oices of a Panamanian girl and a Spokane Indian
In the short stories “Drive” by Christina Henriquez and “Happy Trails” by Sherman Alexie, both authors use the first person narrative voice and present their cultures and events to the audience. The authors created two characters, a 48-year-old Indian narrator, and young Panamanian girl Marisol. The two narrators share some significant similarities. For example, they are both from working class people who live with their mothers, whose homelands have been “invaded”. Although both narrators used first-person point of view, there are also several meaningful differences between them. For instance, they used different amount of words from their own languages, and their cultures have been affected by outside culture in different levels.
Both narrators are working class. Marisol used to have a job as a saleswoman in an appliance shop. However, she soon got fired because no one even needed appliances. Then she and her mother lost income completely. “My mama and I are going to run out of money in a few more weeks and I don't want her to have to find work” (Henriquez 77). In this excerpt of the text,
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However, they see this differently. In the short story, “Drive”, people believe that adult live with their parent because they are unable to make a living on their own. It is thus laughable to live with parents. One reason Marisol is in love with Beto is that he is independent and doesn’t live with his parents. “I thank God for the millionth that I know at least one person in this city who doesn’t still live with his parents.” (Henriquez 60) However, in Spokane tribe, it is never criticized to live with family as adult. Because Spokane people believe in connection between family members. The narrator explained in the text: “I still live with my mother. The rest of the world would call me a failure, I suppose, but Indians don’t judge adult Indians for remaining in the family home”
Mrs. Younger lived a lower end lifestyle. She tried to work for her family but it was a different time than today, and people had different ideas based on the time that they lived in. The time in which the
Madame Manec, an old woman who takes care of Marie-Laure and her Uncle, sums it up well, “Some can afford hotels or rentals, but many are in the warehouses, on straw, not enough to eat. I’d take them in, but your uncle, you know, it might upset him. There’s no diesel, no kerosene, British ships long gone. They burned everything they left behind…” (Doerr 120). Through out the novel, the materialistic approach is explained through the two teenagers Marie-Laure and Werner who have had two different experiences in life; one blind in France and the other an orphan in German. Marie-Laure is a blind girl who through her family learns what is going on around her but can tell
Sadly, to this day, women are still treated like objects in various parts of the world. Whether forced into marriage or used for inhumane acts, it is a shame that changes towards the treatment of women are only starting to take place now. An insightful look into the worlds of poorly treated women is seen in the short stories “Another Evening at The Club”, and “The Leaving”. Alifa Rifaat, the author of “Another Evening.” depicts the life of an eastern teenager that was forced into marriage and is controlled by the actions of her husband. While the main character, Samia, seems to act as an evil accomplice of her husband, her actions are driven by the need to serve a purposeful life for the sake of survival, and their image together. Similarly,
The "Public and Private Language", by Richard Rodriguez and "Mother Tongue", by Amy Tan are great examples of how two immigrant families can have their similarities and differences. For a long time, the American people have looked at immigrants through their own eyes and perspectives. Never do people think to change gears and walk in the footsteps of a stranger. In this case, people need to look through the eyes of an immigrant and see that one immigrant family is not the same as the other. The different people may have connections with the same or different cultures, however, they have different obstacles and hardships with adjusting to a new way of living.
Have you ever been in a situation where your family couldn’t provide that much for education? Are you influenced by anyone that’s older than you? Marjane lives in Iran, where most of the revolution war between Iran and Iraq occurs. There’s a lot of discrimination that happens there for equal rights towards women. Marjane comes from a really wealthy family and they took this women away from her family when she was little to be there maid. Esperanza lives in Chicago where she wanted to become a writer. There is six people living in one bedroom with one bathroom, Esperanza is poor so her parents can only afford a little. Even though Esperanza knows that she doesn’t have much she tries to make the best of it. In Persepolis and the House On Mango Street, both characters are influenced by someone older than them, they want to help their family, and they both have trouble in school.
