The Grim Reader Is All Powerful

Great Expectations tells the ultimate rags to riches story of the Orphan Pip. Dickens takes his readers through life changing events that ultimately mold the identity of the main character. Dividing these events into sections will provide the basis for interpreting which events had the most profound effect on Pip’s identity towards the end of the novel. These life-changing events provide the catalyst for the development of Pip’s character from childhood, his adolescence, maturing into a social gentleman, and finally becoming a self-aware man of society.

Death is a topic that unites all of humanity. While it can be uncomfortable to think about, confronting death in unavoidable. “Dying” addresses that discomfort and universal unwillingness to consider the inevitability of death. Pinsky’s use of imagery, symbolism, and tone create a poetic experience that is like death, something every reader can relate to. In “Dying,” Pinsky describes how people are oblivious and almost uncaring when it comes to the thought of death. Pinsky is trying to convince the reader that they shouldn’t ignore the concept of death because life is shorter than it seems.

The first character to play a big part in shaping Pip’s personality is his sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery. His sister’s vicious attitude and harsh punishments force Pip to have an unfriendly childhood. This bringing up “by hand” has caused him to be a “sensitive” boy. The constant threat of being beaten with the Tickler has also instilled the fear of speaking out against adult’s treatment of him because it would send his sister into a “terrible Rage.” However, her brutality has also made Pip able to feel when something was a “keen injustice” because he himself feels so about her actions and words towards himself.

Death is the great equalizer. No matter the person, death comes to all eventually. The idea that no matter what one does or says death’s grip is ever present scares a large majority of people. This means death is not a topic typically approach with thoughtful discussion in normal conversation, rather it is regulated to philosophers and academics. Cathy Malkasian seeks to challenge that notion in her graphic novel Percy Gloom. In it, Malkasian uses symbols that at first seem absurd, or amusing to broach the topic of death and deep truths surrounding it, in an accessible way. The three biggest symbols that Malkasin uses are the goats, the muffins, and Safely Now.

Regardless of race, caste, religion, or age, every human has wondered about the one fact of life that unifies us all: What is death? Both poems, “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” by Margaret Atwood and “Because I could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson share a common subject of death. Using figurative language, both poems illustrate distinct takes on a similar topic.

Death is among the greatest mysteries of the human existence, one of the issues being that neither science, religion, or philosophy have definitive explanations on it. Although Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet explore death and dying, the former advocates for people to be more optimistic in these circumstances than the latter. Station Eleven’s characters focus their thoughts on living and improving their situation to achieve their goals while Hamlet's characters concentrate on dying and how to end the misery of life, as they are hopeless to change their fate. The ability to make decisions result in opposite outcomes for the characters in each text as Station Eleven’s characters have free will and are rewarded for using it, whereas Hamlet’s characters are punished for seeking to control their future. The development of each character’s life is due to their respective text favouring or punishing free will. The consequences of exercising free will in Station Eleven yield positive results because humans can control their own destiny in a world of death, while in Hamlet, contrarily, humans are controlled by fate and have to endure the consequences of attempting to defeat it.

Imagine ink like darkness for the rest of your life, never to see the light again. Imagine never hearing the words of love oozing out of your beloved’s mouth and wrapping your body with warming comfort. Imagine never feeling the gentle touch of a man or woman ever again. Imagine slumber but for eternity where your organs decay and you are no more than a mere frame of bones. Imagine death. Byron states, “all tragedies end in death” and I agree wholeheartedly. In prolonging unhappiness of life there is still peace that one’s life is still whole and that they are alive, however in death there is no light at the end of the tunnel, it is just pure darkness. Vivacious, colorful and musical, Moulin Rouge and dreary, dark and full of betrayal Shakespeare’s King Lear, though very contrasting texts have one thing in common, they both end in death. This essay shows the similarities between these two texts in order to prove that Byron’s statement “all tragedies end in death” is indeed true.

Discovering something for the first time can be meaningful and can help initiate the process of change that can shape and impact life. The combination of themes that Michael Gow’s play Away, Seamus Heaney’s poem Mid-term Break, and Dane Clark’s short film Margo Lily, highlight includes coming to terms with a person’s mortality, death as a means of bringing people together regardless of social status, and the importance of reconciliation. Death is inevitable and one must accept this in order to progress in life. Michael Gow’s play ‘Away’ opens with the final scene from Shakespeare’s, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespearean allusions come into play with Tom as the character of Puck, an immortal fairy, symbolising a whole life ahead for Tom.

