A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller

“These people had no ritual for the washing away of sins. It is another trait we inherited from them, and it has helped to discipline us as well as to breed hypocrisy among us.” (19) These words, which were written by Arthur Miller in 1953, in the description of John Proctor, have given us the explanation of the hypocrisy we have today and will remain within us for a long, perpetual time ahead.

Every respectable parent wants what is best for their children, even if that means putting their personal dreams on hold. Unfortunately, parents can negatively affect their children through, not only their actions, but also their beliefs onto how to achieve their dreams. The damaging effects of parents chasing unrealistic dreams, such as the American Dream, can be seen through their children and how they chase their own dreams. Biff Loman of Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller and Walter Younger of A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry watch their parents fight for their dreams only to become a failure, Biff is pulled into his father’s delusional dreams of success and Walter lacks the proper role models to shape his dreams around,

Miller’s A View from the Bridge, originally written in 1956 as a one act play, has many features of a classic Greek tragedy. It is set in the Italian-American neighbourhood, situated in Red Hook, near Brooklyn Bridge in New York. It is in this community Miller chooses to dramatise themes of conflict, betrayal, love and obsession. The underlying omerta is present throughout the play and is the reason for the conflict as it is defied by Eddie Carbone, the Italian longshoreman, who destroys himself in a clash between his blind passions and primeval ideas of his own people about right living.

In “To Build a Fire”, the author Jack London uses three fires to express the overall theme of pride. The unnamed man goes on a journey in freezing temperatures which leads him to make stupid decisions. The first fire the protagonist creates restores his pride he has in himself. London states, “for the fire was beginning to burn with strength”.

In "Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller, Biff Loman undergoes some changes that shape his understanding on reality. These changes come from seeing the truth about his father, Willy Loman. The acts of Willy Loman altered the way Biff Loman perceived not only the world, but his father. The false guidance Willy gave Biff also led to Biff not having the easiest life after high school. Biff 's concept that being well liked in society is what made you successful is shattered, when he ultimately finds out that his father is just the opposite.

Arthur Miller’s play titled “Death of a Salesman” offers a plethora of morals pertaining to the human condition. One moral, shown in Aesop’s fable “The Peacock and Juno”, pertains to that one should be content with that of which they are given, for one cannot be the best at everything. In Death of a Salesman there is, without a doubt, a paucity of content and happiness within the Loman family. But what does it mean to truly be content?

American short stories have a great relationship between themes of a story to American social concerns. Writers of American short stories often mention the concern or get the point that there trying to say about America across. For this they are given the name of “American short stories”. Without a proper display of America these would just be short stories rather than American short Stories. The writing of these types of authors has a real life concern that they want to spread with people and make the concerns a real thing rather than just an idea. Many of these concerns in short stories revolve around death and different occurrences of death. Whether the death is cause by another person, group of people, nature or by oneself, the concern

In most cases all anyone needs in life is love. But what is love? In The sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway we get the sad truth about what love sometimes is in the real world and in some cases alike this novel, there are many reasons in which love is lost. One of the reasons for lost love is sex. Unfortunately the sexual drive of other characters in the novel dictates whether they love each other or not. Another factor that plays a huge role of leaving love hopeless is alcohol. In this novel for some characters alcohol is a lifestyle, when drunken characters do careless acts in which you can never tell if their actions reveal their true feelings or if they did those actions because they are under the influence, so characters cast these actions and blame the actions on alcohol. The last factor is dissatisfaction with love. This means that characters in this novel are not satisfied with the love and relationship they have now and go on chasing for an even better love which does not exist leaving the love they used to have broken. Through mood, narration and description the author Ernest Hemingway develops the theme of hopeless love.

In The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway, there are two main settings: France and Spain. The novel begins in Paris, France with the narrator and protagonist, Jake Barnes lives and immerses himself in his journalism. Paris is known to be a place of great beauty, and was a common place for many writers to reside in the 1920’s. This initial setting of Paris served to contrast the excitement and beauty yet corruption and uneasiness that is the enigma of Paris. This is where Jake lives, he frequents bars and parallels his author Hemingway in his general detachment from the war. The second setting is in Spain where Burguete, Pamplona and Madrid are visited. Burguete is a more rustic part of the country where Jake and Bill go to be one with nature and go fishing. This setting was the most different from Pamplona and Paris, for its unadulterated nature and simplicity of the landscape. However, the fiesta in Pamplona was a grand event where Brett was moved by Pedro Romero. Pamplona was a small city known for its bull-fighting, and the place where tension unfolds when the main characters get drunk and fight for Brett’s affection. The settings in this novel are parallel to the events that unfold there.

The writer of The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway was a short story writer, journalist, and an American novelist. He produced most of his work between the nineteen twenties and nineteen fifties. One of Hemingway’s many novels, The Sun Also Rises was originally published on October 22, 1926. In the novel, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway uses the lead female character, Lady Brett Ashley to portray the new age of women in that time period.

Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night (1934), has been understood as a study of the corruption of the American Dream through the psychological decline of the novel’s male protagonist, Dick Diver. From the outset, Dick appears a promising psychologist however his success is limited by the social and cultural climate of the 1920s. Milton Stern suggests that ‘the inner focus’ of the novel ‘is the disintegration of the disciplined and creative ‘romantic’ within the ruinous world of the selfish’. Stern’s assumption, however, fails to note that Dick’s vulnerability and need to be loved are symptomatic of a larger crisis of self, and the repression of traumatic events throughout Dick’s life such as his experiences of war and the death of his father. This sense of emotional breakdown features throughout Fitzgerald’s fiction and was an important trope of 1920s literature. According to Malcolm Cowley the period was defined as an ‘age of emotional breakdown’. I maintain that the war had an unshakeable grip on the American population of the 1920s, resulting in an age that was defined not only by beauty and glamour, but also by the existence of widespread psychological disorders, which challenged notions of masculinity. Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night, as well as his short stories, ‘Babylon Revisited’ (1931), and ‘One Trip Abroad’ (1930), grapple with these ideas, presenting the psychological legacy of World War I, and how this affects the lives of Fitzgerald’s male

The years went by with no word about Nicolo and Maffeo. But marco was asking people if they new anything about his father and uncle. It is not uncommon for a traveler merchant to

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. In the novella, The Pearl by John Steinbeck, Kino lives with his wife, Juana, and his child Coyotito. The family lives in a small village in a town where the Spanish colonized. Coyotito goes through something striking and in order to fix it, Kino finds something life changing. Throughout the story, Steinbeck shows that materialism and greed left unchecked can lead to immoral behavior shown through the unnamed trackers, the doctor, and the main character Kino himself.

Most people would consider finding a piece of jewelry worth large sums of money a wonderful stroke of luck. Kino, the main character of John Steinbeck’s ninety-page novel The Pearl, sure felt this way when he discovered the greatest pearl in the world at the point in his life when he needed it most—his son having just being stung by a scorpion and needing expensive medical treatment. However, when the pearl buyers try to swindle him and then send assassins to kill him, burn his house, and destroy his canoe, his perception of the pearl begins to shift. He decides to flee to the capital and sell the pearl himself, taking a route through the mountains in order to evade his pursuers. When his efforts to hide fall short, he changes tactics and

In the novella “The Pearl” by John Steinbeck he introduces many themes such as “Challenging the accepted customs of a society is difficult.” Kino tries to challenge the customs of a society in many parts of this short story and especially when he finds the pearl. Eventually kino tries to gain power from the the pearl but the doctor, three robbers, and three pearl buyers make this very difficult for Kino. The author uses those characters to express the theme “Challenging the accepted customs of a society is difficult.”