Summary Of The Novel 'Water For Elephants'

Not surprisingly, elephants are known for being more emotional and empathetic animals than the rest. According the three articles, “Elephants Can Lend a Helping Trunk”, “Elephants Know When They Need a Helping Trunk in a Cooperative Task”, and “Elephants Console Each Other” elephants understand when they need each other’s assistance. All two authors describe the studies of elephant behavior differently, but with a similar purpose.

Themes and motifs: The book, Water for Elephants, has a symbolic study of human need for love and acceptance. The primary symbols are revealed through unique characters that struggle to feed deep internal desires. Rosie, the elephant, is a big and powerful symbol. More than just being a performing animal, Rosie reflects the desperation of so many

Thesis: (Nature is the driving force of the world, with a part of this the animal kingdom; in particular; the elephant a majestic gentle giant with intellect, emotions, and so many amazing things that people should know.)( Elephants are beautiful, intelligent, and important animals that have so many fun things to learn about.)

In “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell retold an occasion where he was struggling to come to a final decision of whether to shoot the elephant or not. With his final decision, the elephant finally lay dying in front of thousands of people. He said that he was forced to shoot it because the Burmese people were expecting him to do that. In addition, he also explained that he had to do it “to avoid looking like a fool” in front of the crowd (14). At first glance, one would think that it makes sense for him to kill the elephant to save his face, but that was not the case. He effectively uses this incident to demonstrate the “real nature of imperialism” (3), whereas the elephant represents the British Empire.

George Orwell began the essay with his perspective on British domination. He stated that it is evil and alongside of that it is oppressive. He felt hatred and guilt toward himself and the Burmese people. The people of Burma did not feel threatened because the narrator of the story had killed the elephant. The Burmese people have lost their dignity and integrity while trying to fight off the British imperialism. Orwell uses allegories to describe his experience of the British imperialism and he had his own view of the matter of slaying the elephant. He successfully used ethos, pathos, and logos by attracting the audience to read his story. He had to make a scene in the story to make the people of Burma feel the same emotion. The elephant was the one reason why it makes this story emotional. He used logos to show that he can kill the elephant even if he does not want to so that it does not make him look fool.

As the Battle of Britain rages on in England, young Nick Freestone is sent to Burma to live with his Dad. After a few days in Burma, the Japanese invade the country. Nick’s Dad is sent of to a prisoner of war camp, while Nick becomes a slave to the Japanese on his fathers plantation. But Nick has “an ace up his sleeve” that the Japs don’t know about. It is the tunnels throughout the plantation. Will Nick fight back, or will he escape.

Human beings have full control over their identities after they have received knowledge and have become shaped from external stimuli. These stimuli include the teaching process of humans which comes through tradition, schooling, and the actions of other humans and the influence of the organisms around them. Andrew Solomon, through “Son,” was able to use his experience of growing up and labeling himself as a gay dyslexic to show how his environment and knowledge had shaped his identity and how it was viewed by others with different identities. In “An Elephant Crackup,” Charles Siebert was able to explain how the other organisms or humans are able to form new identities for elephants over time by shaping them a new environment and having the elephants process it. In “Mind’s Eye,” Oliver Sacks had different case studies of blindness from different people and was able to show how each one experienced their blindness help shape and express their individual identities. The stimuli that becomes processed by a person in the situations, accounts, and studies of these works assist in the role of explaining the formulation of an identity.

    “The bad in the past can lead to the good in the future” (in class discussion). As inspiring as this theme may be, when still drowning in the “bad” the future feels like forever away. In Katherine Applegate’s novel, The One and Only Ivan, an inspiring tale of perseverance is revealed. Ivan, A gorilla, taken from his home in his early youth, lives in a mall exhibit. He watches human interactions and befriends animals near his domain. Stella, an elephant and a friend,is a special part of Ivan’s life. She asks him to ensure that their newest addition, a young elephant named Ruby, is cared for. An ongoing infection in Stella’s leg eventually takes her life, and Ivan is more determined than ever to get Ruby out of the mall and into a zoo. Eventually through determination, persistence, patience, and love Ivan and his friends have a happy ending.

In the short story, The Elephant in the Village of the Blind, there are a group of blind villagers that come across a conflict amongst themselves. The villagers are being introduced to an elephant for the first time in their lives. In curiosity, they all feel different parts of the elephant, observing the different textures and body parts. As they discuss their different views and experiences from touching the elephant their personal ideas created conflicts. As they disagree, it creates an interesting representation of human interaction. In this story, the conflicts that arise between the villagers represent the small bubble of human observation and subjectivity, and how much of human interaction is about competing to be correct in our beliefs because ego and self worth drive how we interact with each other.

