Symbolism In Pat Conroy's 'The Water Is Wide'

In the play, The Seagull by Anton Chekhov, the main characters Constantine Treplieff, Nina Zarietchnaya and Boris Trigorin are entangled in a love triangle. Treplieff is an aspiring writer who writes plays about dead characters, which contributes to their failure. He lives in the shadow of his famous actress mother Irina Arkadina and her successful boyfriend Trigorin. Nina is a young aspiring actress who is also searching for acceptance. Her father and stepmother disapprove of her acting career. Lastly, Trigorin as mentioned before, is a successful writer and the boyfriend of Arkadina. He ultimately has an affair with Nina. The main symbolism in the play is an actual seagull, which is a bird that lives near the sea. In Chekhov’s The Seagull, the symbol of the seagull is used to represent Nina Zarietchnaya because of her sense of freedom and security at the lake, her destruction of Constantine Treplieff’s heart and her own destruction under Trigorin and their love affair.

Transitioning from normal life in California to arid desert, the family experiences an environment where civil liberty is as scarce as water. Though the sun’s intense beams project glimmers of water and freedom upon the desert’s farthest edges, these impressions convey a cruel false sense of reality just out of reach. Water in the desert represents an imagined freedom able to quench the family’s thirst. When the family returns home, they anticipate the sea as well as welcoming neighbors and friends, but are isolated and excluded evocative of the desert. While a recognizable sea breeze wafts through the house bringing with it the reminiscent smell of simplicity and freedom, the family has changed, the neighborhood has changed, and America has changed. Water after the desert represents a fabricated freedom, which falls short of expectation. By considering the absence of water, Otsuka exposes the emptiness and lack of American freedom given to Japanese-Americans during and after World War

By the time the alcohol touches the tongue, the storm has already begun. John Cheever’s relationship with alcohol presents itself throughout the short story “The Swimmer”, and uses the character, Ned Merrill, to represent the struggles he was experiencing. Addiction and the need for alcohol drove this character into a storm he couldn't retreat from. In “The Swimmer” Cheever uses a physical storm and the changes in the weather to show the path of drinking and becoming an alcoholic. The short story begins with joy and excitement, then turns into something casual and frequent, but eventually leads to misfortune and a misery. Nobody desires to be led to an unpleasant storm, that comes with drinking alcohol. Cheever uses nature and the storms to represent the life of an alcoholic.

In life, relationships change based on what two people experience while living with one another. In The Color of Water by James McBride, one relationship that changes throughout the book is James’s relationship with his mother, Ruth. Although James states that he loved his mother, he was also embarrassed by her at a young age. Since James is black, he’s embarrassed by his mother's white skin, because her complexion showed her difference from his friends and their parents. James states that at the age of 10, he “had reached a point where I was ashamed of her and didn’t want the world to see my white mother.” (McBride, 100) In order to avoid being seen with his mother, James would avoid telling his mother where he and his friends would be playing so she wouldn’t look for him. At his young age, he would also refuse to walk with her to the grocery store, making it clear that “the intent was to hide my white mom and go it alone” (McBride, 101)

 Water represents Sethe's transition from slavery to freedom. Sethe left Sweet Home pregnant with Denver, "and ran off with no one's help" (p.224). She ran scared and fearful of the trackers following her trail.  Sethe met Amy Denver, a white women, on her way to Ohio.  Amy helped Sethe find the Ohio River.  The river was "one mile of dark water...[and] it looked like home to her and the baby"(p.83).  When Amy left, Sethe traveled downstream and met Stamp Paid.  He helped her and Denver cross the river to freedom.  Stamp took Sethe upstream, "and just when she thought he was taking her back to Kentucky, he [Stamp Paid] turned the flatbed and crossed the Ohio like a shot" (p.91).  The river locked away the memories of Sweet Home and began her life with Denver at 124.   Water represents the transition of Sethe's slave life to her life of freedom.  Again, water has cleansed the soul of the sin of slavery. The river is now a barrier.  It separates Sethe's life of slavery, to her new life of freedom.

The film, Children of Men directed by Alfonso Cuarón, holds a mirror up to our faces and makes us look. Humans kill, torture, and destroy. Yet we create, give, and love. This motion picture explores the themes of hope, faith and redemption with astounding technical and artistic prowess that puts the audience into the thick of it. It is infused with authentic acting, celestial music, intense visual effects and rich symbolic script writing Children of Men is much more than a dystopian fantasy flick. It is an innovative masterpiece!

Philip K. Dick’s novel, Time Out of Joint, is set in an artificially created town from the 1950’s in a dystopian 1990’s society. Published in 1959, Dick’s novel was met with criticism from those who feared the Communist threat of a third world war. In making “time out of joint” in his novel, Dick blurs the line between fiction and reality by distorting narrative structure and employing the symbolism of words to satirize 1950’s American society’s willful ignorance and fear of the unknown. As power and moral authority shift, the reader questions the postmodernist novel’s world, instilling a sense of doubt and curiosity.

