Steppenwolf : The Idea Of The Absurd Within Harry Haller

Dickinson’s This is my Letter to the World raises tension between exclusion and the human conditions’ longing for belonging. Dickinson’s “letter to the world” is an extended metaphor of her deliberate attempt to establish an affinity with her society through art- her literature just like Grossman’s essay. Her vulnerability and isolation, is evident in her personal tone with “my letter” being exposed to the wider “world”. This disclosure juxtaposed with the next line “that never wrote to me” further emphasizes her reality filled with isolation. The juxtaposition encapsulates her position as an outsider, interplaying the themes of inclusion and exclusion, seen through her desire for her art to be reciprocated and appreciated by the open distant world. Furthermore, Dickinson covets for a sense of connection through the reoccurring motif of the natural world, personifying “her” as a feminine persona with a nurturing capacity emphasizes through the accumulation of endorsing imagery “tender majesty… hands I cannot see…for love of her”. Despite her lack of relationship with her environment, she elevates nature to be majestic further denigrating her own self status as her writing will still be “judged” no matter how “tenderly”. Thus Dickinson seeks a sense of belonging through nature deriving from the human condition, yet in this driving process towards inclusion is met by exclusion from her sense of identity

After the wolf leaves his home, the narrator calls his mother and tells her that a wolf just came to see him, and she tells him that “‘there’s one at mine too. I’m just now looking at him’” (Poissant 3). With this moment we realize that the lack of appreciation for the world around us is not just an individual issue, but a collective issue with the society we live in. The narrator wasn’t the first person to take a moment for granted, and will not be the last, as we as a privileged species do not recognize that we are fortunate to have things as simple as food on our tables and clothes on our bodies. The wolf in this story is acting as the world telling us that we cannot take anything for granted, or else it will be gone before we know it. This mindset will arguably be the demise of our species, as soon enough we will all be seeing wolves that will be take away our belongings. Only then will we come to appreciate everything we have in our lives.

      The Victorian form of inquiry coexisted with a desire toward repairing the weakening foundations of faith.  "I write so/of the only truth-tellers now left to God,/The only speakers of essential truth/Opposed to relative, comparative/and temporal truths/...while your common men/lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine/ and dust the flaunty carpets of the world/...The poet suddenly will catch them up/With his voice like thunder, - 'This is soul/This is life...(Longman p.1872 lines 858-862,869-875).  Elizabeth recognizes the transition of her society and wonders aloud if they have all missed the point entirely.  She is arguing, in a sense, for sense and for the need to remain accountable to something outside ourselves.

Also the use of depressive connotations like squashed and dead in “A dead snake, cane toads squash flat, nothing that lives, and nothing that shines”. Herrick uses this theme to create a sense of the environmental effect on Harry Hodby’s identity, and to show the significant ideas about human nature.

The poem suddenly becomes much darker in the last stanza and a Billy Collins explains how teachers, students or general readers of poetry ‘torture’ a poem by being what he believes is cruelly analytical. He says, “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it”. Here, the poem is being personified yet again and this brings about an almost human connection between the reader and the poem. This use of personification is effective as it makes the

Swift in great detail describes the act of excretion various times throughout the text. In the country of the Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos throw their excrement at each other and at Gulliver. The recurring appearance of excrement reminds the reader of the importance of the body’s demands while refusing to let humans be portrayed exclusively as intellectual beings.

“Thus I fled, ridiculous hairy creature torn apart by poetry–crawling, whimpering, streaming tears, across the world like a two-headed beast, like mixed-up lamb and kid at the tail of a baffled, indifferent ewe–and I gnashed my teeth and clutched the sides of my head

Dillard’s essay, unlike Woolf’s, is written in a positive tone. She is surprised and absolutely happy to see the weasel for the first time in her life. Dillard says that it was “a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons” (2). It seems like everything around them lights up, the world is beautiful and they are in the center of it. The cheerful tone, that author uses to depict her meeting with the weasel, makes the reader feel excited as

A deeper level is achieved in the mind of the narrator when she acknowledges her own mental state and that she is eager to leave her sad mood. While the man is described as animal-like and savage, she stands “In moody sadness, on the giddy brink” (9) full of contemplation and reflection on her own worldview. The poet is quite self-aware while the lunatic is not, and through her intelligent banter, the reader can see the extreme difference in personality. The poet’s own self-conception, however, is ironic in that she is wishing for ignorance that can only be achieved by lack of a self-concept. The catch-22 she experiences is perplexing, both to her and the reader.

Dickinson’s poem unfolds truth to society’s power over a woman’s identity. The poem has an angry tone read from the first line, “I’m ceded- I’ve stopped being Their’s-” (1). A defiant and condemning voice aimed at an ambiguous, authoritative figure who is embodied by the capitalized, plural pronoun “Their.” Dickinson’s refusal to exactly specify who “Their” is, demonstrates the power and relationship “Their” has over the speaker. Dickinson interchanges this pronoun with “They” (2) as the poem progresses on, and this larger entity is associated as the church, family, society, etc. because of Dickinson’s references to “church” (3) and “childhood” (6) within the opening stanza. Dickinson’s narrator is tired of being put aside or controlled by others. This angry tone begins to grow louder as Dickinson beings conveying this message and while the poem moves through stanzas uncovering the narrator’s identity.

and it’s easy to become cynical and to hate everybody, but that’s just our default setting. He wants his audience to be able to overcome the importance of life’s daily annoyances and becoming an aware and conscious being in a world of boredom and cynicism. He uses pathos and ethos to really appeal to the reader's emotions. Alternatively being both conscious and aware enough to choose what we

Gulliver’s Travel’s is divided into four parts, each part retelling one of Gulliver’s voyages and each also addressing an aspect of Swift’s discontentment. The satire that Swift deploys is present in Gulliver’s perceptions.

The last two lines of the poem are a timid reflection on what might happen “Had I the Art to stun myself/ With Bolts—of Melody!” (23-24). The idea that creation is a power that can get loose and injure even the creator illuminates why in this poem the artist positions herself firmly as a mere spectator. In these first two poems, we meet a Dickinson who is not entirely familiar to us—even though we are accustomed to her strong desire for privacy, these poems can be startling in the way they reveal the intensity of Dickinson’s fears. She is, after all, shrinking from what is dearest to her—nature, one of her favorite subjects, becomes a harsh judge, and poetry, her favored medium of communication, can suddenly render the reader “impotent” and the writer “stun[ned]” (19, 23). The extremity of her positions in shrinking from the small and beautiful things she loves creates the sense that this is just the beginning of a journey by leaving so much room for change.

The world of John Updike's Rabbit, Run is a collection of polarities that dramatizes the in-betweeness and the constant state of tension that characterizes humanity. A cursory perusal of John Updike's Rabbit, Run reveals a world of hopeless futility in which Harry Angstrom runs in ever-tightening circles. Rabbit is always running, from one woman to another, between Brewer and Mt. Judge, between solitude and society. Rabbit is torn because he has faith in something meaningful in the world, somewhere, but he fails to find it during any of his frequent but brief stops. More important than the futile vacuity of Rabbit's world, however, is the fact that he never gives up his quest. He searches through sex, orthodox

In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver is washed up onto a foreign land where he encounters two species: Houyhnhnms, ruling intellectual horse-like species, and the Yahoos, brutish human-like animals. As a foreigner, Gulliver tries to integrate himself with Houyhnhnms community and through his attempts of communicating Gulliver ultimately fails due to his striking similarity to the brute Yahoos. Swifts juxtaposition of two different worlds, made extremely clear by both physical, physiological, linguistic aspects, reveals the futility of any successful integration.