Big Sky By A. B. Guthrie

In Anita Endrezze’s poem “The Girl Who loved the sky” we read about two best friends that meet inside a “second grade room” (1). There with very different characteristics they learn that overall they are more alike than they think. They are able to relate to one another by their views of the world around them. The speaker in the poem is growing up without a father and her friend is blind. Both forced to grow up with an important element missing from their lives. They overcome this tragic part of their childhood and relay on their friendship to feel “safe” (39). As the speaker continues to explain their relationship, we feel their connection. We get the sense that they are able to understand each other and have the ability to view the world around them in the same way.

Billie Jo Kelby is not a boy. She’s a girl; a wiry, thin, redheaded girl that looks more like her father than her mother. She lives on the Great Plains in 1935, during the great drought known as the Dust Bowl. She lives with her pregnant mother and her father, and life seems good, or as good as it will get in her dusty world.

Throughout the course of the book, A Long Way Home, Saroo Brierley, the author, encounters a series of traumatic experiences that lead to bittersweet moments. Unlike a normal child’s infancy, Saroo was physically and mentally consuming. Through his experience, we are able to get a glimpse of the many struggles and hardships young children live in India daily. His petrifying experiences of living on the streets, Liluah, and Nava Jeevan finally lead to his safe haven of being taken by the Brierley’s.

In Tony Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” it explores the discovery of ethnic identities. It depicts the life of Macon Milkman Dead, a withdrawn loner who doesn’t feel accepted by others and is disconnected with his family and heritage. With help from others in his community Milkman takes a trip to discover himself and his roots bringing him closer to the true meaning of his purpose. Milkman in turn realizes that flight represents liberation from a life of restrictions, set in an era of racism and separation. Flight may seem as a positive solution to such a life of problems and discrimination, however, holds very negative aspects in family settings. Abandoning your own and severing those mutual bonds plays a significant role in the life of the loved ones left behind. Most are left recovering from their loss, or completely lose hope such as Hagar. Solomon leaving his wife Ryna and children behind was necessary sacrifice he had to make in order to be free. Solomon is never punished or looked down for his decision; in his song it acknowledges his accomplishment as a great achievement. In “Song of Solomon”, the ability of flight symbolizes the escape from oppression while searching for freedom.

In April of 1992, a young man of the age of twenty-four, later determined to be Chris McCandless ' body, was discovered in an old Fairbanks bus in the Alaskan bush. Four years after his death, Jon Krakauer wrote a novel titled Into The Wild, the book traced McCandless 's journey around much of the United States, across the West side of Canada, and even down to the boarder of Mexico. Over the many years since his death, speculations have arisen about how death was brought upon him. Most believe starvation was the only reason, but with extensive research Jon Krakauer discovered another theory, that a substance in the seeds that Chris McCandless was ingesting was a contributing factor to his death. Even with this conclusion many around the world despise Chris for his being naive and unprepared when walking into the wild. While others believe he was brave for following his dreams and never letting anyone talk him out of his plans. Chris McCandless was an adventurer who was brave enough to never back down, but in the end his luck turned for the worst and was misfortunate enough to have ate the wrong type of food. McCandless was an inspiration and a lesson to people of all ages, that dreams aren 't meant to be taken lightly and even with possible risks they should be followed. Jon Krakauer 's book tells a marvelous story of a young man who left behind the outside world to do what he loved the most.

1. One of the main characters in the book Black and Blue is a woman named Frannie Benedetto. Some of the roles that Frannie had were being a wife, a mother, a Catholic, and a nurse. Her role as a wife was very challenging, due to the fact that she was in an abusive relationship and was married to a New York City Police Officer. Frannie had been married to her husband Bobby Benedetto for almost twenty years. Her entire relationship with her husband has been traumatizing. Numerous times Frannie had been physically assault, raped, and belittled. Bobby physically assaulted Frannie when she was nineteen years old for the first time in their relationship. Frannie recalls many times that Bobby came home drunk and would rape her. Bobby belittled his wife by accusing her of sleeping with the doctors she worked with and by making her feel like she had deserved to get beaten up by him. One of the major reasons that Frannie stayed in the relationship with Bobby was because of their son.

