Mammita's Garden Cove Analysis

Transitioning from normal life in California to arid desert, the family experiences an environment where civil liberty is as scarce as water. Though the sun’s intense beams project glimmers of water and freedom upon the desert’s farthest edges, these impressions convey a cruel false sense of reality just out of reach. Water in the desert represents an imagined freedom able to quench the family’s thirst. When the family returns home, they anticipate the sea as well as welcoming neighbors and friends, but are isolated and excluded evocative of the desert. While a recognizable sea breeze wafts through the house bringing with it the reminiscent smell of simplicity and freedom, the family has changed, the neighborhood has changed, and America has changed. Water after the desert represents a fabricated freedom, which falls short of expectation. By considering the absence of water, Otsuka exposes the emptiness and lack of American freedom given to Japanese-Americans during and after World War

In his latest novel, Jasper Jones (2009), Craig Silvey uses syntax, visual and olfactory imagery, personification and symbolism to describe the inside of Mad Jack Lionel’s dingy house, creating a sinister, gloomy and malicious mood. As this setting is observed through the youthful eyes of the Bildungsroman novel’s narrator, Charlie Bucktin, you receive the eye-opening thoughts and perceptions of a child combined with Silvey’s precisely crafted language, producing an impactful and evocative passage.

Imagine yourself shipwrecked upon an uninhabited island. The experience of being stranded will cause you to pose many questions, with the possibility of only one of those questions to being answered. One answered question is: what is the purpose of literature? Northrop Frye, within “Motive for Metaphor”, uses the analogy of being within an uninhabited island to examines the purpose of literature by connecting it to the purposes of language and their use within the different worlds and levels of the mind Frye sees present.

In the section “On the Rainy River” from the novel The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien describes his difficulty in choosing between going to war or going to Canada. O’Brien implements many different rhetorical and stylistic strategies to express his dilemma. His use of juxtaposition, rhetorical questions, and somber diction enhance his frustration of his two choices. O’Brien uses juxtaposition to compare his option of running away to Canada with what he would rather do: live his life. O’Brien describes a scene he has imagined of himself running away.

In the beginning, the island has a happy, holiday feel, like a trip to the Bahamas. The boys explore the island feeling like adventurers and trailblazers instead of lost children. When scouting the island for the first time, Ralph, Simon, and Jack talked of making maps and a“kind of glamour was spread over them and the scene and they were conscious of the glamour and made happy by it” (Golding 25). But the island does not retain its pleasant and benign atmosphere for long- soon an aura of fear steals over the jungle. Hunting goes from an adrenaline fueled excursion to source a mild anxiety for all but Jack, and when he tells his hunters to follow him, they “spread out, nervously, in the forest” (Golding 133). The jungle has changed from a place full of fruit and joyous exploration, to one full of shadows and beasts. It is easier to revert back to savagery when lost within its trees. As early as the third chapter, Jack gets startled and “for a minute became less a hunter than a furtive thing, ape-like among the tangle of trees” (Golding 49). When one is alone or afraid, the jungle starts to feel like a hunt-or-be-hunted scenario. Jack, the character perhaps most acclimated to the jungle through his long hunting trips, describes being afraid and feeling vulnerable in the jungle, as if something is always behind him. When everything has deteriorated into chaos, perhaps the most telling

In the essay, "Westbury Court," by Edwidge Danticat describes his past experiences in Westbury Court. An otherwise undesirable place to live with no consistent hot water and trash pilled up in front of the apartments, as his home. Danticat uses expressive and literary purposes, along with classification and narration, to convey his theme that individual experiences shape us and how we interpret things.

Many people do not have the chance to live out their dream; a sundry amount have to settle for more attainable goals. Future presidents became dentists and rock stars turn into nurses. There is a limited population who can walk up every morning completely satisfied with their life path; McTeague is one of the lucky few. He is a man who took the remnants of his deceased mother’s wealth and pursued his dream. Some might fantasize of bigger homes or fancier cars, but McTeague dreamed of a little dental parlor. His dream of starting up a business can seem rather small, but McTeague is content with his one shop. The narrator however disapproves of McTeague’s ambitions and belittles the protagonist through choice of structure and condescending

Gray uses the images of an “Aboriginal, not attempting to hitch, outside town” to emphasise the discomfort and disconnection he feels with land and the environment around him. This image is very strong as it shows his disempowerment towards the environment. He feels lost in this town so he moves away from the foreign constructions.

