Swell Season Theme

When Danny had hit the baseball, “My [Reuven] glasses had shattered...felt a sharp pain in my left eye when I blinked”(Potok 33). The “shattered glasses” symbolize the hatred between the two enemies, Danny and Reuven, will be broken, and Reuven’ perception has changed, leading to a friendship. As Reuven got home from the hospital, Reuven walked around his house “watching the sunlight and listening to the sounds on the street outside…tasting the room and the sunlight and the sounds” (Potok 96). Ever since Reuven’s eye accident and encountered Billy’s blindness, Reuven has developed an appreciation the gift of perception as he describes “watching,” listening to,” and “tasting” the world around him. Not only Reuven’s accident enhanced his physical awareness that was surrounding him, but also the symbolism of the world’s suffering and difficulty. On the day that Danny and Reuven were about to separate pathways, “we [Reuven and Danny] shook hands and I [Reuven] watched him walked away quickly, tall, lean and bend forward with eagerness and hungry for the future.” Reuven emphasizes his subjective perception of Danny’s departure of vision, touch and taste. This multisensory perspective reflects the way Reuven’s perspective has broadened, which symbolize Danny and Reuven

Blindness is not limited to physical manifestation. In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” the figurative blindness is immediately apparent through the narrator and his shallowness, irrational jealousy, and egotistical personality. His dismissive behavior and ignorance towards the feelings of Robert, his wife’s blind friend, speak negatively of his character and reveals his insecurities. While the narrator’s emotional blindness and Robert’s physical blindness initially inhibits their bond, it eventually leads the narrator to an epiphany and the beginning of a character transformation. The different forms of blindness allow the characters to bond and grow over the course of the story.

The author’s melancholic, yet, optimistic tone arouses mix feelings from his readers. Bragg clouts his readers’ perception of his father with harrowing, however, coveted recollections of the past. In the author’s comparative recount of the Father’s demeanor, he paints an unsettling, yet a hopeful life of his father:

The use of symbolism such as the physical and emotional meanings of blindness can describe different meanings behind elements of the story. In the critical essay, the author discusses why an author might choose to make a character bling and what it means. Diane Andrews Henningfeld, the author of the critical essay explains, “clearly the author wants to emphasize other levels of sight and blindness beyond physical.” Blindness can be more than just the levels of physical sight and the author wants that to be understood. The author wants to emphasize and make it very clear that other levels of sight and blindness exist like not seeing the beauty in life and being blind to it beyond just being able to see with your eyes. The quote can feel something about the characters traits and how they can be so opposite from their physical abilities. This quote Conveys the facts. People can see in different ways. It is stated that,“although he is blind, he ‘sees’ how to get along with others in profound and important ways. By contrast, the narrator, although sighted, does not see how his isolation damages himself, his wife, and their relationship. He is

When we think about our existence in terms of how we are humans, we take into account what happens in a typical human life. The universal qualities of human existence is the most prominent theme in the book. This theme is noticeable, multiple times throughout Our Town, by Thornton Wilder. One time the theme is shown in the book in the beginning, where the Stage Manager talks about the layout of Grover’s Corners. The same theme is repeated, when George and Emily are hanging out and they get ice-cream sodas. In another moment the theme is shown in its infancy stage, in the Stage Manager’s discourse about the twins being born in a Polish Town. The theme gradually culminated in the book, towards the end, where Emily’s funeral takes place. We

The word “blindness” can be used thematically and literally; thematically being someone can be ignorant or oblivious to see the truth or world around them, and in a literal sense it means that a person is physically blind. In Oedipus the King by Sophocles the role of “blindness” literally and thematically is used to show how the character Oedipus is oblivious to see the “truth” in his life is like Donald Trump, America’s forty-fifth president, on his views of climate change. Donald Trump is “blinded” by the fact that climate change is a real problem and in his mind the crazy weather is just the weather itself acting up.

