The Invalid Setting

This chapter is called Rich Chicago Girl. Mary Alice gets off a train from Chicago. After they leave the station Grandma enrolls her into school on the first day she arrives! Mary Alice sits next to Mildred Burdick who Grandma says to stay clear of but gets into deep trouble with and her horse ends up losing her horse and having to walk miles to get home. And that’s the end of this chapter.

The image of the train appears several times; including when Big Boy heads home for the final time. “Big Boy slowed when he came to the railroad. He wondered if he ought to go through the streets or down the track. He decided on the tracks. He could dodge a train better than a mob.” In this section, the train serves as the carrier of Big Boy’s adulthood. By staying on the tracks he believes he is still innocent; still hidden from the mob that is after Big Boy because he murdered—certainly a crime not associated with youthful innocence. Because Big Boy is black, he never really has true innocence. He has to be mindful of his surroundings at all times, knowing that whites are always out to get him. But whatever

McCarthy’s The Road exemplifies the struggle to survive throughout the entire novel. In the most trying times, during the longest stretches without food, the father’s persistence and confidence

The story takes place at a train station, where the girl and the American sit down on a table

“Why should I play games? I’m on the edge of panic half the time.” says Adam Farmer in the novel I am the cheese written by Robert Cormier. This novel has many characters but there is one in particular, who is the main character. A boy name Paul Delmonte also known as Adam Farmer. This essay will begin by describing Paul and his personalities, and then explain why he is important to the theme.

dementia. The train cars move north and they finally arrive in Siberia where it is barren, dim, and

The Road by Cormac McCarthy details a post-apocalyptic world with mysterious origins. While there are many questions about this world, the reader is left to their own imagination to determine how it got that way. Within this world, there is a man and a boy, father and son trying to make their way and survive until they can find a safe haven that may or may not exist. The see many things along the way and the man instills in the boy that it is important to remain a good guy and always “carry the fire”. Carrying the fire refers to the light inside of you that makes you who you are and may also carry the “goodness” of human nature. Inevitably, the man meets his fate via a mysterious illness leaving the boy on his own. The boy is then introduced to a family that has been following them knowing that the man was not well and the boy would need someone to look after him.

Additionally, McCarthy uses similes often in both the books to give a more in-depth perspective on what the characters are seeing. In The Road, the man has a flash back to how the world was like when the disaster first happened and says, “In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators,” (The Road 14). The use of this simile allows the reader to see how the world has changed and has obliterated the last bit of humanity since now those refugees turned into cannibals only a few years later. In addition, in All the Pretty Horses, the use of similes aid in describing sights that are beautiful to Grady, such as,

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy is a novel about a father and a man on a dark and sadistic road. The child in the story is forced to live a life of cruelty due to his father’s own selfishness and stupidity. While the mother grew weak and killed herself leaving her child alone in the world instead of taking him with her and ending his suffering. The father and son not only have conflict among themselves. The outside world is reddened with heinous monsters that will do anything to kill, rape, and eat any survivors of this world are met with a grueling fate of devastation.

Orphan trains is a documentary about children in New York, being sent on trains to other parts of the country, in order to find families and be taken care of. There are stories from, adults that actually rode on these trains when they were children. The Orphan Trains was started by a man named Charles Loring Brace in 1854. Brace, had traveled to New York in the early 1850’s, and was horrified at the conditions of all the children he saw on the street. Brace felt that it was a duty to help these children out, and decided that the only way to help these children was to get them away from their surroundings, and send them away to be raised in nice, Christian homes around the country. So, in 1853, Brace founded the Children’s

About thirty to forty children rode these trains with only two to three adults. They were told that they were going out west, but the children really had no idea what that meant. Most of them had never been outside of New York.

Edith Wharton’s novel, Ethan Frome, takes place in Starkfield, Massachusetts during the winter season sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. By using flashback, first-person narrative and limited third-person narrative, Wharton tells the tale of an unfortunate man, Ethan Frome, whose world takes an ironic turn that traps him into a life of misery. The story describes Ethan’s life as it was twenty-four years prior and the ill-fated circumstances that resulted in the broken man he had become. Just like many Americans, Ethan Frome had dreams and hopes for a better future but family obligations and poverty were obstacles he simply could not overcome.

The Road takes place in post-apocalyptic America after an unknown disaster occurs. The novel centers around a boy and his father, both of whom are never given names. In an analepse, the reader learns that the mother of the boy kills herself with “a flake of obsidian” as she fears that she would be raped and murdered (McCarthy 30). “[The man] hadn’t kept a calendar for years” and the reader is left unsure what year or month it is (McCarthy 2). The man is sure, however, that winter is approaching and it would be best for him and the boy to travel south where it is warmer. They have nothing but a pistol, their clothes, and a cart with food they scavenged for. The world is barren with “dust and ash everywhere” (McCarthy 3). The story chronicles the man and boy’s journey to the south while they look for food, supplies, and shelter. The pair must fend off “bad guys” during their journey as well (McCarthy 39). When one of these “bad guys” puts his knife at the boy’s throat, the man is left with no other option than to shoot the “bad guy” leaving a “hole in his forehead” (McCarthy 34). Another gruesome event occurs when the man and boy are looking for food in a house they found. While walking down a cellar’s stairs, they smell an “ungodly stench” (McCarthy 56). In the cellar, there are “naked people” who are whispering “help us” and a maimed man on a mattress with his “legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt” (McCarthy 56). These people are being kept to be eaten eventually and the man and his son

In Robert Cormier’s I Am the Cheese the reader learns about Adam’s hardship to take care of himself on his journey to find his father in the hospital, while in the end he was in a mental hospital himself. The lie Adam tells himself about riding his bike to Vermont to see his father gives him hope, and this hope gives him a purpose to his life. Adam, as well as other people, will mislead themselves to give them hope, which is an important message that the author wanted to illustrate.

In San Francisco they get on a trans-American train to New York, encountering a number of obstacles along the way: a massive herd of bison crossing the tracks, a failing suspension bridge, and most disastrously, the train is attacked and overcome by Sioux warriors. After heroically uncoupling the locomotive from the carriages, Passepartout is kidnapped