The concepts of life and death can be portrayed using numerous literary devices and embellished ideas. The author of Beowulf entirely uses enhanced literary techniques to express ideas because it is an advanced rhetoric; Dylan Thomas also integrates accelerated rhetorical devices to express his ideas on life into his poetry so that the reader’s emotions are touched by the author. Both authors make sure that their messages are fully incorporated into the text so that the readers can take something away from their work. Although the authors use various forms of literary devices to express their ideas, the nature of their message is relatively concrete in regards to the different cultures they experienced in their lives. Life and death are two vast concepts that will never have one

Mister Pip follows the story of Matilda, a 13 year old girl from Bouganville which at the time was being torn apart in the chaotic civil war now referred to as the Coconut Revolution. Lloyd Jones displays the slow yet destructive nature of war to all those involved through vivid description, pathetic fallacy and the brutal actions the characters endure. Lloyd johns shows how war is destructive to both the perpetrators and the victims. There are three groups the novel which are the Rambo’s, the Redskin’s and the villagers with each group being impacted by war in a different way.

This tension between an urbane, educated, retrospective narrative voice and other, more urgent forms of direct speech is a feature of the book throughout. The dominant tone is that of Pip telling his story, but there are a great variety of other languages, different voices and more eccentric styles within this dominant discourse. This is not to suggest that Pip's own voice lacks range and variety. As we can see, he can investigate his own childish terror vividly, but he can also recreate Pumblechook's nemesis with the tar-water to great comic effect.

Contrary to what Atwood articulates, fictional writing has been viewed as a way of writing that grants freedom to the writer. The writer can end the story with suspense, ending at just that point that a character is phased with a huge obstacle or immense passion (Nodelman, 1). This is believed to set the reader up into believing that overcoming such obstacles in real life brings about immense rewards and therefore such kind of writing is always motivational to the reader. This is a point of view that Atwood is quick to rubbish by pointing out that all other endings that are not ‘happy endings’ in fiction are delusionary. “Don't be deluded by any other endings, they're all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality” (Atwood, 3).

There are salient junctures in Pip’s upbringing that make him who the person he was; this is a tale that in which Pip was soliciting for awareness of himself, as well he realized that his life had major elements of obscurity; due to the fact, he was presented clearly, two radical different lifestyle choices; one, involving a life as a blacksmith and the other; involving the path as life as am affluent prosperous gentleman. Dickens carefully wrote in the periods of Pip’s life and how those set of circumstances; affected by choice, as well affected Pip’s later choices he had made. The temptation of class and wealth perverted the actions of Pip and other people around him; Pip is therefore contemplating on how he was saved by reminiscence of the stages of his life. In the first stage; Pip encounters Magwitch; by accident, this affects the outcome of later events of his life; Pip is than introduced to Miss Havishism and Estella, he fell in love with Estella, and was dramatically persuaded by the promises he made to himself, from his encounters with Miss Havhishism and Estella. Dramatically; Pip than learned the truth about his wealth and that Magwitch was Estella 's father; this collapsed Pip’s vision of reality and forced him to alter his exceptions concerning the truth; Pip than had to save himself from his own selfishness, as well as his malice actions, to the ones who were faithful to him; finally, at the end Pip is a full grown adult and had gain

Mister Pip written by Lloyd Jones is a novel recounted by the protagonist Matilda. Set in 1990’s Bougainville, we see Matilda begin to question her Mother’s traditional idea’s about life as a civil war rages between the rebels and the Redskins in her homeland. Mr. Watts or “Pop eye” is given the role teaching the village children, being the only educated, and consequentially, white man left on the island. He begins reading Great Expectations to the children and Matilda finds herself becoming entranced in white civilisation. She gets immersed in the story of the white boy “Pip” living in London in the 1800’s,

Harshly administered punishment and conformity to order was emphasized from an early age, as indicated in Pip’s conflicted conscience in his choice for the lesser of two evils; robbing and lying to his sister, or risking potential bodily harm from an escaped convict. The dilemma renders Pip distressed, as if he “ had to make up [his] mind to leap from the top of a high house, or plunge into a great depth of water” (16). His perpetual guilt is attributed to his sister’s deontological