Literary Analysis: 'The Art of Racing in the Rain' by Garth Stein

People often think of family as positive, loving, and with no flaws. However, there is almost a stereotype that all families love each other and there aren’t problems or challenges in a family. Sometimes families put people through challenges and some families aren’t “perfect”. In the book Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff, Jolly has two kids and goes through challenges with her family. Most careful readers can see how Jolly has these challenges with her kids and how she is far off from the “perfect” family. She goes through many of these challenges in life and finds a way to overcome them. Jollys family shapes her identity because the challenges she faces ends up making her stronger. Jeremy and Jilly challenging her, LaVaughn helping her out, and her past family all shape her identity.

The race in which Dave competes with his heroes the Italian racing team, the Cinzanos, serves as an important scene for Dave’s self-actualization. Dave is working hard to be at the same level as the famed cyclists. He tries to converse with them during the race to find that they only ignore him. As Dave is catching up to them, he is humiliated when the Cinzanos sabotage the race causing Dave to fall off his bike. Here, Dave discovers that they are meaner, shallower, and more class-conscious than the hated university students. Dave realizes that he is not an Italian nor wants to be one as he takes down the posters of the famed Italians from his bedroom walls. He lost his hopes and ideals that he found in his heroes.

John “Crash” Coogan is the typical jock; he lives in Pennsylvania and is starting his second year of middle school as a 7th grader. I thought the main theme of the book is don’t judge a book by its cover. At least what most of us have in mind as a jock? Crash had always picked on his neighbor Penn Webb because of his choices and his lifestyle until later he realized something about Penn that he was his meant- to- be best friend. Crash has a wonderful life, until life deals him a hand that he could not have expected. When Crash 's grandfather unexpectedly has a stroke, Crash instinctively steps back and re-evaluates his life without even realizing he 's doing it. Suddenly, his cool friend, Mike doesn’t seem so cool anymore. Things that

The first page of The Art of Racing in the Rain is enough to get the reader hooked. ”Gestures are all that I have. Sometimes they must be grand in nature” (Stein, 2008). The story is being told from a dogs point of view. Enzo cannot communicate the way he’d like to by using words and sounds, so he must rely on his actions and his gestures to tell him story to his owner. So he pours his heart out into his book. The beginning of the book starts out with the dog, Enzo,

Little Porter Osborne, Jr. grew up on a farm in Georgia where the people own the land and the land, in turn, owns the people. In the novel, Run with the Horsemen, Porter fights his way through adolescence and the depression, learning more about life every day from the big boys under the tree at lunch. Ferrol Sams is able to portray a realistic account of life on a farm during the depression by using humor, dialect, and vivid imagery.

Everyone has a different way to deal with overwhelming situations. It can be more difficult for people with mental illness to cope with the hardships of life. For instance, in “Horses of the Night,” the character of Chris has dissociative symptoms that can be linked to his depression. Margaret Laurence’s short story tells the story of Chris, a young teenager who moves to from a small farm to the town of Manawaka in order to go to high school. The story is told by his younger cousin, Vanessa. As she grows up, she learns that Chris is depressed. The author uses the theme of fantasy to show that he does not cope well with reality. The horses, Shallow Creek, and the children are symbols that show us the fantasy that Chris lives in.

Throughout this entire semester, I have learned many different aspects of society that I had a basic understanding of originally. I never would have imagined the amount of knowledge and real life stories I would gain in this class. I want to start of by saying that I am grateful to have taken this class and appreciate each and every story that was shared. These stories opened my eyes to a world I wouldn’t have normally seen. For that fact alone, I believe sociology was one of the most insightful classes in my college career so far.