In the art work, The Roar of Our Stars by Alice X. Zhang, there are numerous details that are present. In this piece there is a sky that starts off as dark blue and red towards the bottom, but as it gets to the top it transitions to a less dark blue, and then to a light blue with a touch of a light red on the left side. Across the sky there are what seems to be hundreds of white points with yellow tints that start off distinct and small towards the bottom, while growing in size and have a faded look as they go up the image. These points that represent stars each have red, white, orange, and blue glares that run up and down vertically. These stars create a cluster towards the top left corner that creates a slightly blurred white light. Centered on the bottom half of the page, there is a person in a light brown tweed jacket, a white button up collared shirt with thin strips, and a red bowtie. This brown haired man is staring up, smiling with his mouth ajar, towards the main cluster of stars that are creating the light shinning down on him with his hands slightly raised at chest level.

There are an infinite amount of unique responses to the question “What is the meaning of life?”. However, the majority of people will agree that the true meaning of life is to find happiness and what is really important to one’s self. In Jon Krakauer’s, Into The Wild, Chris McCandless conveys this idealism through his life’s journey as he bravely defies all limitations. Chris McCandless isolates himself from society in his Alaskan Odyssey as a way to defy accepted expectations and to begin discovering the meanings of life without any corrupted influences.

I disliked the book because it was sad and it showed how his life all ruined

“Sonny’s Blues” was written by James Baldwin. Some of the main characters of the short story are family members that include the narrator, his brother Sonny, their mother, the narrator’s wife Isabel, his father and their uncle. Sonny’s friend is also a main character in the story, but was not in the least helpful to Sonny. The characters live in Harlem and try to survive in very trying circumstances of crime, violence and poverty. Even though the main characters are all struggling to make it in the violent crime ridden neighborhood of Harlem, they interact and help Sonny to fulfill his dream of playing his music for a living.

One cannot run from hardships, for they occur every day, appear suddenly, and can quickly consume hope. Instead one must face these difficulties and overcome them. However, to rise above obstacles alone would only cause further misery and despair. The struggler’s family should rally behind him to comfort and assist him in his time of need. In Cry, the Beloved Country, a 1948 contemporary novel, Alan Paton uses parallelism to emphasize the importance of family because when individuals encounter hardships they need support from others to help them.

In a world where male-dominance is the standard for societies, there will always be a group of the subdominant gender that is looking to change the way that society functions, to achieve equality. However, opposers to the form sometimes head towards the extremes and surpass equality, only to achieve dominance. In Sarah Hall’s novel, Daughters of the North, she follows the protagonist, Sister, on her journey away from the dystopian, patriarchal society of England to an off-the-charts, female-only commune, named Carhullan. Sister dreams of a matriarchal, utopian community that is far different than the city she had left; however, what she finds is that Carhullan is not necessarily better, but simply ruled by a different, dominant gender. All in all, this paper argues that matriarchal societies are not superior to, but rather an inversion of patriarchal societies.

Reservation Blues, a novel written by Sherman Alexie meant for anyone with the ability to understand its words to be read. This can be said solely from the purpose, or theme, of the book. That theme is the fact that everything happens for a reason as your desires could stare you in the eye without you realizing.

If one is aiming to write a poem it is useful to know by detail the basic elements of poetry to understand and control better what and how to say things, they are: voice, stanza, sound patterns, figures of speech and the poetic forms.

Doris Lessing, author of The Grass is Singing, published in 1950 targets the death of Mary, a female farmer and a lovely wife. During the 1940s in South Africa, the novel associates with prejudice and racism and shows the conflict in the African society during that period of time.