Water for Elephants contains great social importance because it shows the dark side of capitalism. As said by Elizabeth Judd, “no matter how miserable or oppressed, the performers love the manufacturing of illusion, sewing a sequined headdress for Rosie” (the elephant performer), “or feeding the llamas as men die of starvation in devastated American.” Even in the novel, they were running out of meat to feed the large cats, they luckily had an injured horse; that they were able to use for food. The ringmaster Uncle Al would even do anything for a buck, he treats his performers and workers like they are nothing, he feels that the only reason that they are there is to help him flourish and bloom. Uncle Al’s main goal is to take Benzini Brothers circus, better than the Ringling Brother. “And then the shower of money starts- the sweet, sweet shower of money. Uncle Al is delirious, standing in the center of the hippodrome track with his arms and face raised, basking in the coins that rain down on him. He keeps his face raised even as coins bounce off his cheeks, nose, and forehead. I think he may actually be crying” (Gruen 237). This just shows how ruthless and money thirsty and that all he

George Orwell, author of, "Shooting an Elephant" reveals his inner conflicts to the audience by offering in depth description, using intensity, and symbolism through the act of shooting the elephant. His narration helps him do so by giving descriptive scenarios in the story. Orwell's narration can also be used to examine the role of India and Great Britain at the story's time in history. The narration then allows Orwell to use symbolism in place of description. Orwell uses narration to help explain his inner conflicts and to what is happening in each setting of the story.

During this time period, there was little to no regulation of the circus crew or the animals. This was the situation in a Water for Elephants. To top it all off, the show was owned and operated by a money hungry and cruel person, who would do anything to save money such as not paying the workers, not feeding the workers, not giving the exotic animals proper care and the list goes on. But in the circus, the audience seem to buy into the performer's deceptions. The audience is completely oblivious and are deceived by this circus, but in reality the circus is not as perfect as they make it

There is always a story behind any circus man whether it is how the owner becomes who he is, as well as the reason why. Cathy Day implies in “Wallace Porter or What It Means to See the Elephant”, how Porter becomes a “circus man” and infers the reasons why. Each year Porter escapes his hometown in Lima, Indiana to please his greed, but he still returns feeling hollow, until one summer it led him to meet Irene. Quickly they fell in love with each other’s person and married, yet Porter was still not satisfied. Filled with his own ambitions, Porter failed to please Irene’s need just like he did with his helpless soldiers at war. When Porter went to “see the elephant”, he saw his failure in marriage and in war reflected on the

If you’re not paying attention, the mind can be a tricky labyrinth. The less you know about it, the more inexplicable and frightening it becomes. For example, why do seemingly benign elephants wreak havoc upon villages? In “An Elephant Crackup,” Charles Siebert explores the aberrant nature of these elephants and correlates them to their traumatizing upbringing, deprived of community and kinship. The biochemistry of the human mind, analyzed in “Love2.0” by Barbara Frederickson, serves as a worthy addendum to Siebert’s conjecture. “Love2.0” explains that the brain, hormones, and nerves work in unison to build emotional fortitude, stimulate oneself, and express positivity resonance. Siebert’s ideas of elephant culture and trans-species psyche can put Frederickson’s theory of emotions into practice. The absence of certain hormones within elephants, provided their fragmented community, can explain their volatile outbreaks. Alternatively, the reinstitution of human parental roles into elephant culture can help reconstruct their broken emotional states of elephants and rebuild their resilience; this healing process can also extend to humans.

Elephant has long been known as one of man’s best friends, who have peacefully coexisted along with humanity for thousands of years. However, the relationship between the two is no longer in the equilibrium state. In “An Elephant Crackup?”, Charles Siebert discusses the downfall of the elephants. He gives a depiction of the recent raging and violent acts of the elephants among themselves and toward other species, including humans, and presents an educated and almost unexpected explanation to their behaviors. He says elephants are just like us; they have feelings and now are “suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma”(Siebert 354). The similarity that should be something fascinating is now slowly turning them into the immensely savage beasts before wiping them out of existence. Even when the appearance of the words “stress” and “trauma” looks like a serious case of “anthropocentric conjecture”, it provides a totally new vision, a fresh way of looking at the boiling issue of the disappearance and sadistic acts of elephants specifically and wild animals at large. With the help of two powerful essays: “Great to Watch” by Maggie Nelson and “The Power of Context” of Malcolm Gladwell, the issue of the unusual behaviors of the elephants is thoroughly illuminated and its solution no longer seems to be out of human’s reach.