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Analysis Of Rube Goldberg 's ' Rube '

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Every Sunday morning, Americans fetch their newspapers from their porch, grab a steaming cup of coffee, and flip the thin sheets to the comic section. This ritual creates a connection between a cartoonist and his audience. Creating giggles and chuckles with his comic strips, Rube Goldberg took his fascination of technology and combined it with the belief that Americans complicate plans to complete simple tasks, giving birth to the Rube Goldberg Machine. His goal was to reverse the actual function of a machine, making difficult things simple, to express his feelings toward Americans. The machine relies on the relationships between everyday objects to get from point A to point B. For example, Goldberg devised a contraption entitled “How to Get Rid of a Mouse.” The idea is that a mouse will dive for a painting of cheese, flying through the canvas and onto the hot stove. Then, he will jump onto an ice cube to cool off, and a moving escalator will drop him on a boxing glove that knocks him into a basket. The basket, tied to a rocket, will set the miniature rocket off and fly him to the moon. If one step goes awry, the machine fails. All the seemingly random parts are connected by one main goal: getting rid of a mouse. In the same way a Rube Goldberg Machine is reliant upon a string of preceding actions, so is the overall theme of a novel. To illustrate the concept of interconnecting themes, imagine what these seemingly unrelated items and characters from A Separate

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