Goodbye To My Twinkie Days By Bich Minh Nguyen Summary

Chuck Klosterman, in the article “Nostalgia on Repeat,” there is two sides of nostalgia, how it can be good and bad for you. Klosterman, gives examples from both sides. Memories are the past, it is ok to remember them and think about them, maybe even smile from them, just don’t live there. Looking at the past can hinder growth, if a person cannot move on from it and wants to keep reliving that part of their life. The Authors purpose is to shine light on both sides of nostalgia, it is not all bad to remember the past and even flash back to it. However, trying to relive the past is not all good either. It stunts growth and keeps a person from living their life in the now. Chuck Klosterman, writes in a casual tone for those readers that are too

Nostalgia is the feeling of missing the past. In “Grape Sherbet” by Rita Dove, the speaker develops this feeling by using past-tense verbs. The speaker also uses family to show that she misses the past. Furthermore, the speaker indicates the fleeting nature of time by using themes of death. The speaker in “Grape Sherbet” by Rita Dove has an attitude of nostalgia.

- Characters: The main character is developed by what type of book the author is writing. My main character Sugar Mae Cole was developed because of the way she acts toward different characters in the book. And by her personality and sugars personality is sweet kinda like her name and she is polite. She is always trying to brighten the other characters up especially her mom Reba. She has a different personality that any of the other characters and connects with them in a different way that is what makes her the main character. she is cautious and also believes in people and things like her mom. Her mom Reba is about to give up but Sugar still believes in her and she believes she and her Mom will get a home and things will

The Past, an ever growing pool of time, is always biting at the heels of a person. It reminds him of what they have done wrong, done right, or when he did nothing. For most people, recalling the past leads to loose ends and blanks where memories should be. No matter how much a person may want to return to the past, it is not possible. It is lost forever. These forgotten moment lead to uncertainties and confusion in the present, and chaos in the future. Forgetting the past leads to spirals, spinning downwards as people look to what they have lost. They retrace their steps hoping to find a sliver of who they are and what may become of them. In the poem, Itinerary, Eamon Grennan shows how an individual searches through his past, but can never return to it. Through the poem and with a personal experience I will explain how individuals deal with uncertainties in their pasts.

The distractions of war, misinterpretation of reality and limited control of fate as a result of the human condition appear throughout the Vietnam War at all times. Tim O’Brien, as a narrator describes the struggles of storytelling during and after the war. The constant struggle to determine reality versus personal perception arises in many aspects of his memory. Some factors of recalling events are uncontrollable such as interference of imagination and uncertainty as a result of the human condition. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the telling of story-truth, rather than happening-truth, is necessary, as no replica can be as genuine as the original.

The memories that a person makes throughout their lifetime creates amazing stories. The book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien was based on memories from the Vietnam war. The protagonists in the novel is all the men that served and faced many obstacles throughout the war. The novel was written in parts of his memories from the war making the book nonlinear. O’Brien’s intended audience was soldiers and men, while discussing storytelling/memory and morality throughout the novel.

In Tim O’Brien’s novel, “The Things They Carried,” imagination is seen to be both beneficial and harmful. This novel consists of a story truth and a real truth. Tim O’Brien writes the book about the Vietnam War based primarily on his memory of the war. He does not remember every detail of the war, thus he makes up some false details to make the story seem more interesting. He does not only describe his own experiences, but also describe the experiences of other characters. He wants the readers to be able to feel and understand how he felt during the events of the story; he wants to provoke an emotional truth. O’Brien tries to prove that imagination is not completely a bad thing and that it is also a good thing. O’Brien starts to create stories about what could have happened in addition to the real war stories about himself and other characters’. With the power of imagination, O’Brien is able to talk about something that did not actually happen in his past. Imagination helps him escape reality and create a whole new life. Therefore, O’Brien uses imagination to do things that cannot be done in real life, to feel relieved, to confuse the readers on what is real and what is not, and to give the readers false belief.

