Supernatural Character in Octavio Paz's Short Story, My Life with the Wave

The text “Letting the air into a relationship: Metaphorical Abortion in ‘Hills Like White Elephants” by Wyche David aims at analyzing and synthesizing the short story by Hemingway “Hills like White”. The analysis would provide new knowledge to readers of the short story or provide the readers with a new point of view of analyzing it. The subject of the text is to present his ideas on the short story and well as critique other critics who had previously critiqued it. The story illustrates broken relationships of Hemingway and the pain it caused him, which led him to write the short story. The whole text is therefore an analysis and synthesis of the short story written by Hemingway.

In A Place Where the Sea Remembers, Sandra Benitez invites us into a mesmerizing world filled with love, anger, tragedy and hope. This rich and bewitching story is a bittersweet portrait of the people in Santiago, a Mexican village by the sea. Each character faces a conflict that affects the course of his or her life. The characters in this conflict are Remedios, la curandera of the small town who listens to people’s stories and gives them advice, Marta, a 16 year old teenage girl, who was raped and became pregnant. Chayo is Marta’s big sister and Calendario is Chayo’s husband. Justo Flores, his conflict is person vs. self. One of the most important conflicts in this story is person vs. person, then person vs. supernatural followed by

An important idea in The Wave is ‘words can be used for harm or for good’. This idea means that words can be used to hurt people mentally and create bad things, but, at the same time can cheer a person up and change their life in a good way. The confusing thing is, is that good words can also be bad. For example, if someone said that they won their basketball game and you said ‘good’, then that would be a good thing to say. It’s also quite the same with harmful words. In The Wave, this conundrum is used in a smart way. For example, Ben Ross is taking his first class with The Wave as a base when he introduces the line,

Evocative and visceral, Irving Layton’s “The Swimmer” follows the impassioned swim of a man as a metaphor for man’s relation to nature. The poem begins with the titular swimmer breaking away from his vessel and into the sea. Layton elaborates upon the swimmer’s journey underwater, as a mystical intercourse between man and Earth. In the final stanza, the man is expelled by the sea and returned to land. In “The Swimmer”, through the description of an incestuous relationship communicated through erotic imagery, Layton expounds on the theme of the connected, yet ultimately detached, relationship between man and nature.

In Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the concept of appearance versus reality is manifested in three of the major characters around whom the novel revolves. The surface impressions of Santiago Nasar, Angela Vicario, and Bayardo San Roman are deeply rooted in Latin culture; underneath the layer of tradition, however, lies a host of paradoxical traits which indicate the true complexity of human nature.

Of the many literary devices used by writers to make their work more powerful and layered, symbolism is one of the most effective, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a text that relies heavily on its use to develop its narrative. The novella recounts, in the form of a pseudo-journalistic reconstruction, the murder of Santiago Nasar in a small Colombian town in the mid 1900’s. Through the course of the novel, Marquez employs various symbols to reinforce key ideas, themes and techniques. This helps the novella break the monotony of a linear storyline and unfolds the plot in a unique way that compounds both effect and meaning.

Poetry is often used as a form of writing to express emotions or tell a story. The poems “LA Nocturne: The Angels”, by Xavier Villaurrutia and “Meditations on the South Valley: Poem IX” by Jimmy Santiago Baca, are two distinctive poems. In Baca’s poem he expresses the disbelief and the sorrow of the death of a boy named Eddie. While, in Villaurrutia’s poem reveals an expression of secret desire men have. Baca and Villaurrutia’s poems, both use repetition, imagery and metaphors in their poems to convey their message.

