Analysis Of The Boy Died In My Alley

What drives a person to complete a seemingly impossible goal, and what is their motivation? The characters Ernesto and Cap are similar in the challenges they face but are different in their overall goal. Ernesto in, Barrio Boy, undertakes a mission to learn English in California. Cap in The Cremation of Sam McGee undertakes a far different challenge, but equally as challenging when he had to cremate his friend, Sam McGee, in the freezing cold. Ernesto and Cap are similar in the toughness of their task and how they undertook the challenge.

This Boy’s Life shows that boys need reliable adult role models in their lives. Discuss.

In the article “The Terrible Boy” written by Tom Junod Jonathan Miller was one of the world’s most terrible boys. In America’s eyes a terrible boy is cruel, hostile and merciless. In this article, Jonathan was painted by these descriptions. However, this wasn’t always the case. He wasn’t terrible when he moved to Georgia he just wanted to get kicked out of school, so he did whatever it took. Though in highschool he took on the description of a terrible boy. It all started on the bus when Jonathan threw a open ketchup packet at his rival Joshua Belluardo. They got off the bus and instead of a fight it was a crime scene.Jonathan murdered Joshua. Sadly, though Jonathan was a terrible he should have been shown mercy.

The works of Gwendolyn Brooks has gone through several changes throughout her career. When she first published in 1945, she was eager to be understood by strangers. In her last two poetical collections, however, she has dumped that attitude and gone ?black?. Her change then led her from a major publishing house to smaller black ones. While some critics found an angrier tone in her work, elements of protest had always been present in her writing. Her poetry moves from traditional forms including sonnets, ballads, variations of the Chaucerian and Spenserian stanzas, and the rhythm of the blues to the most unrestricted free verse. To sum up, the popular forms of English poetry appear in her work, but there is some testing as she puts together lyric, narrative, and dramatic poetic forms. In her narrative poetry, the stories are simple but usually go beyond the restrictions of place. In her dramatic poetry, the characters are often memorable because they are everyday survivors not heroes. Her characters are drawn from the underclass of the nation's black slums. Like many urban writers, Brooks has recorded the impact of city life. However, aside from most committed naturalists, she does not entirely blame the city for what happens to people. The city is simply an existing force with which people must deal with. The most dominant theme in Brooks?s work is the

Murder on a Sunday Morning is about an African American boy who was wrongly convicted of murder. He was only fifteen years old when his life changed forever. While first watching the documentary, it seems to the audience that Brenton Butler, the convicted boy, is guilty. Mr. Stephens, husband of the victim, Ann Stephens, claims that Butler came over, tried to take Anna Stephens’ purse, and then before she could comply, he raised his gun and shot her in the face. Sadly, Mr. Stephens was the only eye-witness, which is a major red flag, as he is connected to the victim. After being forced by the detective, Butler confesses. Once defense attorney, Patrick McGuinness is involved, he has Butler tell the court of his innocence and thus beings the criminal proceedings for Brenton Butler.

By adding this phrase in the poem, the persona implies that whatever he is saying in the poem is not his own. However, the lack of quotation marks and the repeated use of the pronoun “I” in the poem implies that the persona “owns” whatever he is saying. Therefore, the persona attempts to own and disown the experiences narrated in the poem at the same time, a paradox. Yes, the persona is the boy. However, as he recalls the time when he first learned English, he tries to separate himself from his experiences during the war. The girl being shot in the last stanza, although the boy wasn’t physically present, is indicative of a turning point in the boy’s life—it ruined the innocence of the boy. And in the poem, this turning point is symbolized by way of the persona’s detachment to what he is narrating; to his former

The story set place during the Civil Right movement in a black household of a little girl and her mother. The poem signal that African Americans are not gifted with their freedom when the girl asked her mother to join the Freedom March “to make our country free” (Randall). Getting their freedom taken away, many African American children march the street of Birmingham to regain their natural rights. Taking a stand to fight for one’s right is the responsibilities of everyone. Another example is the mother’s reason for refusing to let her daughter go march because of her fear of the danger behold there. The mother then direct her daughter to “go to church instead” (Randall). Ironically, the girl meet her fate at the place thought to be the most sacred place. This ironic situation revealed that ignoring the violation of the rules upon civil rights is as dangerous as challenging it.

