Haroun and the Sea of Stories Closed Reading

In the novel Longboat Bay are the starting and the main setting. The characters Abel and his mother Dora lives on the land of Longboat Bay. The lands have been the Jacksons land for more than a century and have been taking care of it since now. Abel lives in a place with no main electricity from the city and no water except rainwater. The land around them is a national park and behind the house is the orchard. This is shown in the quote “and all the land around them was a national park.” And “there were orange and lemon trees in the orchard as well as olives and mulberries.” The sea is “rich in life” and the author invites the reader to want to care for the sea. This technique shows the beauty of the sea and the land around it.

To start out analyzing this archetypal setting we must identify what the sea archetype actually is and where it came from. According to Deborah Rudd from billstifler.org, she says that the sea is, “the mother of all life; spiritual mystery; death and/or rebirth; timelessness and eternity”. It also says this on Yourdictionary.com, a site where education from levels 7 to even collage is accepted, that the sea,”Can be both good and evil, with dangers and treasures. It can also show infinity.” Both sites said something similar in terms of life but when looking at the article from your dictionary there can be good and bad sides to the sea and this stays true throughout different cultures.

In the Heart of the Sea, is a book that can transport us to a different time, where there is adventure, but also suffering. It is the story of a tragedy, that contains many other stories inside and just with the first chapter- if we read between the lines- we can discover more than just the history behind the title, we can also discover the situations, the problems and the culture that let us know how things worked many years ago. It is not a fairy tale, it is the beginning of what happened in the heart of the

The geography of rivers is important to their symbolism in this story. Antonio’s river starts from a lake, a place of no morals; studies prove that infants are selfish beyond belief, and so is water at its birth. His river carries the water to the ocean, the place where all water lands, carrying the blood and salt and debris that it picks up on its long journey. All high rivers go to the ocean, no matter how many lakes they go through. The ocean is where water goes to die, until its spirit, in clean water, is carried through the clouds back into the frigid mountain lakes, where it is born again. This is the cycle of water, and the cycle of life.

A possible passage through the American continent to the indies was earnestly being explored just as the poet's body was probably being probed and prodded to seek enlightenment or a successful path. This analogy is made clear by the clever extended pun on 'straits' as both a trade route and a personal dilemma. They are itemised so that the link is not missed for the Western Sea, to which all the straits led, also represents death and entry into the next life: "So death doth touch the Resurrection

1. The personification, “The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel” (page 153) describes the action in this chapter. What specifically does the line describe?

In addition to mirroring life, the Sea of Flames sets the stage for Doerr’s most pervasive yet inconspicuous analogy. When asked what he wants readers to take away from his novel, Doerr replies “that war is more complicated than they [the readers] might have thought, that there were civilians on both sides making really complicated moral decisions, [...] [that] little miracles” sprouted in the least expected of places (Schulman 27). The Sea of Flames is a central messenger for this theme at individual points of the novel but also in its overarching structure. The reader is first introduced to the Sea of Flames when it is housed at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, marked only by “an iron door with a single keyhole,” a series ending with a “thirteenth [...] no bigger than a shoe.” (Doerr 19-20). All the Light We Cannot See is partitioned into fourteen fragments- but it is labeled zero through thirteen. Just as passing through each door brings one closer to the gem, Doerr seeks to guide his reader through the locked gates of compassion and conflict to arrive at his own gem, which is revealed after passing through the thirteenth gate, into the last chapter of the novel, as Marie-Laure contemplates all the invisible electromagnetic waves, “ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous” passing “over the scarred and ever-shifting landscapes.” Transient messages connecting ephemeral people who eventually fall away, like the Sea of Flames, and “rise again

In this poem the poet uses many techniques to engage and hook the audience. Dan Ashlin expresses how the ocean has a life of its own through personification, an example is “it dreams, it mopes, it stretches”. I appreciate how the poet has used verbs in this technique as it positions me to feel like I can relate to human emotions, movements and

In the next stanza, the line "Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay", the poet is now using imagery with the waters, however it can also be a metaphorical representation of life due to

The narrator begins this story stating, “None of them knew the color of the sky” (338). He refers to the cook, the correspondent, the captain, and the oiler, the main characters. This quote means that all of them are focused on fighting for survival, paying all of their attention to the waves. They fight against the waves, trying to stay alive. However, the author states, “A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats” (339). The waves are a symbol of the uncaring nature; it does not matter how hard the protagonists try to fight against the waves because nature continues its course; the waves continue to flow. However, the characters are determined to stay alive. They continue to face this external conflict that is nature, even when they realize that nature is

The swimmer finds himself past the point of no return in the quest, so to speak, and at the mercy of whatever he encounters, such as the shark Connelly suggests in the imagery of the last stanza. Finally, Connelly ended the poem by writing “But what we own beyond a shadow of a doubt is our fear of being eaten alive, torn apart in depths we have entered willingly” (20-27). This part of the metaphor uses the violent image of being attacked by a shark to represent the severity of our encounter with the sublime. In the quest for the ideal the only thing we can be certain of is that it will not be easy and the uncertainty of what will be there waiting for you. The shark in the ocean’s depth is an apppropriate symbol for the sublime as defined by Rousseau’s explanation of Kant’s philosophy: “something that is fearful and incomprehensible that one wants to resist” (“Kant’s Beauty and the Sublime” 1).

It eventually turns out that those bars of prison are the shadows of Death’s dead and dying ship, but does this not allude to the approaching change in life that the Ancient Mariner suffers? He becomes trapped in life, to wander the earth forever, spreading his story--a prison of freedom, a cell made out of eternal life. A curse disguised as the world’s greatest blessing. He goes further to describe the boat when he says the line, “Are those her ribs through which the Sun/ Did peer, as through a grate?” This is, on one level, merely continuing the same vein of interpretation as mentioned before, both veins. But on another level, it describes the weariness of the Ancient Mariner, and the old and eaten-away shape his body has taken on over the years--his ribs sharp and bony against even the baggy of rags.

The Old Man and the Sea has man tensions, ambiguities, and ironies that arise within the work which the work uses towards a particular theme. There are several themes that unify into one resolution. The Old Man and the Sea can be interpreted to discover how it functions as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. This would be how the structural purpose of the text could be explored. The first step to this process is to find a confusing, unclear section within the text.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a novel by Solomon Rushdie that is dedicated to his son. The story is about a celebrated storyteller, who loses his talent for telling stories when his wife leaves him. His son, Haroun, is pulled into an adventure that finds him at the sea of stories to defeat a powerful enemy and rescue his father's gift for storytelling. In this book, Rushdie argues the importance of stories and how there must be a proper balance of freedom of speech.

In 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge published his poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Several editions followed this, the most notable being the 1815 version, which included a gloss. This poem has grown to become well known and debated, especially concerning the message that Coleridge was attempting to impart. The interpretation of the poem as a whole and of various characters, settings, and objects has been the subject of numerous essays, papers, books, and lectures. There are approximately four things that are major symbols in this work, along with the possibility that the structure itself is symbolic.