In Mammita’s Garden Cove by Cyril Dabydeen, the author uses the literary techniques questions, tone, and flashbacks to convey the main characters view on place. Max believes that he will have better opportunities in Canada rather than in his home country. This short story details his views on his life at this point, and how he is doing in Canada.

Damon Knight’s “The Country of the Kind” follows a narrator who the audience at first knows little about, who lives in a society that is different from the norm, but is also initially left ambiguous. This sense of the unknown exists up until the narrator stumbles upon a pamphlet which opens up new viewpoints to the reader. The pamphlet serves to create three new perspectives in particular, all of which significantly shift the reader’s understanding of the story. First, it gives the reader a chance to understand the narrator and sympathize with him. Second, it offers a new perspective on society and their overall conception of what defines a utopia. The third and final perspective is that of the people who live within this society, and their interactions with the main characters. These three new perspectives prove to be formative in understanding the main character, his interactions with other characters in the story, and the role of society.

Imagery, detail, and symbolism play a crucial role in this work. Imagery has the function of painting a picture of the situation in the reader’s mind so that he or she is able to develop a version of the story individually. It makes the reading a more personalized experience that helps the reader to understand what’s going on. When O’Brien was just about to escape to Canada to avoid being drafted, he described the scene that was presented in front of him. “The shoreline was dense with brush and timber. I could see tiny red berries on the bushes.” In this quote, the reader can visualize the setting of the lake where he has to make his life-changing decision. It appeals to the visual sense by describing the shoreline and even the sense of

At points in our lives we are given hope that we are happy and that all will be well. Then it is snatched away from us. Throughout A Northern Light, Donnelly destroys hope over and over again. Mattie is constantly let down after having high hopes of going to college in New York. Even Weaver’s hope is tested.

In this excerpt from the memoirs of Virginia Woolf, one can see the lasting significance this fishing trip had on Virginia Woolf’s life. The rhetorical question “-how can I convey the excitement?” paired with a majority of her diction indicate the fun she had on the trip. Not only this, but the anecdote shows the lesson Woolf’s father taught her. The words chosen to express these memories are descriptive and excitable. In this text, Virginia Woolf uses positive and expressive diction to effectively convey how her experience made a lasting impression of childhood summers in her

The world of Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” exists through the mostly unemotional eyes of the character Nick. Stemming from his reactions and the suppression of some of his feelings, the reader gets a sense of how Nick is living in a temporary escape from society and his troubles in life. Despite the disaster that befell the town of Seney, this tale remains one of an optimistic ideal because of the various themes of survival and the continuation of life. Although Seney itself is a wasteland, the pine plain and the campsite could easily be seen as an Eden, lush with life and ripe with the survival of nature.

Alistair Macleod, a Canadian author, enjoys writing about the Canadian culture in Nova Scotia. He is the author of the novel No Great Mischief and many short stories including The Boat. Both creations of his have a common subject: Culture in Nova Scotia. It is also noted that “Macleod’s short stories are pervasively somber in that they depict a culture that is an gradual loss or erosion of value” (Riegal 133) In his short story, The Boat, the reader senses this mourning of the decline of this culture that comes with the newer generations. The message received in this short story is to never let anyone stop you from doing something you love and the importance of doing what you want to do. This message is important because it allows the reader to realize that if they are not happy they might not have enough time to do anything about it. Through out the story, the reader senses the struggle the narrator has which is to pick between the traditional life of a fisherman and the new life of education. After he was a fisherman along side his father’s he then followed his father’s dream of having an education and became a professor. However, the short story’s narration is nostalgic as if regretting his final decision. The narrator’s lack of connection with a loved one, a loss of culture and his reminiscing of his past experiences with the sea demonstrate this nostalgia.