Gary Paulsen’s,”Stop the Sun,” is a short story surrounding Terry Erickson - a 13-year-old boy - trying to understand his father’s syndrome (post-traumatic stress disorder). At the start of the story, Terry was puzzled to why his father’s eyes ‘would go away’ and what caused him to change after coming back from Vietnam. Seeing someone he loved changed for the worst hurt him. Terry questioned his mother, but she wouldn’t give him a straight answer, seemingly that she did not know the answer to the question either. So he took matters into his own hands. Everything happened at once - his father’s explanations and the truth about his condition. He had to grasp all the information that was coming all at once at him. Terry afterward became insightful of his father’s experiences and what happened when he couldn’t ‘stop the sun.’ Although Terry was puzzled and conflicted with the fact his father’s experiences and syndrome at the start of the story, through the understanding discussion they had together, Terry became insightful while learning not to be ashamed of his father. At the beginning of “Stop the Sun” Terry was puzzled of his father’s experiences in the Vietnam War. He was confused and ashamed to find out there were many more downsides to his syndrome other than the blank looks. “Words. They gave him words like Vietnam Syndrome, and his father was crawling through a hardware store on his stomach” (Paulsen 640). Here it is demonstrated how Terry has yet to learn the reasons for why his father ended up acting this way. When Terry saw his father’s face, he knew that this wasn’t his father on the ground. “Terry realized that he had to do something. He had to do this thing, had to understand was what wrong with his father” (Paulsen 640). Nothing was going to stop Terry getting down to business about his father’s condition. Tension filled the air while Terry made the decision to have a talk with his father. He tried to break the silence by giving his father some soda, but it was no use. Stalling was the only thing that Terry could actually think of doing at the moment. “I still can’t do it, Terry thought. Things are bad, but maybe not as bad as they could get . . .” (Paulsen 642) Terry here is
The author, Tim O'Brien, is writing about an experience of a tour in the Vietnam conflict. This short story deals with inner conflicts of some individual soldiers and how they chose to deal with the realities of the Vietnam conflict, each in their own individual way as men, as soldiers.
In the story “Stop the Sun” there are two themes. One is to never give upon trying to understand someone or something. The second one is sometimes war can affect people forever. Terry feared to go out in public with his father because the war made his father act strange. Terry wanted to understand what was happening with his father so he could him. Terry learned the horrible things that his father had faced in the war. He also learned that his father was the only soldier out of 54 men to survive. Terry had to change to understand what his father went through. In conclusion Terry played one of the main parts in the story. Such as he created the theme of the story and he also learned to better understand his father.
As human beings evolve from infancy to elderly stages in life, times of struggle and hardship continually challenge their kin and personage; as life tests their mental fortitude and survival dexterity. In essays “My Father’s hands” by author Daisy Hernandez, and “Beginning Dialogues” by author Toi Derricotte, life and its whirl wind of ups and downs are expressed and exemplified. Both authors’ upbringings share various similarities on their evolutionary road trip through life. Struggling with hardship and abuse, how both authors’ dealt with their hardships, and how they ultimately survived/overcame these trying events, show similar correlations.
When disaster strikes, two responses exist: lose hope, or find an inner strength to rise above. “Werner” is an essay where the author, Jo Ann Beard, presents the idea of rediscovering yourself, rebuilding a life after loss, and rising above adversity. Werner, Beard’s main character, finds that the only way to truly move on after a tragedy is to take a leap into what is unfamiliar. After a fire burns down everything Werner has, he is forced to grow and become a new man, leaving his old life behind. Throughout the essay, Beard illustrates a man who faces challenges to his sense of self, and who sequentially must change and become someone new to find who he is again. Beard’s use of the third person, candid diction, and conflict resolution compose an elaborate work that focuses on the concept of becoming a new and better person after a traumatic event.
Trauma is an event in an individual's life which is "defined by its intensity, by the subject's incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization" (Dodge, Kenneth A., John E. Bates, and Gregory S. Petit). In Toni Morrison's, The Bluest Eye, it is demonstrated very clearly how just one unresolved act of trauma can lead to an almost never-ending cycle of tragedy in a community. The cycle of tragedy is easily transferred from parent to child, and its effects can be easily worsened by a lack of support from other people in the community.
Life can bring unexpected events that individuals might not be prepared to confront. This was the case in the short story “On The Rainy River” written by Tim O’Brien. Young Tim is drafted to the military to fight the American War in Vietnam. He faces the conflict of whether he should or should not go to war after being drafted. The thought of giving up the future he has worked so hard for and instead fight a war “for uncertain reasons” terrifies him. He must make the agonizing decision of whether to pursue his personal desire and in turn be shamed by society or conform, sacrificing his ideals in the process.
