Alice Munro Carried Away

Sometimes there is a situation that one is dragged in to, such as some type of accident. For example, Mitchell Stephens is one of the narrators in “The Sweet Hereafter” by Russell Banks. In his side of the story, he is a lawyer from New York who heard about a bus accident in Sam Dent where ten children died in a bus crash. Mitchell is also the one lawyer representing Risa Walker and her husband in a negligence suit that financially compensated them for the loss of their son Sean. Mitchell is not only just a lawyer like many others but also had more experience. He sympathizes with the parents who lost their children in the accident because like these parents who lost their children he also has a daughter Zoe, who is he can consider dead due to her drug problem. To this reason, Mitchell Stephen has the most to gain by telling his tale to the reader because he seeks to relieve himself from his grief and to help future children riding to school who do not have to come to the same fate as others in the accident.

Have you ever wondered if the ordeals you went through could become a “rite of passage?” These ordeals could be a big event that could change a person’s entire foundation, such as marriage, or it can be something small, like being inspired to cook because of feedback. The novella, “The Body” written by Gordie Lachance, elaborates about the author’s childhood where he and his friends went through an ordeal that is a rite of passage. This ordeal was considered a journey for the boys as they believed in the frame and glory once they found the corpse of Ray Browser, a young boy around the same age as the author and his friends. The journey started out as an easygoing adventure, a playful type that could be considered as an innocent boy running in the park playing tag with his buddies. However, the journey changes into a more “serious business” for the author and his friends have to face many circumstances where it becomes flight-or-fight situations. In the novella, Gordie reveals many insights into the characteristics of his friends and himself

Fitting in is always an issue in the world of teenage girls and some girls have better outcomes than others. “Snow White” by Grace Hu is a story about a teenage girl named Mary who is an albino. Mary struggles to be accepted because of her scary white exterior. Also she has low self confidence from being teased by her peers. Mary also only has one true friend that begins to drift apart from her. Another story that deals with the issue of acceptance is the story “Red Dress”. “Red Dress” by Alice Munro is a story about a teenage girl entering her first year of high school. She fights to be accepted and decides to go to the school dance with her one friend Lonnie, despite her terrible clothes put together by her crazy

The Things They Carried is an autobiographical novel written by Tim O’Brien that details his time as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Considered to be “the best work of fiction ever written about Vietnam, some even think it is the best about war,” (Greenya 1). The stories that are contained within the novel talk about themes such as loss, burdens, and the horrifying truths of the Vietnam War, the first war to take place during a more ‘modern’ era, as the tragedies of the war could be broadcasted through television. Much like many soldiers that fought in the war, Tim O’Brien was forced to face through many tragedies. Due to this, the book is used to preserve those who have died in Tim O’Brien’s life. The two chapters within The Things They Carried develop the importance of O’Brien’s coping mechanism. In The Little Brown Reader, ‘Snapshot: Lost Lives of Women’ by Amy Tan contains a similar structure to the two chapters of O’Brien’s novel. I believe that Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is similar to Amy Tan’s ‘Snapshot: Lost Lives of Women in the structure detailing the past and the idea of keeping people’s lives preserved through the art of storytelling, O’Brien’s last two chapters are essential in showing this similarity.

The story, “Runaway”, written by Alice Munro, suggests how human beings try to escape from their problems when they cannot manage them. The story tells how a girl in a bad marriage who unable to deal with it runs from the situation but later came back, refuses a chance of escape from her abusive husband. Even the goat Flora who cannot be fully tamed as an animal runs away and Carla is described as a girl who wants the attention from her husband that she does not get and runs away from him. Carla’s nature is like the goat Flora because they both escape from their situations. Munro shows parallels between Flora and Carla, which argues that Flora’s behavior mirrors Carla’s relationship with Clark.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a story of a young girl’s journey down the rabbit hole into a fantasy world where there seems to be no logic. Throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice experiences a variety of bizarre physical changes, causing her to realize she is not only trying to figure out Wonderland but also trying to determine her own identity. After Alice arrives in Wonderland the narrator states, “For this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people” (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 12). This quotation is the first instance that shows Alice is unsure of her identity. The changes in size that take place when she eats or drinks are the physical signs of her loss of identity.

The Ride is the story of the heinous and gruesome murder of ten year old, Jeffrey Curley, a case that is familiar to many in the Massachusetts area. The book works its way from the grisly crime to the years afterward. It focuses on the family of Jeffrey, heavily weighted on the life of Cambridge Firefighter Bob Curley, Jeffrey’s father. Charles Jaynes and Salvatore Sicari, both from Jeffrey’s neighborhood were convicted of the murder. Within this essay I will demonstrate from The Ride the relationship between reporting and suffering that may have been brought on for the crime victims of this case, the relationship between the victim profiles and the victim family profiles, the role in which the family may have played in the

In connecting the powerless, ‘unhuman’ woman to the patriarchal family system, we can notice that “...the mother is the logical target for all of our fear, ambivalence and rage because she is the primary nurturer and caretaker... [and w]hat is crucial is an awareness that we are in this myth and that it has consequences for real men and women" (Reis 93). It is easy to blame our mothers for our issues, she is there and she is available while the father is typically emotionally unavailable. In the novel, the audience can easily blame Ratched for the Combine’s issues, simply because she is there. In the Handmaid’s Tale, we see the women who try to take back some of their power by not going along with the society that forces reproduction be described as the unwomen, by telling women that take back their power, not only their reproductive freedoms but also just the power over themselves, are no longer women furthers this line of dehumanization.

