The Emptiness Of A Mason Jar Analysis

In life, you learn that certain things just don’t mix: Diet Coke and Mentos, cereal and water, drugs and good grades, and picnic tables and dancing, just to name a few. That last example might seem a little bizarre to you, but to me it hits very close to home. Throughout my childhood, we had this picnic table that sat on our back patio. We would have tea parties on it or use it as a place to color or do homework. Sounds pretty fun, right? Sure, as long as you were using it the way it was intended to be used. Throw in my sister and her aspiring dreams to be a dancer, and suddenly our story gets a little messy. So grab a snack, sit back, and listen to the story of how my sister drove me to start taking drugs.

Through the juxtaposition between past and present, organic imagery and a pronounced tone of both wonder and tranquility marking the language, Gwen Harwood's poetry delineates the nature of grief, fear, and memory as they personify human experience. The events described in "Father and Child", is an exploration of the existential and moral concerns of the poet. Both poems exemplify the ideals of maturity as compared to immaturity. 'The Violets' on the other hand explores the reconciliation of past memories. How one who cannot be comforted in the moment, can be comforted by memories instead. Fear is the main focus on Harwood's most psychological poem 'The Glass Jar'.

“The Glass” by Sharon Olds is an autobiographical piece which outlined one of the most memorable events for the author as she witnessed her father dying of cancer. Although the poem is about her father, her father is placed as an auxiliary character to the glass that he continuously spits up his phlegm and mucus into. The contents of the glass are described in gruesome detail while her father is slowly withering away beside it quietly. The author had a tumultuous relationship with her father as he had abused her as a child and she even has an entire collection dedicated to her feelings towards him, aptly titled The Father. The titular glass's function in Sharon Olds' poem "The Glass" is to replace the author's dying father as the new center of the universe because the glass now contains the father's life, thus shedding the once godlike image in the author's life.

The suicide of Sylvia Plath is still felt today as she died due to the expectations society set on her as a woman in living in the mid 1900s. In her autobiography, Plath creates a character by the name of Esther Greenwood that gets thrown into the loop of life predestined for her by society and feels these expectations pile upon her. Her inability to cope leading up to her suicide attempt turns into a wake up call. The pressures society in the 1950s put on Esther affect her perception of society and cause a decline in her mental health. In the novel, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Esther feels the pressure of society, turns away from the influence of the people closest to her, and struggles with her mental health.

apple pie.” (para. 9) This does seem to be the case. It is hard to go

He refers to the story of Adam and Eve to show his panic but soon after follows with how sweet and delicious the apple pie was. He refers back to guilt when he decides not to share with Cross-Eyed Johnny in lines 50-52. Once again he soon follows with, “He watched my fingers greedily push big chunks of pie down my throat” (57-58). He expresses that he feels guilty and then cancels the guilt out with his satisfaction for the apple pie. The contrast between his Christian ways and human desires expresses his youth and maturity being a six-year-old boy and how he was influenced by his

After he steals the pie he states, “I knew an apple got Eve in deep trouble with snakes…” He uses this example from the Bible to show his religious upbringing and how he applies this story from creation to his sins. Like Eve, he realized that he did something wrong after the fact. At the end of the narrative, he brings up sin again to say, “I knew sin was what you took and didn’t give back.” He includes this sentence to show the purpose of sharing his childhood story with the reader and what he learned from his mistakes. He reveals his religious views and morals at the end to justify that he is aware of his wrongdoing and also to help the reader avoid the same fate.

In the excerpt from A Summer Life, the autobiographical narrative by Gary Soto, he uses tactile and olfactory imagery, dramatic diction, repetition, and religious allusions to recreate the experience of his six-year-old self. In the first part of the story, Soto describes his experience feeling nervous while stealing a pie

Observation: Yesterday, in the morning, I was sitting on the floor, pretending that I was cooking something on the pot as I stir. “Child A” saw what I was doing and walked towards me. “Child A, come and see what I am cooking”, I said. She took the saucepan with the lid that was on the stove, sat down on the floor and put the saucepan down. She held on to the lid, opened it and closed it. I handed her the spoon that I was using and I took the pot and the spatula and showed her how to stir. “This is how we stir, “Child A”, I said. She started pounding the saucepan using the spoon that I gave her, making sounds. “Child B” heard the sound that “Child A” was making and saw what we are doing. “Child B” was looking at the pot and the saucepan that was on the floor as she crawls toward us. She sat on the floor beside me and opened and closed the pot twice. I opened my eyes wide and smiled, “Wow ‘Child B’ you are making sounds!”, I said. “Child B” looked at me and smiled back. I gave her the spatula and assisted her hand on how to stir. I took the kettle and the cups and put it on the floor. I sang, “This is the way we pour our drink” and pretended that I was from the cup. “Child A” took the other cup and drank from it. “Uh- oh! Out of your mouth, “Child A”, I said. Later that day, after their lunch, “Child C” went to the dramatic area and played with the kitchenware. I went to her and sang, “This is the way we stir our food” as I use the spoon to stir. She moved her head from left

There were bowls, mortars and pestles sitting on the kitchen table as if they were waiting for the owner of the home to come back any minute and prepare dinner. Typically museums have everything behind glass or in display cases, but having them sitting on the table made it feel like the home of a real person, not just a figure of history. I thought this was especially important because it pushes the idea that people still live this way, rather than seeing Native Peoples as an extinct culture.

“So I started this new diet, and I can’t drink wine. These kids are making it very hard to keep that up,” the Rosehill Elementary School librarian, Mrs. Harrington, siad to me in passing. I paused my book shelving and gave her a quiet chuckle while she went to go teach the kindergarten class that recently arrived. For the next thirty minutes I heard screaming and shouting about sharing crayons while students ran up and down the shelves, nearly running into me in the process. Once the kindergarteners left, Mrs. Harrington was making her way back to her desk, but whispered to me, “You know what? I’m going to have a glass tonight. I deserve it.”

Virgil Ortiz states that when he walked up to the Charles Bridge, it reminded him of the photo from the “Clay People Book” and knew that he needed to recreate it someday. The vertigo series infuses culture awareness and historical research into the piece. As his ancestors once used

The headmistress never knew what to do with little Stupid One. The little girl slammed into things standing directly in front of her. She spoke her first word at age 3. She ate bugs off the floor. Puzzled and slightly annoyed, Headmistress remembered asking the young child to point at one object that didn’t belong in a group. In a group of a red tomato, a red firetruck, a red apple, and a green grape, the young girl giggled and pointed at the firetruck with a chubby finger. Exchanging disapproving glancing with the nurse, the headmistress decided to spend extra time with the child, forcing knowledge down her throat in heaps. It did nothing.

Esther Greenwood: Normal, as she knew it In all aspects of the lives we live, normal can not ever be defined as a single idea. If normal is such a thing at all, it is a subjective opinion and can only be defined on an individual level. Everything we interpret is relative to our upbringing and our environment. Not one person had the same upbringing or lived in the same environment as another person for even siblings who have lived together their whole lives have different nurturing experiences. The differentiation between normal and abnormal is a topic of much debate. The meaning of normality varies in many ways such as by person, time, place, situation, culture and set of values. Normality is usually seen as good and desirable by society and what society thinks while abnormality may be seen as bad or undesirable (Boundless).

Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of The Bell Jar by Silvia Plath, is cast under the spell of her own depression and the story of being released from the spell follows the structure of one of the 7 plot types Christopher Booker created. These 7 plot archetypes include the Quest, Voyage