Mystic River is a novel written by Dennis Lehane published in 2001. Despite this novel having a plot filled with both crime and mystery, revenge is also an underlying theme that remains continuous throughout the story. Revenge is the natural human sentiment involving both the desire and action of a victim carrying out his/her own form of justice against those that have wronged him/her personally. Justice is the action of punishing either immoral or illegal acts for the greater purpose to maintain local peace. Through Lehane’s portrayal of the characters’ inner monologue, the nature of their wrongdoings, and the impact of their past experiences on their current self-image, it is evident that the human desire for revenge stems from the impulse

Both Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” contain matters of skewed appearances and reality. Though both texts have themes of hidden truths, both have different outcomes when characters of their respective texts have their “veil” lifted: Goodman Brown is forever changed by his new perspective whereas Delano remains unperturbed by what he learns. In addition to this theme of appearance versus reality, both texts explore the consequences of this “unveiling” and, in connection, explore ideas of good versus evil and innocence turned into corruption.

Through the beginning to the middle of November, I read the book Reality Boy by A.S. King. Reality Boy is about Gerald Faust, a kid in highschool who had his whole childhood screwed up because he was on reality TV. His mom thought he was retarded, his sister constantly beats him up, and the whole world laughed in amusement as they watched him take craps everywhere. The book was interesting because he started out as a kid known as “The Crapper” and he was able to turn his life around for the better.

When Reuven and Danny first meet on the baseball field they both have rigid expectation about each others lifestyles. Ironically Reuven is temporarily physically blinded by Danny with a baseball, but metaphorically they become more aware of each others cultures and identities and how similar they are to each other. While Reuven is in the hospital Danny visits, Reuven explains, “I looked at him and suddenly I had the feeling that everything around me was out of focus. There was Danny Saunders, sitting on my bed in the hospital dressed in his Hasidic-style clothes and talking about wanting to kill me because I had pitched him some curve ball” (67). Again, Reuven is using sight as a way to explain Danny’s personality. Reuven’s identity, when Danny comes to visit him is more defined in context to what he wants in life rather than what he is expected to want in life. When he realizes that Danny has dreams to become a psychologist he starts to open his own eyes to the possibilities of becoming something based on what he wants, and to not be influenced by others

In Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, the main character Reuven is a believable character who learns friendship, and is taught how to see the world from a new perspective. When Reuven is in the eye ward, he observes a blind boy named Billy. After watching Billy, Reuven feels sympathy for him and thinks, “I couldn’t imagine what it was like to know that no matter whether my eyes were opened or closed it made no difference, everything was still dark” (Potok 53). Reuven begins to feel sorry for Billy, and can’t even begin to imagine how it would be completely blind. Baffled by his thoughts, he learns to feel sympathy for others, but Reuven is still “blind” for not knowing how to forgive Danny. Later on in the book, Reuven returns to school with a new perspective.

According to Helen Keller being able to literally see worth nothing when you are mentally blind that is, not being able to see things beyond the surface. The theme of sight versus blindness in the tragic play “Oedipus the king” by Sophocles is a metaphor, with blindness symbolising knowledge, light and truth while sight symbolises ignorance, darkness and lie. This metaphor and irony of sight and blindness is the building block of the play “Oedipus the king”, with central figures Oedipus, King of Thebes and Teiresias the blind prophet. References to sight and blindness, both metaphorical and literal are frequent throughout the play. Usually, the image

Life is beautiful is a 1997 Italian tragicomedy drama film, directed and starring Roberto Benigni. The film narrated a World War 2 story in where a jewish father named Guido Orefice ’s family was captured into a jewish concentration camp, however he employed his fertile imagination, and manage to shield his son Joshua from the horrors of the camp and sacrificed himself to ensure Joshua and Dora--his wife’s survivals. The film strongly conveyed the themes of innocence and love through uses of a range of cinematic techniques and narrative elements, such as diegetic and non-diegetic sounds, Mise en scene, foreshadowing and characterizations.

The story “Cathedral” demonstrates that lack of sight does not necessarily prevent one from perceiving things as they are, or live their life to the fullest. In the story, a middle-age blind man, who is a friend to the narrator’s wife, and used to be her boss at one point, visits the narrator and his wife. The narrator has never interacted with blind people before, and all he knew about blind people was what he had seen on television. Blind people are stereotypically portrayed on television as slow moving, dull people, who never laugh. Based on this perception, the narrator was reluctant to meet the blind man and doubted whether they were going to connect. This is evident when the narrator states, “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me” (Carver 1).

    The theme blindness & sight best resembles Tiresias as he is blind, but he has the ability to metaphorically  ‘see’ what others can’t. A good example of this is when Tiresias says “How terrible- to see the truth