When we are adolescents we see the world through our parents' eyes.  We struggle to define ourselves within their world, or to even break away from their world.  Often, the birth of our "self" is defined in a moment of truth or a moment of heightened self-awareness that is the culmination of a group of events or the result of a life crisis or struggle.  In literature we refer to this birth of "self" as an epiphany.  Alice Munro writes in "Boys and Girls" about her own battle to define herself.  She is torn between the "inside" world of her mother and the "outside" world of her father.  In the beginning her father's world prevails, but by the finale, her mother's world invades her

“It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder, that life might be long.” (Chopin 17). “"Poof!"… gave a revealing look at the victims of domestic abuse and how they wrestle with overcoming their fear and their doubts after suffering years of abusive treatment.” (Toomer 5) Loureen unlike Mrs. Mallard, witnesses her husband’s death first hand during a marital argument. Loureen goes through denial questioning whether her husband’s death. She is happy her husband is dead but also feels guilty, because she knows how a mourning wife should react, but the joy of his demise is greater,” I should be praying, I should be thinking of the burial, but all that keeps popping into my mind is what will I wear on television when I share my horrible and wonderful story with a studio audience…”, Loureen’s husband, Samuel, was physically abusive, as revealed by Florence, Loureen’s best friend and neighbor. “Did that mother***** hit you again?” (Nottage 1563) This abuse, physical by Samuel and mental by Brently, is what allows Loureen in the drama “Poof!” and Mrs. Mallard in the short story “The Story of an Hour” to have the shared freedom they feel in the release from their respective abusive relationships.

People are shaped by the external forces that act upon them. They can choose whether or not to accept the pressure and conform to them or they can reject it altogether, further reinforcing their original traits. Sometimes these external forces are too substantial for the individual to handle and they have no choice but to conform and submit to these forces. In the short story “Boys and Girls”, written by Alice Munro the protagonist begins to discover that society plays an important role in the shaping of a one's character and personality. In her childhood, the protagonist exhibits a very unorthodox nature as she prefers to do manual labour alongside her father rather than residing in her house doing more domestic tasks. As the protagonist

Another way that forensic science has impacted the judicial process is through appeals. With the increase in forensic science being used in the courtroom for trial, it has also increased in the use for appeals. The Innocence Project, created by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who were the lawyers in the previously mentioned New York case, is an advocacy group that strives to exonerate wrongfully convictions individuals through DNA evidence and lead reform efforts to the criminal justice system. Since the Innocence Project began in 1992, they have exonerated almost 350 individuals through DNA testing with about 150 of the actual offenders being found.

In Alice Munro short story “Boys and Girls” is about a young girl confused in life about herself maturing into a young women that takes place on a fox farm in Jubilee, Ontario, Canada with her parents and her younger brother. The character of the young girl that is not specified by a name in the story is struggling with the roles that are expected by her peers of a young women in the 1940’s. This young girl has been helping her father on the fox farm for many years in which brought so much of a joy in her life. As she gets older, as well and as her younger brother Laird grows older, she is starting to realize that her younger brother will be soon be taking over the roles and responsibility of taking care of the animals. Then her mother and grandmother points out the anticipations of her to start acting more like how a young women of her age should present themselves and this has great emotional effects on her, and at the end of the story she shows a final act of disobedience against her father, but it only shows the thing she resist the most, her maturing into a young women and becoming her own person.

“Carried Away | Alice Munro” by Andrew and Other Stories, states Louisa, although

Blin’s work throughout this article does not just develop into discussing the short story itself, but mainly focuses on the notation of the authors writing. This article, “Alice Munro’s naughty coordinators in Friend of My Youth” by Lynn Blin is an interesting read; by being able to use this article as a template for any other piece of writing while still being very useful and specific towards “Friend of My Youth”. She breaks down the sentences and words to understand the deeper workings of “Friend of My Youth”. Blin points out that Munro purposely leaves important information out of her story, leaving the narrator and the reader in the dark. “It is in… gaps that Munro not only enables us to play our role of active readers by inviting us to fill them in, it is in these gaps she constructs the space in her text to enable various narrative voices to be heard” (paragraph 71). By identifying those blanks the reader can come up with assumptions of what is really happening and thus can come up with a variety of outcomes.