In the book color of water by James mcbride talks about his mother Ruth's and how she had ups and downs in her younger life till now when she is a widow and how she a has this habit of riding her bicycle through the all- black neighborhood in which James and his family lived. In “The Color of Water,” by James McBride has many themes. Each theme he is trying to get a point across and he tries to make us understand what him and his family went through as being Jewish and African American. He tells about his past and his parents past to give us an idea of what they all went through. In this book he brings you into their lives.

At the beginning of Le Thi Diem Thuy’s novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, water provides a refuge to the narrator and her family by functioning as a pathway to a new and secured life. This water signifies a new beginning and becomes a dwelling place where the narrator retreats when searching for answers. As the narrator progresses in the story, her understanding of life also develops, and water in the story becomes a barrier; it never truly provides the answers or fixes the issues that engulf the narrator’s family like a surf on the beach. Instead, the water reflects the traumatic reality within the narrator’s life, whether she realizes it or not. Essentially, in The Gangster We Are All Looking For, water functions as a pathway and a barrier which illuminate the trauma that the narrator and her family experience in their lives after Vietnam’s colonization.

In the short story “ The Swimmer,” John Cheever expresses the idea that Neddy Merrill can lose everything if he denies reality. Cheever achieves this by employing various symbols during Merrill's cross county journey. The main symbols are the weather and seasons. Cheever uses the changing of seasons to distort the character’s sense of time and show the progression of Merrill’s life. In the beginning of the story the setting is described as a midsummer day and by the end of the story, Merrill is able to see the constellations of late autumn, meaning winter is near. The illusion of time allows the reader to understand the extent of Merrill’s state of denial, as his beliefs begin to contradict the reality around him. While Cheever uses the weather to describe how Merrill feels. When it is warm Merrill feels happy and youthful. However, when it becomes colder Merrill begins to feel weak and sad. To emphasize Merrill’s state of denial, Cheever employs the motif of alcohol in “The Swimmer;” the reader notices that when Merrill is presented with a reality that he deems unpleasant, he uses alcohol to enhance his state of denial. Through the critical lens of New Historicism, the reader can infer the author’s purpose for writing “The Swimmer” is to criticize the lifestyles of affluent people in the 1950s and early 1960s. Cheever focuses on the party lifestyle of affluent communities and how the use of alcohol allows them to deny the reality around their current misfortunes.

Imagery, detail, and symbolism play a crucial role in this work. Imagery has the function of painting a picture of the situation in the reader’s mind so that he or she is able to develop a version of the story individually. It makes the reading a more personalized experience that helps the reader to understand what’s going on. When O’Brien was just about to escape to Canada to avoid being drafted, he described the scene that was presented in front of him. “The shoreline was dense with brush and timber. I could see tiny red berries on the bushes.” In this quote, the reader can visualize the setting of the lake where he has to make his life-changing decision. It appeals to the visual sense by describing the shoreline and even the sense of

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, is a story about love and war. Frederic Henry, a young American, works as an ambulance driver for the Italian army in World War I. He falls tragically in love with a beautiful English nurse, Miss Catherine Barkley. This tragedy is reflected by water. Throughout the novel Ernest Hemingway uses water as metaphors. Rivers are used as symbols of rebirth and escape and rain as tragedy and disaster, which show how water plays an important role in the story.

Everyday the world is growing older, and the human population is growing smarter. For instance, the short story There Will Come Soft Rains hints at the fact that a radioactive bomb caused an end to human civilization in a certain house. Although it may seem that this is something that could never happen in any near generation, were still left with the question of when will humans take it to far. In There Will Come Soft Rains, Ray Bradbury uses irony, personification, and symbolism to glamorize the fact that without humans populating the earth the world is a much more calm and peaceful place.

Undoubtedly, Stephen Crane’s Open Boat’ is regarded as one of the finest and most intriguing short story written by an author with a naturalistic point of view or perspective. Stephen sets up the story based on his real life experience thereby bringing out the intrinsic reality to his audience using symbolism, poetry, and imagery. Perhaps the most intriguing naturalistic approach of ‘the Open Boat’ is the way Stephen expresses the themes in the short story with an ironic twist regarding the vastness of the universe and the insignificance of man. As such, Stephen Crane’s short story, The Open Boat, is a true depiction of the tag of war between the unpredictable cosmic universe and man exposing the themes of determination for survival, mortality, friendship, with an exquisite touch of other devices such as poetry, symbolism or imagery, and tone. This paper aims at dissecting this subject matter through a detailed analysis of the plot created throughout the novel.

The Cay written by Theodore Taylor, is a story about How Phillip learned to respect Timothy . Phillip used to disrespect Timothy because he is a black man. The story is mainly about Phillip and Timothy being stranded in an island when they left their home to go somewhere elsewhere because they didn't feel safe in Curacao. The setting is about Phillip Enright a young boy happily living on an island in the Caribbean. The story takes place on the island Curacao, the largest island off of the Curacao coast. Phillip and his friends have a great time pretending that they are saving their town from pirates of old ships coming over the horizon. They like to pretend that these ships spanish galleons coming to invade their town.