Despite the use of humor, the speaker of “Forgetfulness” establishes both a melancholic and deeply reflective tone in order to analyze both the inevitability of forgetfulness and the heartache that comes with it. Employing humor, Collins appeals to his audience and conveys the universal experience of forgetting memories as you grow older, “well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those / who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle” (18-19). The speaker humorously contradicts the old bicycle cliché that states that once you learn how to ride it, you never forget. According to the speaker, however, you do forget. And if you can forget how to ride a bicycle, you can certainly forget everything else. In no time, you will be blindly sinking into oblivion, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. On the surface, the speaker’s musings appear quite humorous. However, Collins’ words reveal an undeniable truth about the human condition -- that growing older and forgetfulness are inevitable. The speaker continues to emphasize this idea by comparing life itself to an individual trying to remember a book they once read:

A person’s past life is really important because it shapes the individual to be the kind of person he/she will be in the future. No matter how much we try, we can’t rid ourselves of our past nor can we run away from it. It’s embedded in our memories and will always remain to do so. In the short story “Xmas”, by Russell Banks, we meet the protagonist, Gregory Dodd who tries to run away from his past and avoid it. Eventually, the reader will learn what the consequences of such an action can lead to. Through the epiphany that the protagonist, Gregory Dodd, undergoes, Banks illustrates the consequences of avoiding one’s past; the nature of the epiphany is defined by the car collision, and ultimately leads Gregory to a wakeup call and a deeper self-realization, leaving him with some heavy thinking to do about his life. The forces that contribute to intensifying the moment of epiphany are seen in the plot and symbolism.

We have all had those memorable moments that send us back in time; a song on the radio, the smell of cookies baking, driving in the car. They make you think of good times passed. But Billy Collins’s poem, “The Lanyard”, is not only a recollection of the past, but a personal insight to about the things his mother has done for him and what he has done in return.

In “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien portrays a captivating message of responsibility to his readers. Its moral explains how we sometimes let ourselves “out” of our problems, because we would like to be somewhere pleasant. The excerpt

Susan Griffin, a feminist writer and finalist for the Pulitzer Price in non-fiction, explores the concept of forgetting in her chapter “Our Secret”. Unlike Foer, Griffin (1992) doesn’t seem to be too much a fan of remembering, describing memory to be like “a long, half-lit tunnel, a tunnel where one is likely to encounter phantoms of a self, long concealed, no longer nourished with the force of consciousness, existing in a tortured state between life and death” (p. 258). In fact, Griffin might argue that there are several benefits to forgetting, and that the collective memories of a traumatic past should not be remembered or preserved. Failure to retrieve memories may not always be a bad thing, in fact, unwanted memories – of childhood trauma, emotional rejection, or any of life’s inevitable disappointments - have the ability to torment and mentally exhaust a person. Throughout her essay, Griffin explores the hidden shame and pains that several characters carry, herself included, and the consequences they bring. She writes of one woman’s memories of the cold war, who, as a young child, witnessed “shoes in great piles. Bones. Women’s hair, clothes, stains, a terrible odor”, all of which left her sobbing and screaming in fear (Griffin, 1992, p. 233). Another gruesome account Griffin (1992) writes of, is as

The ticking of the clock sounds disturbingly clear tonight, and my blanket does not warm me, washed cold by the moonlight shed through the curtains. Lying in my own bed, instead of the bleached sheets of the hospital, does little to drive away the dreadful thoughts haunting me. So I turn on my nightlight and pull Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' from the bookshelf. I need to feel close to someone right now, and as incredible as it sounds, Frankenstein's painful narrative strikes a responsive chord in my heart. It started when I moved from a stuffy little village to gargantuan Shanghai. My classmates mocked my old-fashioned clothes, and every time I apologized in embarrassment for my ignorance, they even laughed at the archaic word that I used. Just when I finally adjusted to city life and a new school, I was hospitalized for a potentially cancerous tumor. I escaped the strong

A way to cheat Time, not to undo what has been done, but to do what was left undone. Aloud he said, “Something to remember me by.”

Repression of memories is a psychological concept that has haunted modern psychology for years. Repression of memories also known as “rememory” defined by the mind pushing away traumatic or shocking experiences into a dark corner of a person’s unconscious. As this idea developed and began to be studied more thoroughly, slavery became an institution in which researchers saw promise in drawing conclusions about the dangers of repressing memories. In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, the character narratives of Paul D and Sethe exemplify the dangers of repressing memories. Both disconnect from and push away unwanted emotional traumas or experiences from their past. However, this effort doesn’t pay off and their repression of memories is not successful. Through the use of symbols such as Paul D’s tobacco tin and Sethe’s scars and lost child, Morrison demonstrates how repression of the past isn’t effective and how it always comes back to haunt a person who doesn’t correctly cope with their trauma. Paul D and Sethe live unfulfilled lives as a result of repressed memories.