The text under analysis is a story written by O'Henry. O'Henry is a pseudonym of William Sydney Porter. He was an American writer, noted for his numerous short stories. He worked in various jobs: as a rancher, bank teller, as a journalist. He founded a comic weekly magazine “The Rolling Stone” before being employed by “The Houston Post” to write a humorous daily coloumn. In 1898 he was convicted of embezzlement and served a three-year term in the federal penitentiary. After that he contributed short stories to the popular magazines of his days for the rest of his life. In all, Henry wrote 270 stories, and they consist of a rich mixture of semi-realism, sentiment and surprise endings. He is frequently thought of as a “funny” writer. O’Henry …show more content…
It is like the last chance it is very fragile and hangs by a thread. At the same time the author uses it as an antithesis and contrasts it with Johnsy. To intensify the feeling of struggle and survival a metaphor is used. “It is hanging bravely from the branch”. The leaf unlike Johnsy wants to live and to survive, it is lonely and it sticks to the ivy steam. But Johnsy thinks pessimistically. She has almost everything to get well: an experienced doctor giving precise instructions and a good, caring friend at hand, who is ready to do everything to help her. The author uses both direct and indirect methods of characterization. He describes his characters and at the same time he makes them act and lets the reader draw his own conclusion. He describes hem through their actions, their dialogues and attitude to each other. There are two protagonists: Sue and Johnsy and two secondary characters: old Behrman and the doctor. The reader knows that the girls are young artists and good friends. They rent a joint studio and try to pave their way to Art by drawing to illustrate magazines. Their relationships are very warm and friendly and their deeds prove it. Sue treats Johnsy as a child; she calls her “dear, naughty girl, goosey”. She’s quite persevering and doesn’t let down under difficulties. The girl is loyal and devoted. She does her best to cure her friend, asking Behrman for help. The author uses inversion to underline
People one can never really tell how person is feeling or what their situation is behind closed doors or behind the façade of the life they lead. Two masterly crafted literary works present readers with characters that have two similar but very different stories that end in the same result. In Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener” readers are presented with Bartleby, an interesting and minimally deep character. In comparison to Gail Godwin’s work, “A Sorrowful Woman” we are presented with a nameless woman with a similar physiological state as Bartleby whom expresses her feelings of dissatisfaction of her life. Here, a deeper examination of these characters their situations and their ultimate fate will be pursued and delved into
One artistic aspect of the book is that Stockett chose to tell the story from three different women’s perspectives. Using this stylistic technique helps keep the reader more engaged in the book. Each woman, whether it be Aibileen, Minny, or Skeeter, uses a
In his use of characterization, he descriptively talks about the different states his mother undergoes in her illness and the surrounding events and emotions elicited by her continuous downfall, readers experience a feeling of sympathy for Wolff in his circumstance. This also brings light and support to his obscure, perhaps unethical, reasoning that his mother's life, along with those who find
There comes a point in one’s life when they must recognize the hardships placed upon them, and instead of being ignorant of those hardships, they must confront them head-on. In “Marigolds”, a short story by Eugenia Collier, the main protagonist, Lizabeth, encounters various struggles that come with living in a poor town in rural Maryland during the Depression, allowing her to learn more about growing up and accepting reality with all its flaws. Lizabeth is a 14-year-old girl who feels a conflict between her inner child and her inner woman, as she is unable to do anything that satisfies both sides of her. She feels too old to be a child, yet too young to be a
Using an analytical approach to such stories is to do a kind of violence to
In this analysis I plan to show that the first person point of view was used to write this short story. I also want to show that there is more than one theme as well. I would like to show how Edie kept secrets and how she was blinded by love. I plan to show that this story contained secrecy almost to the ending.
