The Lovely Bones and Beloved Essay

“Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.” -Alice Sebold. Alice Sebold the author of Lovely Bones creates a story of depression, guilt, and grief with the murder of Susie Salmons. In Lovely Bones the death of Susie affects all those close to her, like her mother, her father and her classmates. Her father grieves with despair as the murderer has yet to be caught. Her mother can not handle her disappearance and finds unnerving ways to cope. Susie’s classmates, Ruth and Ray both find ways to cope with each other and through other connections with Susie. A death of a loved young one is one no one is ever ready for. The grief starts and people find ways to feel guilty. If no mental aid is present the associates will

Tim O’Brien grew up in a place where if you were to look in the dictionary for the word “boring” you might find it. O’Brien was a World War 2 veteran and of an elementary-school teacher where he served as a WAVE. Although he has wrote many other books, he is primarily known for “If I die”, “Going after Cacciato”, and “The Things they carried”. The latter book opens with “The Things They Carried” and closes with The Lives of the Dead. The Lives of the Dead is a short novel about young Tim and his older self, Timmy, and his overall experience of coping with death. The Lives of the Dead shows the concept that the dead lives on by remembrance and telling stories.

In the novel Beloved, Toni Morrison delves into not only her characters' painful pasts, but also the painful past of the injustice of slavery. Few authors can invoke the heart-wrenching imagery and feelings that Toni Morrison can in her novels, and her novel Beloved is a prime example of this. Toni Morrison writes in such a way that her readers, along with her characters, find themselves tangled and struggling in a web of history, pain, truth, suffering, and the past. While many of Toni Morrison's novels deal with aspects of her characters' past lives and their struggles with how to embrace or reject their memories, Beloved is a novel in which the past plays an exceptionally important role. Most often, it is Beloved's

Play character, Emily Webb, as a ghost-seeing her living father, contributes a meaningful reflection to discuss, as she says, “I never realized before how troubled and how...how in the dark live persons are” (57). In this world of Emily’s, the dead can visit memories, and look on only from the grave’s perspective at the present, where she pities the living. Those alive never truly know what comes of the dead, and thus mourn and churn at the sight of the unknown, as she correctly states. As death will always stay the same in the past as the future, this ignorance of death provides a similarity. Similarly, life’s fragility, flaws too, hold the same constancy of death; as Wilder’s orchestrations of his characters emphasize both the rapidity at which life can seize, and how blind the living pass through it.

Controlling the movements of the short stories, death is a regnant theme in D.H. Lawrence’s “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” and Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party.” Death brings forth consciousness and it excites the need for an epiphany within the protagonists. To a lesser extent, death creates tremors in the worlds of the antagonists. Death furthermore makes the indifferences of the secondary characters more pronounced. Affecting the lives of the protagonists, the antagonists, and the secondary characters of these two short stories, death plays an integral role in the themes of these works.

The characters in both stories experience important, but hard to deal with rites of passages. For example, we see in October Sky how O’dell has to deal with his abusive step dad. In The Afterlife we read how Robert all his life has had to deal with not having a home to live in because his parents left him. These are all important because they can affect the characters later on in there life. Making them act or think a certain way about the type of situations they are going through or went through. The purpose of this essay is to explain the similarities and differences between two texts. The two texts, The Afterlife and October Sky, are similar in some ways, but very different in other ways.

Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson are two well established gothic authors who illustrate parallel themes of death throughout their works. Both writers share a common interest in their writing as death, loss, pain and doubt is a reoccurring theme within most of their works. This essay aims to explore the manner in which both Poe and Dickinson address the subject of death.

Death dominates the novel ‘Burial Rites’ written by Hannah Kent. ‘They said I must die’ in the opening pages of the novel emphasizes the importance of death, and how it motivates characters thoughts. It is through the harsh Icelandic environment we gather how death shapes the fate of the novel. The constant use of symbolism, through ravens in which symbolise darkness, destruction and death shows us the reality of death in the novel. The constant changing of relationships are seen as a positive to Agnes as she has no future with anyone due to the fate that is going to be served to her.

In Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” and in D.H. Lawrence’s “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” two women were in a situation where death was literally at their feet. In “The Garden Party,” Laura finds herself contemplating the dead body of Mr. Scott, a man of lower class who lived at the bottom of the hill from her house. In “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” Elizabeth finds herself contemplating the dead body of her husband, Walter. Although the relationships these women shared with the dead men were completely opposite, they both had striking similarities in the ways that they handled the situation. Both women ignored the feelings of the families of the deceased, failed to refer to the deceased by name, felt shame in the

Memory is cruel. It can take you back to the happiest day of your life, your wedding perhaps, and you can remember every detail vividly. Or it can chain you, anchor you, and not let you move on with your life, as many people who have suffered horrific emotional experiences would understand. In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, the characters are haunted by the memories of their past. A former slave, Sethe has learned to cope with the atrocities of her past, that is, until Paul D comes and unearths some of her emotional trauma.

Can death ever be stopped? In the case of ill-fated siblings, Lord and Lady Usher, the answer reveals itself. The internal conflict of the characters shows the battle between man and death. The relationship parallels a sister-like connection with humans and death. This whole situation translates a frightening tale onto the reader who has an implied personal presence in the story. “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe uncovers through the use of characterization, symbolism, and point of view that death can never be stopped, no matter how long it is repressed.

Many authors fixate on a theme through much of their writing. Of course, if one is at all prolific, they have to write based on more than one, but, often, it seems that writers have a particular bent that controls them. A good example is Edgar Allen Poe who was shaped by misery and self-loathing. His life reflected that as much as his writing, and he seemed to believe that it was his lot to find some unrighteous ending. Another writer who was consumed by a particular phantom was Jack London. Among the many writers who would eventually commit suicide, London always held death at bay just by the slimmest of margins. His stories seemed to be about adventure and winning the struggle against the wilderness, but in the background the reaper was always present. Stephen Crane was another that battled death in his writing because he seemed to want to know how he would handle it. This paper compares the writings of Jack London and Stephen Crane as they explore the subject of mortality.

Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe were both nineteenth century gothic poets known for their lifelong fascination with the theme of mortality, but their style and approach to writing could not be more contrary. Although death is inevitable, the idea of it was a painful subject for many in this particular day in age; death and illness was much more common. These two poets not only spoke about death in the majority of their literature, but they were obsessed. Poe and Dickenson were from around the same time period and region, and the way they spoke about mortality had different effects in their communities. Dickenson’s free-flowing style in her writings about death and nature was elegant and subtle, while Poe wrote articulate and flamboyant tales of horror and insanity. These poets may have had similar interests, but the way society received their work was completely different.

I contend that, while a number of differences between “Loving the Dead” and "Mud” are fairly obvious, the similarities are concealed throughout the two. It is perceptible that the two narrators feel completely different about their relatives from the first glance, but it is noticeable that they may actually feel the same. Another differentiation is how the two dealt with their losses and what their families taught them. A resemblance would be the memories their relations gave them to hold on to and how their relatives were when living.

Death is inevitable. Sylvia Plath, author of 1962 confessional poem, ‘Lady Lazarus’ and Markus Zusak author of 2005 historical fiction novel, ‘The Book Thief’ explore the idea that a range influences ultimately determine a person’s final destiny. Zusak and Plath discuss this common idea by utilising various literary techniques complementing the conventions of their respective text types. Both authors highlight a range of key ideas such as, the idea that patriarchal standards within society impact the protagonist’s fate, the social influence relationships have on individuals and the effect this has on their fate and the inevitable role death plays and the controlling influence death has on life within their respective pieces.