Burroughs talks about how the sea is contradictory on its own, in its immensity. It mocks its victims “with the most horrible thirst”, and it smites everything like a hammer, while sometimes caressing like the hand of a lady. The breaking of its waves is violent, yet as it reaches the sands it reminds us of the rustle of a child's

The short story “My Life with the Wave” by Octavio Paz is an allegorical piece that utilizes water as an extended metaphor for dysfunctional, emotional changes that occur in romantic relationships, and, more specifically, in women. The wave is personified through female characterization to highlight the uncooperative nature of women in romantic relationships. The various transformations for water act as a metaphor for various transformations in a dysfunctional romantic relationship. The water is also symbolic of love in that it goes on forever and is often inescapable. Paz effectively applies feminine characteristics to a wave in order to depict unpredictable and emotional human transformations in dysfunctional relationships that

The Wave is a story about a high school senior class that has been intrigued to join their teacher’s cult known as the Wave. Several people tried to prevent the denial of his movement. Laurie Saunders the main character in the wave, is a rebellious girl who is very ashamed of this movement and is not inspired by her history teacher. He shows them a very emotional video of what Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party did. Some of the students take it more personal than others do. Because of Laurie’s bravery, independence, and determination, Laurie denies the Wave.

Unlike other forms of literature, poetry can be so complex that everyone who reads it may see something different. Two poets who are world renowned for their ability to transform reader’s perceptions with the mere use of words, are TS Eliot and Walt Whitman. “The love song of J Alfred Prufrock” by TS Eliot, tells the story of a man who is in love and contemplating confessing his emotions, but his debilitating fear of rejection stops him from going through with it. This poem skews the reader’s expectations of a love song and takes a critical perspective of love while showing all the damaging emotions that come with it. “Song of myself”, by Walt Whitman provokes a different emotion, one of joy and self-discovery. This poem focuses more on the soul and how it relates to the body. “Song of myself” and “The love song of J Alfred Prufrock” both explore the common theme of how the different perceptions of the soul and body can affect the way the speaker views themselves, others, and the world around them.

Characters are made to present certain ideas that the author believes in. In Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold there are many characters included that range from bold, boisterous characters to minuscule, quiet characters but one thing they all have in common is that they all represent ideas. Characters in the novel convey aspects of Marquez’s Colombian culture.

Continuing in the theme of conformity; if the boys are united by their heteronomy, Cuellar’s castration, in contrast, is the source of his ostracism. His unfortunate accident is a wound that ‘time opens instead of closes’, and as the story progresses, Vargas Llosa juxtaposes the boys socially inclusive youthful pastimes of football and studying mentioned earlier in the novel with his comparatively solitary penchant for the ocean and surfing “a puro pecho o con colchón” (94) in chapter five. In this passage, his distance from the others is symbolised by the isolation of the sea; the narrator says the water “se lo tragó” (95) and later, the boys state that “se perdió” (96). Clearly, Cuellar’s failure to partake in the testosterone fuelled rituals of sexual maturity in the city has seen him shunned from the rest of the boys and resigned to hanging out with “rosquetes, cafichos y pichicateros” (96) instead – the modern, metropolitan outcasts. Evidently, Cuellar is incapacitated by this highly heteronormative lifestyle, as the inherent masculinity of the city is a fixed identity that will perpetually exclude him, or anyone else who cannot fulfil Peruvian societies idea of gender appropriate behaviour.

To practice machismo, also known as masculinity in a Dominican culture, males have to hide their flaws and act a certain way. If men express their un-masculine nature, they will be seen as expressing their weakness. In Drown written by Junot Díaz, contains many stories about Dominican Republic male struggles as an immigrant in America. One of the struggles Díaz expresses in his text is appearing masculine in society’s eyes. From the story “Drown”, the unnamed narrator expresses what it means to be masculine. “Boyfriend” is a story about another unnamed narrator observing his neighbor’s relationship, and comparing it to his own past. Yunior, the narrator of the story “Negocios”, explains the history of his father Papi, also known as Ramón. Society creates many definitions for what it means to be masculine, leading the narrator from “Drown”, the narrator from “Boyfriend”, and Ramón struggling to choose between doing what they want for themselves, or do what society wants to see.

Camilla, Arturo, Sammy, Vera and Hellfrick are all non-entities in the bustle of L.A. culture, but all are profoundly human in their suffering, confusion, and vices. All are battling a poor sense of self-worth and struggling to survive in an indifferent world. Arturo Bandini takes us through this story in intimate first-person, exposing us to his mood swings, his astute observations and his growth as an author and a man.