Gwendolyn Brooks is a famous, African American poetess who is famous for making a social commentary upon the urban society in which she lives. Clearly seen in three of her more popular poems, “the mother”, “a song in the front yard”, and “What shall I give my children? Who are poor?”, Brooks uses the struggles of impoverished motherhood to comment on the stymied lives of adult black women. This is obviously evident in her use of the tone of hopelessness, which transcends all three poems in differing forms that stem from regret in “the mother”, worry and overprotectiveness in “a song in the front yard” and frustration of lacking the necessities for children in “What shall I give my children? Who are poor”

Tobias Wolff’s prepositional memoir, This Boy’s Life, positions the audience to question the role that luck plays in the lives of the characters, particularly Toby and his mother. This account of growing up in post-war America on his life from 1955 to 1965 allows Wolff to reflect on the restrictions imposed on the disenfranchised family by societal norms that prevent them from achieving their dreams of progression through the social hierarchy. Luck plays a very minimal role in the memoir as the characters’ lives are surrounded by an absence of luck. Instead Rosemary and Toby are victims of a variety of circumstances. The social standards imposed through the patriarchy system, the cyclic nature of domestic abuse leading to this. As a

Scanning the darkness from left to right, seeing near where he stood, he first took in the main counter, seeing it being configured as an “L” shape. He then looked through its transparent fronts, seeing the remains of small and empty displays. Even through the dimness brought by the open door, he could tell their whiteness was dust covered. His eyes lifted, looking beyond the main counter, and then scanned slightly right. Seeing further into the depth of the room, and on its other side, sat a set of two counters travelling the far wall. Both, butted end-to-end, they led to a back area he could not fully see. He assumed that was where the back entryway was and where the killer entered.

For centuries, racism has plagued America. People of black ethnicity have been specifically targeted at the most. The bombing of Birmingham, Alabama was an especially tragic example of said attacks. Countless innocent black men, women, and children were shot and killed in the events following the bombing.

Gwendolyn Brooks was a well renowned poet of the 1900s. She earned the honor of being the first Black author to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Brooks was also the first Black woman to hold the position of poetry consultant for the Library of Congress. Her works portray a political consciousness, reflecting the civil rights activism of the 1960s. While expressing her commitment to racial identity as well as equality, Gwendolyn managed to bridge the gap between academic poets of her generation and Black militant writers of the 1960s.

This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff, a memoir about the life a young boy growing up in a broken family, is an extremely enjoyable book. I was assigned to read this book during my American Literature class, but it was so entertaining, that I would like to read it again on my own time. This book is essentially about how the character he tries to mature into, and how he reacts to the negative impacts that happen to him throughout his life. I very much enjoyed this book because it included real-life situations of social and financial statuses, broken families, abuse, and negative influences. Throughout all the negative influences that occurred to him in his life, he still made an effort to become the sophisticated boy he has always looked at himself

Crane’s “Maggie: A Girl in the Streets” is a story of unyielding realism. The story follows Maggie, a girl who resides within the Bowery with her physically and emotionally abusive parents and brothers, Jimmy and Tommie. The story focuses on the life and struggles of Maggie and her family within the slums. Maggie desperately tries to escape the life within the Bowery, but eventually succumbs to it and passes away a broken woman.

The alley is also said to live in “complete isolation from all surrounding activity” (Mahfouz,1) indicating that it is entirely bounded and all activity that happens in it is restricted to only the people of the alley showing how the topographical “trap” also relates to the social entrapment that the alley is facing. With no reference to the outside world, the alley is bound to be a trap that no one, not even Hamida, can escape. The claustrophobic state of the alley reflects the oppression propagated by the alleys rejection to modern values. This is further shown by the description of the atmosphere of the alley when it is described to be “veiled in the brown hues of the glow.” (Mahfouz,1) the use of the color brown, indicating visual imagery, shows the negative claustrophobic, and gloomy atmosphere which runs through the alley. The color brown is a color between black and white, symbolizing negativity and positivity, respectively. However, the color black is more evident in the color brown, therefore symbolizing negativity of the alley as it was “veiled” with the brown hues meaning it was masked with gloominess and pessimism. The alley is also described as having a “distinctive life of its own” (Mahfouz,1) proving once again that the alley and the people within it are limited between the boundaries of the alley and their life only consists of the people within the alley with no