Author and sociologist, Dalton Conley, is a Caucasian boy who grows up in a predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhood in the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the 1970’s and 80’s. In his book, Honky, he tells us a unique view through a young boy’s eyes uncovering the way in which individuals are perceived in social reality, and how some groups of people are classified. He also speaks about how some groups get better opportunities and privileges then others. This book is a very powerful autobiography, according to his book, written by, “not your typical middle class white male.” (prologue, p. xiii) He goes on to say that he is middle class, even though his parents didn’t have any money and that he is a white boy, even though he grew up in an inner city housing project where mostly everyone was Black or Hispanic. Dalton speaks about his experience as a white boy exploring his definition of race and class and saying that, “race and class are nothing more than a set of stories we tell ourselves to get through the world, to organize our reality.” (prologue, p. xiv) He describes his childhood as a “social science experiment, Find out what being middle class really means by raising a kid from a so-called good family in a so-called bad neighborhood.” (prologue, p. xiii)

People will do anything they can to save a relationship. In the book The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein explores mental and physical perseverance in the face of hardship. Throughout the book, Denny deals with grief from the loss of his wife and problems that directly follow because of it. Adversity after adversity in Denny’s life seem to turn it completely upside down. Throughout the loss of Eve, custody battles over Zoe, and false accusations of rape against Denny, Stein emphasizes the importance of perseverance through times when giving up seems easy.

Helen Keller once said,” Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet, only through the experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” Building character is not like graphing a linear line, where its only one straight . Our character is defined by our setbacks and grieves, by what we do, how dealt with it, and why. Each choice we make and actions we take daily determine the legacy of our character. This quote embodies the pain and struggles the narrator and Sunny had to endure to understand each other character. This essay will analyze “Sunny Blues” by James Baldwin, it will employ a literary analysis that focuses on characterization.

Weather can influence many things in literature. It can influence the mood, plot, characters, & setting. Foster makes it very clear to us that an author will never put weather into a story with no reasoning behind it. Weather is not just simply a setting in literature.

Dry September is a story where citizens of a Jefferson, Mississippi have heard a rumor that Will Mayes, a black man has raped a white woman named Minnie Cooper. The story explores the reactions of the town’s citizens as this rumor is spread. Individuals begin to make individual conclusions and assumptions drawing hasty ideas based on insufficient or miniscule evidence, even going as far as to make up some of the evidence to draw a conclusion. There is a relationship between racism and violence in the world of the text.

First off “Skid Row” is described as having a population of people that do not have “normal” lives (Bittner, 1967). This is subject to perception because each person defines “what is normal” differently. What one person sees as normal could be seen to others as weird. Anyway for the sake of the article. The people that reside in “Skid Row” as Bittner (1967) states “…is perceived as a natural habitat of people who lack the capacities and commitments to live “normal” lives on a sustained basis. From my understanding of the reading “Skid Row” is basically an area in a city that is run down and has been taken over by citizens that cannot afford to go anywhere else. It is the “Ghetto”. Bittner (1967) describes “Skid Row” as “…located in the heart of civilization, it is viewed as containing aspects of the primordial jungle, calling for missionary activities and offering opportunities for exotic adventure.” This leads to the need of patrolmen taking on the role of peacekeeping and law enforcing on “Skid Row” while implementing containment strategies “…to contain it and to salvage souls from it clutches.”(Bittner, 1967).

The Rain Man stars Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. The movie was made in 1988. The movie is about an autistic man named Raymon, who is a idiot savant played by Dustin Hoffman and his fast, talking self absorbed, egocentric brother Charlie Babbitt, who is played by Tom Cruise. A egocentric person is a person with the simple recognition that every living thing views the world from a unique, self-oriented perspective(LIFE: Inherently Egocentric written by James Craig Green http://pw2.netcom.com/~zeno7/ego.html).

A romantic drama film is a genre that explores the difficult aspects that come with love. The plot usually includes two people that are in love that can’t be together the way they want to be due to obstacles. The obstacles in a romantic drama film can include a family 's disapproval, to forbidden love, to one 's own psychological restrictions. The Notebook is a movie based on a best-selling novel that was written by author Nicholas Sparks. This is a love story that is composed of a series of obstacles between two young people that are madly in love with each other. It perfectly fits and displays the criteria for a successful romantic drama film because it includes the complexity of love, and elicits emotions.