacity for achieving morphogenesis and become typecast in their familial roles.6 Such self-imposed constraints inevitably lead to identity diffusion.
  • Abigail, the overwhelming anxiety over her daughter's loss and the psychological disintegration of her surviving family prompt her to seek refuge by fleeing the Salmon household. When the first anniversary of Susie's death arrives, Abigail can simply no longer fathom the mind-numbing flow of the grieving process:
  • After spending the winter in her late father's cabin in New Hampshire, Abigail drives across the country to California, where she finds a job as a day laborer in a winery. As Denis Jonnes notes,
  • Abigail seeks to empower--or, perhaps more accurately, re-empower--herself by effecting her escape from the larger Salmon family system.7 Yet mere distance can hardly provide her with the emotional sustenance that she so desperately desires:
  • Lindsey attempts to lose herself in the business of living. Opting to go to school the first Monday after Susie's death, Lindsey begins steeling herself against the world. In class, Susie observes, "my sister did not look at Mrs. Dewitt when she speaking. She was perfecting the art of talking to someone while looking through them. That was my first clue that something would have to give" (30).
  • Buckley's youth is understandably complexified by his psychological over-identification with his father, and their intensely close relationship results in Abigail's triangulation after her return from the west coast.
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    This article takes the coping mechanisms in the lovely bones and is connecting it to real life and gives more insight to why the acted the way they did and also how their different ways of coping lead to a divided family. 
Austin Joy

Analysis of A Thousand Splendid Suns - 0 views

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    A Thousand Splendid Suns is a book about women in Afghan and their struggles. In the article Harvey Thompson discuses the problems women face in Khaled's book A Thousand Splendid Suns. "At first, Mariam shows only contempt towards the "interloper," but slowly a friendship develops between the two women. They make common cause and endure degradation, starvation and brutality at the hands of their husband until they are forced to take up a desperate, joint struggle." This shows how women are treated. These women lives are mostly like property being married off to much older men, and having their children. Why have to be a mother at the age of 15 is beyond me but this it's their religion and they are not able to change this life. Thompson also discusses the problems of relationship destroyed at such young ages. For example, Mariam and her father. "The story begins in 1974, as Mariam, an illegitimate child of a wealthy businessman from Herat, is growing up. Her father did not have the courage to marry her mother after "dishonouring" her" (Thompson). The tragedy behind this lost relationship is that her father was the one to marry her off Mariam. Many problems are seen throughout both of Khaled's book. The main factor of both is relationship problems. "Hosseini was born in Kabul, where his father worked for the Afghanistan Foreign Ministry. In 1970, the family moved to the Iranian capital where Hosseini's father worked for the Embassy of Afghanistan. In 1973, Hosseini's family returned to Kabul" (Thompson). It almost seem that he has had some problems within his own family making him want the world to know what happens behind close doors.
Melanie Reyes

Literary Analysis for Henry James - 1 views

Henry James is the author to a wide variety of short novels. He is more known for writing on his own views for European and Americans' society, culture, and class status (Liukkonen). But he spices...

started by Melanie Reyes on 22 Feb 11 no follow-up yet
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