Essay on Atwood's Framing of the Story in "Alias Grace"

Mary Flannery O’ Connor is an American writer and essayist. She is widely known for her Southern Gothic style of writing and her used of gnarled characters in her stories. O’Connor is also famed for her twists in her stories, she usually leaves hints towards the stories’ direction in the form of foreshadowing and this is what gives O’Connor’s writing much merit and influence.

The choices that writers make in their writings often create some degree of impact on their readers. The use of language, dictions, style of writing, and other choices they make, all affects the moods of the readers; however, not only the mood, or emotion, of reading the piece, but the way readers analyze the writing. In the short story, Artie’s Angels, Catherine Wells utilizes rhetoric choices of metafiction, reference to King Arthur, and the selection of Morgan le Fay to identify the qualities needed to become leaders and persuade how these leaders make their social movements successful.

The secondary argument is that use of grace, as Flannery O’Connor sees it, is inapplicable within the context of the story. As evidenced in the article, O’Conner sees the Grandmother as a vessel of grace who, by extending her arm to the Misfit, in turn extends a grace which ultimately touches his soul. She speaks of this action “ [turning] him into the prophet he was meant to become”(O’Connor qtd on Bandy 6). However, as Bandy indicates, “there is no ‘later on’ in fiction” (6), making O’Connor’s comments trivial at best. The article references that grace must

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author of short and long fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. A motif among most of her pieces is voice and the power of possessing one, or the ability to speak up or stand up for what one believes in, and Atwood uses this motif to teach her readers about the importance of having a voice with her stories’ characters; strong and/or gifted with a variety of traits are her stories’ characters with voices while powerless and unstable are those otherwise.

One of the spookiest experiences of Grace’s life was the time that she got locked in her middle school cafeteria at approximately eight pm. It was scary because it was dark and she was all alone. She was also told ghost stories about the school that really alarmed her. This relates to the traits of gothic literature and magical realism it takes place in a bleak setting, but it was also an everyday place. The two genres are similar because they both are meant to bring suspense to the reader.

Fictional world . . . The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, settings, style dialogue and tone are literary techniques shown, through a selection of words, diction, one of the important literary elements, identify themes convey as part of the writer’s technique. For instance the author style, imagery is conveys vivid descriptive text: “Their manes were braided with streamers of sliver gold, and green.” Narrative, narrator first and third person, but what I read, interesting, the writer starts sentences with a prepositions and transitional words… As a writer, I will differently incorporated the author’s style in my writing . . . for example: “Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter”. “For more modest tastes I think there ought to be

Here I am the top secret lab under atwood’s ground. It’s time to use the time travel device to see camp grant in person. The time travel device is highly radioactive, but I tripped and fell into the time window it opened up. I got up and tried to run towards the time window to get back but it shut before I got there. Where am I oh yay camp grant great. I think I just saw someone.

It carries a distinctive detective-style of writing. Some would say that the action situations in the book are unbelievable but it fits in perfectly. Jonathan Kellerman captures who Grace Blades truly is and gives lots of information about her life. He introduces you to her while outlining her life extensively in detail helping you understand her better. You feel an ironclad connection with this character. Some would say that Grace Blades is so intelligent and complex that she is borderline crazy. But, you have to read in between the lines. She is a confident, independent, and motivated woman who is very analytical and intelligent with everything she does. This helped her become the person she is, and most importantly, helps her solve the crime of a man she once slept with. She becomes extremely focused with assisting the police capturing his killer that she put her own life on the line. This results in her coming across crazy situations unimaginable. The action in the book is in-your-face from beginning to end. The story jumps around from her childhood, to her teenage years, into present day. You will learn a lot about this character within these pages. I think Johnathan Kellerman is setting her up for a future novel series where she’s the star of the show. She will become the female version of Alex

Finally, the reader is introduced to the character around whom the story is centered, the accursed murderess, Mrs. Wright. She is depicted to be a person of great life and vitality in her younger years, yet her life as Mrs. Wright is portrayed as one of grim sameness, maintaining a humorless daily grind, devoid of life as one regards it in a normal social sense. Although it is clear to the reader that Mrs. Wright is indeed the culprit, she is portrayed sympathetically because of that very lack of normalcy in her daily routine. Where she was once a girl of fun and laughter, it is clear that over the years she has been forced into a reclusive shell by a marriage to a man who has been singularly oppressive. It is equally clear that she finally was brought to her personal breaking point, dealing with her situation in a manner that was at once final and yet inconclusive, depending on the outcome of the legal investigation. It is notable that regardless of the outcome, Mrs. Wright had finally realized a state of peace within herself, a state which had been denied her for the duration of her relationship with the deceased.

It is thought that if her love was real, and she did not commit the murder, that Grace Marks would be a wreck after such a tragic event. Instead she acts calm and collected, and she even goes as far as wearing Nancy’s clothes and even taking her money, both being blatant signs of disrespect. Even more blatant would be the fact that Nancy was strangled, and Grace’s handkerchief was the “weapon.” Also, Grace had little or no love interest in James McDermott, her co-murderer. However, McDermott had interest in her, which Grace used to play him by giving him false hope that if he did what she said that he’d have a chance to be with her. This is exemplified by McDermott’s desire to please her, even though she had no interest in him. It was his goal to convince her what a good guy he was, and that hopefully that would make her want to be with him. McDermott also knows that Grace has sincere interest in Mr. Kinnear, which would make it easier for him to kill him in cold blood. Grace also used taunting as a device to get her way. She presented the idea of killing Kinnear and Nancy as challenges to McDermott, and he would try and complete these challenges to win her affection. For instance, Grace told McDermott that he was all bark and no bite. This statement may be the main reason that McDermott killed Nancy and Mr. Kinnear, as that allowed him to prove that he was daring enough activity to prove to Grace

Austen has set out to save the rising art form of the novel. In this address to the reader she glorifies what a novel should be: the unrestrained expression of words conveying the wide range of raw human emotion. This veneration of the novel is necessary to the development of Catherine's fiction-loving character as it justifies the narrator's right to remain fond of this flawed heroine.

In order to achieve those goals, both authors implement different literary styles. Throughout “The Last Time I Wore a Dress,” Daphne Scholinksi

that [Gradgrind] has missed or forgotten” (152). In her essay “The Literary Imagination in Public

Much of Natural Born Quilter focuses on the analyzation of how the novel was triggered and how it evolved from Atwood’s rough sketch into Alias Grace. Atwood talks heavily about the woman who knew the real Grace Marks and who inspired her to write Alias Grace, Susanna Moodie. Moodie’s trips to Grace consisted of many eyewitness accounts of Grace “screaming out of her mind… but people faked…because it was nicer in the asylum (Wiley 5).” However, Moodie stated that Grace may possibly be “deranged…and that accounts for it all (Wiley 5).” When Atwood rummaged through the historical records of Grace Marks, she came to the conclusion that there were “three Graces: the murderer, the clueless ingénue, and the hidden Grace that nobody could discern (Wiley 8).” To be able to understand the real Grace Marks and how she is connected to the Grace Marks that Atwood created facilitates my comprehension of Grace’s mentality, therefore, facilitating my comprehension of the novel as a whole. Wiley also wrote that Atwood “was interested in the process of public opinion and