The author agrees with the idea of women as victims through the characterisation of women in the short story. The women are portrayed as helpless to the torment inflicted upon them by the boy in the story. This positions readers to feel sympathy for the women but also think of the world outside the text in which women are also seen as inferior to men. “Each season provided him new ways of frightening the little girls who sat in front of him or behind him”. This statement shows that the boy’s primary target were the girls who sat next to him. This supports the tradition idea of women as the victims and compels readers to see that the women in the text are treated more or less the same as the women in the outside world. Characterisation has been used by the author to reinforce the traditional idea of women as the helpless victims.
The heroine, Mrs. P, has some carries some characteristics parallel to Louise Mallard in “Hour.” The women of her time are limited by cultural convention. Yet, Mrs. P, (like Louise) begins to experience a new freedom of imagination, a zest for life , in the immediate absence of her husband. She realizes, through interior monologues, that she has been held back, that her station in life cannot and will not afford her the kind of freedom to explore freely and openly the emotions that are as much a part of her as they are not a part of Leonce. Here is a primary irony.
One of the most important moves academic writers can master is the art of analysis. This assignment will help you to develop the skills necessary to determine the meaning found within a text.
The women of the story are not treated with the respect, which reflects their social standings. The first image of the women that the reader gets is a typical housewife. They are imaged as “wearing faded house dresses and
When the readers meet the young, subordinated wife of a physician, who remains nameless throughout the entire story, perhaps hinting at the commonness of such situations where all those women are the same: faceless and nameless, this woman’s dilemma becomes obvious. She has been stripped off the only function a woman in those times had, the domestic one, due to the fact that she suffers from a mysterious illness which requires the infamous bed cure. Gradually, she is treated more and more as a child, unable and even forbidden to express herself in a creative way, namely to write, being persuaded that it cannot do any good to someone in her condition. This is why the protagonist (who is simultaneously the narrator), takes it upon herself to write a journal about her experiences and the mysterious woman that haunts her from the
The world is a massive place full of endless literature, beginning from ancient scrolls to daily news articles, filled with many secrets, perspectives and surroundings that help connect literature to an individual’s daily life. Some writers use the skills of literary elements to express and discuss an event that has happened to them or what has happened to others. This helps others to comprehend the perspectives of the author’s understanding toward an incident that one might experience. For instance in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, she uses many literary elements to express her views over most of her stories. O’Connor expresses her views in her short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by using the literary elements of point of view, irony, and setting.
In the story the author portrays the protagonist differently from the other characters because she talks about the physical appearance of other characters and when it comes to the narrator we have no idea what she looks like but she is developed partially through her relationship with other characters, although we the readers do come the find out that the narrator is around the age of 15-17 years old and we can assume that she has a bad relationship with her parents because first of all she talks about them maybe once or twice in the whole story and second of all we know that they sent her to boarding school so that alone proves that her relationship with them is lacking. As readers we also know that she has trouble opening up in the story she say “To open your heart. You open your legs but can’t, or don’t dare anyone, to open your heart” (237). This is a prime example of how author characterizes the protagonist as broken and emotionally damaged. And as the story progress the author becomes more honest with us the readers and herself, she starts the reveal the pain she is in and how lonely she feels. The narrator gives us an example of how she feels after sex by saying “After sex, you curl up like a shrimp, something deep inside you ruined, slammed in a place that sickness at
As the tale begins we immediately can sympathize with the repressive plight of the protagonist. Her romantic imagination is obvious as she describes the "hereditary estate" (Gilman, Wallpaper 170) or the "haunted house" (170) as she would like it to be. She tells us of her husband, John, who "scoffs" (170) at her romantic sentiments and is "practical to the extreme" (170). However, in a time
“To realize the American Dream, the most important thing to understand is that it belongs to everybody. It is a human dream. If you understand this and work very hard it is possible.” However it is not always guaranteed. A Raisin in The Sun by Lorraine Hansberry is a story about a family who continues to struggle while reaching towards The American Dream. The American Dream is described as “The ideal that every US citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative.” The Youngers are a hard-working family who all have different interpretations of the American Dream. Mama, Walter, and Beneatha’s shared powerful dreams that give the a look into The American Dream. Despite