She suggests that through our ignorant thinking, we are putting down the lower earning class and calling them lazy. While the author was applying for jobs, she did not put down that she received a higher education. This determined that she could not get anything over minimum wage. As she applied for numerous jobs, on her third day she hit luck and got a job as a waitress on the spot. She realizes the difficulty in finding a decent job that can pay all of her bills. “I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that "hard work" was the secret of success: ‘Work hard and you'll get ahead’ or ‘its hard work that got us where we are.’ No one ever said that you could work hard - harder even than you ever thought possible - and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt”
It is remarkable how differentiated works of literature can be so similar and yet so different, just by the way the authors choose to use select certain literary devices. Two different novels, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, display these characteristics because of the ways the authors institute such mechanisms. Brave New World describes a futuristic era where humans are genetically manufactured for a certain job predestined to them before they are artificially created, and where common human emotions, desires, wants, and needs have all been modified to support a deemed utopian society where everyone lives and works together in harmony. The Road describes a post-apocalyptic
Often throughout the book she mentions that it is said that "you're paid what you're worth", saying that little pay results in you not being to good of a person. With that label they were looked down on and viewed kind of as untouchables. They had low pay, long hours, no overtime pay, and no benefits which leads to low socio-economic-status a job that no one wants to pursue. She stressed that poverty wasn’t a sustainable condition, it's a state of emergency. Citizens in the lower classes are left to fend for themselves and the ten, eight, or six dollar jobs are all that's there for them. What she would encourage them to do is to demand to be paid what they're worth because in the end they will be better off.
In Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers of 1952, a family of immigrant parents living in poverty in the ghetto of New York City struggles to survive. Yezierska’s use of simile and hyperbole emphasize the fact that women's role in life is deteriorated by men. For so long, women have gotten the stereotype that they are only worthy of cooking and cleaning and are treated poorly by men. Unfortunately, Sarah begins to feel as if she is the only one who wants to be treated equally and stand up for themselves because both her sisters and mothers are coward. Father’s hyperbolic response to mother's opposition to his irrational declarations of being a banker emphasizes his resentment and insolence towards her. Father says, “Woman-- A nag, a noodnik that
When looking into works of literature, some works can seem to be similar or they can seem to be very different. Stories can have a similar setting, point of view, theme, or sense of language and style. However, all of these points could be very different as well and could cover different theme or style. “Good Country People” and “Everyday Use” are two good stories that can both be compared in the theme they both portray, language and style used, and also the setting in both stories. Although in the contrasting side of things, these stories are different in the symbols used within the story, irony, and also the point of view the story is told in.
place nearly forty years apart. After a second read, however, it was easy to notice a distant
Compare two short stories where the characters face difficult situations We are comparing the stories ‘Flight’ by Doris Lessing and ‘Your shoes’ by Michele Roberts. They both deal with the issue of daughters leaving home and how it affects the whole family. In ‘Flight’, the granddad is affected most severely but in ‘Your Shoes’, it is the mother. ‘Your Shoes’ is written in a first person narrative from the mother’s perspective.
Asian stories are mostly characterized by experiences that may impact the reader’s life and reshape it in some way. First person narration is one of the most common literatures we can find between these kind of stories. In stories like “A Small Incident” by Lu Xun, and “On the Oxcart” by Xiao Hong, we can clearly notice that the authors are trying to give us a message within the anecdote. Lu Xun’s story, about an episode that changed his life, has a pretty direct message he wishes to portray to the reader. On the other hand, Xiao Hong’s narration is one that has the reader thinking about what message he’s trying to portray. Both stories have a unique point of view on events and what may come out of it: what the author learned, what the
Compare and Contrast the ways in which modern authors have re-imagined traditional narratives for their own purposes.
Almost everyone from different culture that lives in another country has some issues when trying to raise their family. For me, that im living this experience, it’s a little difficult to adapt in the society. But when I read the short story “Everyday Use” and the “A pair of tickets” I find myself. Because I feel inspired by these two stories, I choose to compare the character of Dee and June May Woo.