We all work with one. Maybe you live with one. Or maybe we've done it ourselves...pretending to know something we don't, trying to act like something we're not. Why do people do this? Pride. Some are afraid to admit that they just don't know something, they want to appear intelligent than they are and so they stretch the truth about themselves or embellish certain things they say. This is what Walter Lee of A Raisin in the Sun was doing as he conversated with his sister's date, George, about business plans. Walter Lee was THAT guy. He had goals. He had dreams. He was also desperate and thought he knew it all. Prometheus was a Greek god that was known for his sly intelligence. As annoyed George exits the conversation, he bids Walter "Good
The short story that will be discussed, evaluated, and analyzed in this paper is a very emotionally and morally challenging short story to read. Michael Meyer, author of the college text The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature, states that the author of How to Tell a True War Story, Tim O’Brien, “was drafted into the Vietnam War and received a Purple Heart” (472). His experiences from the Vietnam War have stayed with him, and he writes about them in this short story. The purpose of this literary analysis is to critically analyze this short story by explaining O’Brien’s writing techniques, by discussing his intended message and how it is displayed, by providing my own reaction,
Discuss how the authors, Craig Silvey and Tim Winton, reveal the central character’s process and understanding of trauma and grief.
Hundreds of bodies littered the ground. Sounds of explosions and endless gunfire filled the air. Soldiers, with their uniforms splashed in crimson, fought viciously and ruthlessly. Their main objective, which was to win the battle, took a backseat to their newfound desperation to stay alive. After all, war is not a game, especially one such as the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and left its survivors haunted by a multitude of atrocious events. Terry Erickson’s father and George Robinson, who were two fictional characters from the short stories “Stop the Sun” and “Dear America”, respectively, were veterans of the Vietnam War. The differences and similarities between Terry’s father and George Robinson are striking, and they merit rigorous scrutiny.
Stop the sun, just like terry’s dad tried to do. Imagine your only chance of survival Is to stop the sun from rising, what do you do? Terry and his dad struggle to understand each other since terry’s dad went through a war, the Vietnam war. When the dad’s eyes start “going away” more and more, Terry becomes obsessed with trying to figure out what happened to his father. Gary paulsen the author of Stop The Sun, focused on multiple craft moves: simile, foreshadowing, and Onomatopoeia to help the readers visualize and understanding what is happening in the story.
In the story “Stop the Sun” by Gary Paulsen the theme is some people have problems that sometimes we can’t understand because it isn’t something that can’t be understood, but the knowledge that we obtain when we ask questions is more beneficial than when we don’t try to seek understanding. The story “Stop the Sun” by Gary Paulsen is about a boy named Terry that has a father and sometimes his father’s “eyes go away,”. This worries Terry and causes him to want to know more about what’s happening to his Father. He looks for answers to his questions everywhere because he justs wants to understand.
In Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss gives life to The Four Corners of Civilization through his storytelling. Storytelling gives the author an opportunity to show their experiences and reflect their beliefs within the world they are creating. During the time this book was being written, there was the Iraq and Afghanistan War taking place which had been sending many soldiers back home with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Rothfuss parallels this disorder within his book through the main character, Kvothe, when he experiences trauma and he shows how Kvothe copes with the persisting trauma through grief theory, “four doors of the mind” (135) . His four doors of the mind is similar to the Kubler-Ross Model, which is widely accepted by practitioners, but challenges it by believing the mind copes with pain through the central idea of numbing. However, this mindset of categorizing emotions experienced within grief can be destructive behavior towards any griever rather than helping them cope; stages of post-loss grief do not exist.
At the beginning of the story the narrator, Tim, gets affected by committing an act of violence when he was in the Vietnam War, killing an enemy Vietnamese soldier. Many thoughts began flowing in his head, all the time thinking about the man he killed. “He had been born, maybe, in 1946 in the village of My Khe near the central coastline of
The sun is the largest object in the solar system. It is a middle-sized star and there are many other stars out in the universe just like it. Even though it is only a middle-sized star it is large enough to hold over 1 million Earth’s inside if it were hollow. The temperature on the sun is far too much for any living thing to bear. On the surface it is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit and the core is a stunning 27,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But don’t worry we are over 90,000 million miles away, the sun could never reach us, at least not yet. The sun is a still a middle aged star and later in its life it will become a Red Giant. In this stage it will get bigger, and closer to us causing a temperature increase and most likely the