The Guilt In Pudge's The Death Of Alaska Young

Being hurt emotionally by death is by far the worst kind of pain in the world. It causes one to completely shy away from doing what is right. Alice Dark’s In the Gloaming, illustrates selfishness in one character, and righteousness in another. Although this story is written in third person, it is out of Janet’s perspective. Janet plays the role of the protagonist character. She spends all of her time taking care of Laird and making him happy. Dark gives her readers many symbols and metaphors throughout her story to explain her theme. She tells a story about a family that is being pulled apart by their brothers and sons homosexuality as well as his death from AIDS. According to David Caron, “The family is an institution, and like all

She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning: and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.” The words she uses radiates the devotion between

In literature, themes shape and characterize an author’s writing making each work unique as different points of view are expressed within a writing’s words and sentences. This is the case, for example, of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” and Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death.” Both poems focus on the same theme of death, but while Poe’s poem reflects that death is an atrocious event because of the suffering and struggle that it provokes, Dickinson’s poem reflects that death is humane and that it should not be feared as it is inevitable. The two poems have both similarities and differences, and the themes and characteristics of each poem can be explained by the author’s influences and lives.

Mary Oliver’s poem, “Sleeping in the Forest,” presents a peaceful and vivid representation of death and its relationship with nature. As the poem begins, the reader is introduced to the earth welcoming the speaker back into the realm of nature. Man was created from the dust of the earth and when we die, our bodies return to the dust. However, this poem presents a more beautiful image of what death is composed of. Death is often portrayed as being frightening and disturbing. When individuals are presented with the thought of death, they often push this thought away out of fear and ignorance. Everyone will die someday whether we ignore the thought of death or not. However, Oliver creates a relaxing and welcoming image for the reader on what death (ideally) is. Obviously, since Oliver is still alive, she doesn’t know what death feels like. However, the way she describes death, I hope that it feels like sleeping in a forest; full of stars and enchantment.

In author Cristina Henriquez’s novel The Book of Unknown Americans, the characterization of Alma Rivera is used to convey how grief and misery is magnified when all that a person had ever known has been taken away for some reason out of their control; it is only when they learn to give up control and forgive themselves, that they overcome the feelings of grief and guilt.

On December 29, 2006, Connie Russell’s son lost the fight for his life. Matt was a bright, twenty-one year old senior at Florida State University. His love of scuba diving inspired Matt to want to become a marine biologist in Australia. However, these dreams would never come true. As Russell painfully recounts, Matt had been traveling with friends to scuba in West Palm Beach. However, on I-95, a drunk driver suddenly came out of nowhere and struck Matt’s car and significantly injured him. Seven days later, Matt was gone. Although Russell lost her son more than ten years ago, her pain is still noticeably fresh. In fact, she still believes Matt died at the hands of someone else’s moronic decision. It was a choice, not an accident that her son was killed. Although some may claim drunk drivers do not mean to take lives, Russell believes otherwise. In fact, Russell was able to convince the audience through the use of rhetorical appeals that her son’s death was a choice, and not an accident.

In Tim’s first up-close and personal encounter with death, Linda, his girlfriend, dies of cancer before turning ten. When Tim attends her wake and sees her body, he is unable to cope with the reality of her death. Instead, he imagines that she is awake and normal and having a conversation with him. Through this conversation with a dead person, Tim comes to realize that his imagination - the stories that he makes up - can keep people alive after their deaths. If he remembers Linda’s corpse, that is all she can ever be, but if he continues to have conversations with her, to imagine her alive, to tell stories about her, then she remains alive as he portrays her. Though told at the end of the book, this vignette becomes a lens through which Tim views death throughout and explains why Tim, the character, and O’brien, the author, tell stories about dead friends. Tim tells stories about death - the death of his friend Kiowa, the postwar suicide of Norman Bowker, the corpse of the man he killed, the tragic accident that killed Ted Lavender, and Linda’s battle with cancer - to preserve the life of people he

Emily Dickinson is one of the most important American poets of the 1800s. Dickinson, who was known to be quite the recluse, lived and died in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, spending the majority of her days alone in her room writing poetry. What few friends she did have would testify that Dickinson was a rather introverted and melancholy person, which shows in a number of her poems where regular themes include death and mortality. One such poem that exemplifies her “dark side” is, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”. In this piece, Dickinson tells the story of a soul’s transition into the afterlife showing that time and death have outright power over our lives and can make what was once significant become meaningless.

The American Civil War was one of the most violent eras of American history. It was during this period that the poems written by Emily Dickinson carry the most meaning. Jay Parini said, “poetry gives voice to what is not usually said”, It feels a shame to be alive, by Emily Dickinson is about death and it questions the bravery of the living. Despite death being a part of day-to-day life during a time of war, death was an unknown state of being and for this reason it scared people and the topic was avoided, as it still is today. This poem questions the bravery of those who live “When

And finally, the beautifully damaged, larger-than-life Alaska Young. As her name implies, she is so young to have the problems that she has and meet such an untimely demise. She is also aptly named Alaska because she is (or wishes to be) an unknown, mysterious, possibly dangerous frontier to her schoolmates. We learn well into the novel, that Alaska experienced a horrible tragedy when she was little: her mother had an aneurysm and died in front of her. Alaska, in shock, was unable to take any action to save her mother and has since tried to control situations with her own volatility and unpredictability. She manipulates those around her by alternating between being a misunderstood victim and an instigator of mischief.

Page 70: The question he asks himself at last which is “What happens to us after we die?” shows us how he is obsessed with what happens after dying. This shows us that while thinking of death, people cannot stop thinking about what will happen to them after they die. Furthermore, this quote hints us about how responsible Miles will be of Alaska’s death since he will always think of the fact she is dead and of what may have happened to her after it.

Robert Frost is an iconic poet in American literature today, and is seen as one of the most well known, popular, or respected twentieth century American poets. In his lifetime, Frost received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, and the Congressional Gold Medal. However, Robert Frost’s life was not always full of fame and wealth; he had a very difficult life from the very beginning. At age 11, his father died of tuberculosis; fifteen years later, his mother died of cancer. Frost committed his younger sister to a mental hospital, and many years later, committed his own daughter to a mental hospital as well. Both Robert and his wife Elinor suffered from depression throughout their lives, but considering the premature deaths of three of their children and the suicide of another, both maintained sanity very well. (1)

I think there are two major ideas behind this story. The first one is really obvious, especially in the end of the book: People shouldn’t ignore death as a topic. It helps to talk about it. It helps, if we have our own fantasy of what happens after someone passed away. But that Alaska would pass away was not obvious for the first half of the book, so for me personally I found another idea behind the story: You should make something out of your life. Live it at its’ fullest. Go and find “The Great Perhaps” that Miles Halters has been looking for, when he came to boarding school.

Emily Dickinson once said, “Dying is a wild night and a new road.” Some people welcome death with open arms while others cower in fear when confronted in the arms of death. Through the use of ambiguity, metaphors, personification and paradoxes Emily Dickinson still gives readers a sense of vagueness on how she feels about dying. Emily Dickinson inventively expresses the nature of death in the poems, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (280)”, “I Heard a fly Buzz—When I Died—(465)“ and “Because I could not stop for Death—(712)”.

The poem by Emily Dickinson entitled the “The Last Night That She Lived” is about the death of a family member. The death was rather expected as it seems. The reason we know this is because the whole family was already gathered in order to be there when she passed. Dickinson was labeled as a dark and morbid writer in her time. In the poem “The Last Night That She Lived,” we get to experience the sadness, grief, and even spirituality of Dickinson’s feelings when dealing with her experiences of death.