Darkness and Decay Essay example

Diction is seen to be used greatly in conveying the suitability of the town for All Souls' Day. Pathetic Fallacy is also used to portray the message by Albert Camus. Also, the “cool wind”, “big clouds...trailing shadows”, “glossy” and “oiled clothing” give the impression of a cool, damp shadowy day, with clothing mimicking this, portraying the psychology of the people of Oran when they are in melancholy for their loved ones. However, from around the third paragraph onwards, a turning point is seen. As previously suggested, it was a suitable time of the year for mourning and All Souls' Day, but ironically this did not occur.

Tobias Wolff’s short story, “That Room” is a very suspenseful story that has the reader on the edge of their seat while reading it. Suspense and excitement is created through the plot and theme of the story which are both developed through four main literary devices. In the story, the narrator is put into what is potentially a life or death situation and it is at this point that he becomes aware that one is never really in full control of his or her own life. Throughout this literary analysis I will discuss the plot and theme of the story in terms of how Wolff uses setting, tone, characterization, and symbolism to enhance both the theme and the plot.

Rick Moody 's short story "Boys" is written with a distinct style. The author uses a form of a stream of consciousness to convey the purpose at hand, which encompasses writing as if without hesitation or editing - whatever came to Moody’s thoughts, he transferred to text. There was also a substantial use of the word “boys”, placing emphasis on the central meaning of the story. The style is thoroughly descriptive and fails to leave any details of the boys ' lives out. This quality donates a sense of reality and creates a bond between the reader and the characters. The tone of the story comes of as particularly unbiased and serious, as if the author were just stating purely factual information. As events become more somber in the boys ' lives, the author approaches a more sympathetic tone. The boys were supposed to be kids, fooling around playing games and living a care-free childhood, but these boys found themselves in scenarios no boy or child should ever encompass.

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, sets a tone that is dark, gloomy, and threatening. His inclusion of highly descriptive words and various forms of figurative language enhance the story’s evil nature, giving the house and its inhabitants eerie and “supernatural” qualities. Poe’s effective use of personification, symbolism, foreshadowing, and doubling create a morbid tale leading to, and ultimately causing, the fall of (the house of) Usher.

The following is a summary on the short essay The Dark Night of the Soul by Richard E Miller. This short essay is an essay that has been written with a main point always in mind, that reading and writing has very powerful influences people and their imagination but, the act of reading and writing is not being utilized as much in the modern world. Richard has created an essay that proves his point by taking five very different short stories and giving each a twist that helps the reader see the power of reading. As the reader is chronologically going through the essay he or she is given many possible meanings of the essay. The meaning and the

He first emphasizes how ample and bright the place is. He also narrates how there are “poisonous particles… as motes in sun-beams, into the lungs” (40). He expresses how suffocating this place is with a cough (14). The fact that the women don’t cough and are “used to it” is like saying they don’t breathe anymore. He describes the women as the “blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands” (12). He portrays these women as cadavers being preserved in this cold place, like a morgue. He says, “…face pale with work, and blue with cold; an eye supernatural with unrelated misery” (11). He is intentionally making the reader feel they are dead alive through the description of a physical death, then a social and emotional death.

The most notable aspect of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides would be its first person-plural narrative voice. Literary scholars have often addressed the issue of the narrative voice and the effect that having multiple narrators has on the story. In her article ‘A story we could live with’ Narrative voice, the Reader, and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides Debra Shostak addresses how the “we” inadvertently draws attention to the “otherness” of the Lisbon girls. She attempts to dispel the belief that The Virgin Suicides is a misogynistic text by analyzing Eugenides’s complicated use of the word “we”. Shostak’s article gives deep insight into the complexities of the plural narrative and provides a foundation for future analysis of the text. However, what Shostak does not address is how this perception of otherness, by both the narrators and the community in which they reside, ultimately leads to the downfall of the Lisbon sisters. My argument is twofold. Firstly, I will address how the perception by the narrators that the girls are radically different from themselves and their community, combined with the tendency to group the girls as a single monolithic entity serves as one explanation for the girls deaths. Treating the girls as though they are the same person leads to the perceived inevitability of their deaths, which ultimately plays a vital role in their untimely and fatal ends.

The Russian Revolution and the purges of Leninist and Stalinist Russia have spawned a literary output that is as diverse as it is voluminous. Darkness at Noon, a novel detailing the infamous Moscow Show Trials, conducted during the reign of Joseph Stalin is Arthur Koestler’s commentary upon the event that was yet another attempt by Stalin to silence his critics. In the novel, Koestler expounds upon Marxism, and the reason why a movement that had as its aim the “regeneration of mankind, should issue in its enslavement” and how, in spite of its drawbacks, it still held an appeal for intellectuals. It is for this reason that Koestler may have attempted “not to solve but to expose” the shortcomings of this political system and by doing so

The ranges from a poor background to middle class families provides for the girls to each have differing expectations of them from their culture. Along with that, each girl has clearly differentiated events in their lives that cause them to lose their innocence. One event, even in its simplicity, is enduring a mother’s lecture where you realize she thinks you are promiscuous and not what she wants you to be. This may be considered rather simple, but it provides ample awareness that things in your world are not what you may have thought. The events of living in a war riddled country and dealing with the destruction and death of people you care about can affect and resonate within a person on a much deeper level.

The author writes the story in a very interesting way. The way that there are only a few descriptions scattered about and that it focuses on dialogue is what allows us to figure out what the characters are speaking about and to find the intentions behind their words. The subject of this short narrative stands out boldly. Though it was written in

Richard E. Miller essay “The Dark Night of the Soul” to be an interesting way to think about reading and writing in today’s world. Richard uses the violence in the world to question if our educational system is relevant to keeping us safe and whether the power literature can be used to change the tragic event that happen around us every day.

In gothic literature, the architecture that inhabits a story can go a long way not only in establishing the mood, but also in establishing the story’s characters. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1839, readers are introduced to a dreary house that is falling apart, while in another story by Poe published in this same year, “William Wilson,” readers are introduced to a school that, although not in disrepair, is labyrinthian and similarly dreary. Moreover, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, published in 1847, showcases a house, the size of which would normally reflect the wealth and high class of it’s owner, and yet the grounds are overgrown, indicating a lack of attention to maintenance while the house itself only features sparse furnishing. In all of these stories, the buildings that inhabit their pages are more than merely settings. Instead they are fragments of specific characters, representations of some form of wellness, while almost being characters in their own right. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” the house represents the physical wellness of both Roderick and Madeline Usher; whereas in “William Wilson” the school reflects the mental wellness of the lead character; and in Wuthering Heights, the titled building represents the emotional wellness of its owner.

To begin, it is necessary to establish how the boys and Trip are able to act in a way which affects the girls so severely. Maslow, a pioneer of humanistic psychology, argues that one must satisfy their physical and emotional needs in a particular order, and only those who reach the fifth and final tier will “be ultimately happy” (382). Dubbed the “love needs”, the third tier can only be satisfied by the creation of strong friendly or romantic bonds with others. Because the girls have been rejected by their own community after their sister’s suicide, and their own parents have “shut the house in

The narrator and the Prince share a pleasant experience on the desert, and when the Little Prince departs, the narrator misses his company. He writes the novel in memory of the Little Prince.

The poet uses words like “flickering fire”, “cavernous” and “sensuous” to give the poem an eerie/strange/dark and empty atmosphere to the first stanza. This atmosphere