The narrator finds himself in a bleak city, the "grey town", which is either Hell or Purgatory depending on how long you stays there. He eventually finds a bus for those who want to go to another place. He enters the bus and talks with the other passengers as they travel. When the bus reaches its destination, the passengers on the bus including the narrator are slowly revealed to be ghosts. Although the ghosts designation is the most beautiful place they have ever seen, every feature of the landscape is solid compared to them, it hurt for them to walk on the grass, and even a leaf is too heavy for any to lift. Shining figures, people who they knew on Earth, come to meet them. These figures are called “spirits”, they are different then …show more content…
The narrator meets George MacDonald and MacDonald becomes the narrator's guide in his journey. MacDonald explains that it is possible for a soul to choose to stay in Heaven despite having been in the grey town. For people that choose to go to heaven and leave the grey town, the goodness of Heaven will work backwards into their lives, turning even their worst sadness into joy, and this change in their experience on Earth to an extension of Heaven. The evil of Hell works the opposite way so that if a soul remains in, or returns to, the grey town, even its happiest times on Earth will lose its meaning, and its experience on Earth would have been Hell. Few of the ghosts realise that the grey town is, in fact, Hell; it is not that much different from the life they led on Earth: joyless, friendless and uncomfortable. The narrator discovers that the vast grey town and the ghosts that live there are tiny to the point of being invisible compared with how big Heaven and reality
. I can’t help but feel out of place in this town, my every public move watched by people by the dozen. I feel like a complete foreigner in my own land, the townsfolk were bitter, cold and unwelcoming. It felt like there was something here, a spooky vibe radiating of every little thing. The town belonged in a book not a thing out of place, not a drunk to be scene, it was every preachers dream.
The author uses more mysterious diction and phrases in this quote to portray a sense of darkness amongst the city. By using words like blackness and comparing the city to a funeral this shows how the
“There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land…I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek…. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.” This new surrounding is the beginning of an adventure for
As I walked, the air of this haunted, dreadful and sorrowful land had sucked the life out of everything and roared as humanity began to disappear. As I carried on walking, I noticed that the small fraction of light was getting smaller and smaller, until it had been engulfed into a think black ash like smoke. Aggressively, the wind walked past the building with its cruddy feeling, blowing away all signs of life. Deeper and deeper into the land was a burning car door. The fire roared and crackled. The roaring and crackling of the burning car door merged with the aggressive air and created the loudest sounds ever heard on land. Growing darker, the skies made me feel nauseous. The fear of not waking up if a human fell asleep towered
However the devil overpowers his sense to go back and he continues on into the forest. The devil gives Brown a lot of information about his family and ancestors, and how they did terrible things such as worship the devil and practice black art. In the forest Brown also witnesses many people from his town; people that he thought were good and would never do evil things. He sees his childhood Sunday school teacher, the minister, and the deacon all on their way to worship the devil.
Today’s issue with schools named after our first prime minister, John A. Macdonald may not be worth doing something about but maybe having a good discussion about. Changing the names of monuments and things named after historical figures from the past because of racism is not ideal because of how things were and how people thought in the past which cannot be judged by our present eyes but maybe, the reasons for their wrongdoings could be well understood now for humanity to never make the same mistakes and move forward into a better future where our past is understood and respected but also seen both the good way and the bad way.
This dark, decayed, disgusting and risky place makes the character confused and makes him feel inside hell. He feels despair and does not understand the cruelness of his captors (even though he had heard some stories, being there was worse).
1. What descriptive details does the author use to make it clear that the setting of the story is a small town?
The narrator discovers that the vast grey town and its ghostly inhabitants are minuscule to the point of being invisible compared with the immensity of heaven and reality. This is illustrated in the encounter
Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black. (Larson
When a young author from New York City decides to take a trip to the southern city of Savannah, he finds himself falling in love with the town and ends up renting an apartment. He encounters many different characters, including Danny Hansford and Jim Williams, that gives the reader a good look into the aura of Savannah. The main conflict in the book occurs when a murder happens in an old mansion located in the town. The book follows the progression of the trial and the outcome following the court’s decision.
The Cold War holds a special place in the study of international relations and its paradigms and perspectives. In this part of the course, three readings work together to provide a basis of arguments and positions on the origins of the Cold War as they relate to international relations. As George Kennan describes in the article written under the pseudonym ‘Mr. X’ in the early years of the Cold War, the Soviets were widely recognized in the western world as being fundamentally expansionist by nature, and this fundamental attribute would lead to the ultimate quest to spread communist ideology across the globe, eventually leading right up to the United States’ doorstep. Similarly, Douglas J. MacDonald lays out the viewpoints held by policymakers
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.
Lyn Di Iorio and Laura Restrepo in their respective novels have managed to provide an overview that how supernatural and mystical powers and entities can change the life and perspective of individuals. Both of the novels entitled as Outside the Bones and Delirium are having a similar theme of conventionality and ghostliness.
Our narrator Susie Salmon is already in heaven. Murdered by a neighbor when she was only fourteen years old, Susie tells us what it is like to be in her new place. "When I first entered heaven I thought everyone saw what I saw. That in everyone's heaven there were soccer goalposts in the distance and lumbering women throwing shot put and javelin. That all the buildings were like suburban northeast high schools built in the 1960s." Later she learns that heaven is whatever you truly want it to be and, sometimes, other people's version of heaven intercepts with your own.