The Respectable and Noble Actions of Gimpel Illustrated in Singer's "Gimpel the Fool"

Throughout this story, Sir Gawain has shown his great personality, and his commitment to being a true knight. He proved that he was humble, self-disciplined, truthful, and had integrity. Gawain woke up one morning to find that the host's wife had crept in the room, and sat on his bed. She jokes that she had snuck in and captured him. Gawain plays along, until the wife tries to talk him into engaging sexually. Gawain continuously denies her requests politely. The Wife says that she would have married him instead if she could have. Sir Gawain was humble and expresses that her husband is a better man. she finally gives up, but requests a kiss. She continues this for the next two days, yet Gawain contains himself, and keeps his mind and body pure,

“I would kill her and teach them reality. Grendel the truth-teacher, phantasm-tester! It was what I would be from this day forward-my commitment, my character as long as I lived-and nothing alive or dead could change my mind! I changed my mind. It would be meaningless, killing her.” (pg 110)

Elie Wiesel has given the listener a wonderful opportunity to feel the intense movement of his speech, “The Perils of Indifference”. His speech is centered around the need for vigilance in the face of evil. Throughout this speech, with which he moved so many, he shared his experience with being sent to Buchenwald, a concentration camp, the treacherous conditions in which they were living, and the way that indifference has separated human beings. He explained, that through anger and hatred a great poem or symphony can be written, because “One does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses.” (Wiesel, 1999/16, p. 78). The three strategies that will be explored throughout this analysis are ethos, logos, and pathos.

John Gardner’s Grendel is the retelling of the heroic epic poem Beowulf; however, the viewpoint has shifted. Grendel is told from the viewpoint of one of Beowulf’s antagonists and the titular character of Gardner’s work—Grendel. In Grendel, Gardner humanizes Grendel by emphasizing parallels between Grendel’s life and human life. Through Gardner’s reflection of human feelings, human development, and human flaws in Grendel, this seemingly antagonistic, monstrous character becomes understood and made “human.”

Describe: Liesel and her best friend, Rudy Steiner, has been walking through town when a woman in a window above them looks to the streets and announces, “Die Juden;” The Jews. This is when a vast amount of Jewish prisoners begins to march their way down Munich Street while Nazi soldiers barked orders at them. To everyone, especially Liesel (who had a Jewish person living in her basement), this was the furthest thing from a pleasant sight. And apparently, Hans Hubermann had enough of this, as if being controlled by God himself, Hans walked over and offered a particularly weak Jew a piece of bread out of pure sympathy, only to be beaten by overlooking Nazis.

In Elie Wiesel’s,“The Perils of Indifference” , he aims a tone of guilt towards the audience by using diction, imagery, and details. Elie uses repetition and uses words that greatly impact mood upon the audience to specify the tone. The words are symbolic towards the tone of guilt. The author also displays the use of facts to indicate his point of view.

The protagonist holds to his immature beliefs that by looking, acting and maintaining a false façade as a “dangerous character” (Boyle,114) it would bestow on him an the badness he desires.

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive...." Joseph Campbell made this comment on the search for meaning common to every man's life. His statement implies that what we seem bent on finding is that higher spark for which we would all be willing to live or die; we look for some key equation through which we might tie all of the experiences of our life and feel the satisfaction of action toward a goal, rather than the emptiness which sometimes consumes the activities of our existence. He states, however, that we will never find some great

Violence and war is notable throughout history. However, it is lazy to say that this proves humans are naturally violent. Rather than using nature as an excuse for those who chose to act violently it’s important we recognize that we have a choice to decide how we act. In Howard Zinn’s, “Violence and Human Nature” He shows that violence is not an instinct but that the environment in which they live in provokes them to act violently or peacefully depending on their choice (43). In City of God, a film concentrating on the gangs of Rio de Janeiro during the 1960’s to the 1980’s, specifically the township of Cidade de Deus, we are introduced to various characters who all make different choices under different motivations. Rocket, the little brother to a member of the Tender Trio, who are essentially the Robin Hood’s of the City of God, to act non-violently despite his environment and the influences around him.

In “Guigemar”, the son of Hoel, is a noble man immune to the feelings of love, basically having no romantic interests in the women who come his way. His remaining indifference continues until he wounds a doe, who places a curse on him after he, himself is injured by his own hand. The curse placed upon a man who shows indifference to love causes Guigemar to be quite pessimistic that any woman could love him enough to not only heal him, but suffer for him as well. However, he seeks refuge aboard a ship at the harbor to rest which leads him to the castle of an aged lord and his wife, who fled from the room she was locked inside within the castle. Discovering the nearly dead Guigemar, the lady vows to nurse him back to health with the help of her female companion, but it is under her care that Guigemar is struck with love, overwhelmed with his newly found emotions towards the woman who has his heart. The two lovebirds, confess their feelings and embrace in their love until they are

The symbolism of the girdle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight changes and grows as the poem progresses, adding Gawain's honor and sin to seemingly separate ideas of an untamed nature related to the otherworld and animal instincts. Piotr Sadowski, in his The Knight on His Quest: Symbolic Patterns of Transition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, calls the girdle a symbol of “complex moral truth” that the other knights of the Round Table fail to learn from, as Gawain does. While I agree that the girdle's most important function is the message it conveys about morality as it pertains to courtly behavior, I argue that the moral ideal the girdle sets is not higher than the knights achieve, but rather is balanced between humanity and the

Gimpel avoids pain not only from the townspeople, but from his wife as well. His wife, Elka, is a very promiscuous woman by nature and she chooses to be unfaithful to Gimpel. However again, Gimpel chooses to evade the truth of the matter to keep from being hurt. One way he [Gimpel] shows the reader how he avoids emotional pain is when he caught Elka in bed with another man. At first, he could not accept what his wife was doing to their marriage and his reputation. However as the pain of being alone increased each day, Gimpel decides to forget the entire incident and forces himself to lie about what he saw. Gimpel says to himself, “Hallucinations do happen. And if that’s so, I’m doing her [his wife] an injustice,” proving that he twists the truth into something that he can accept (416). Gimpel’s mind works in a way that he allows himself to think that he is suffering from a kind of dementia to avoid the painful truth regarding his wife. He also avoids the embarrassment and humiliation of recognizing that the children are not his. Elka had birthed six children, none of which had been fathered by Gimpel. Gimpel knows that the children are

First, our protagonist Candide and his valet Cacambo serve as appropriate examples: a naive optimist and a worldly pragmatist. When Candide finds the monkey lovers appalling and unusual, Cacambo does not “see anything odd about their passion” (Voltaire 49). Exposed by the cruelties of the real world, Cacambo’s sharp wits allow him to take control of a situation and suffer less adversities than other characters. Inexperienced and innocent, Candide can only think one dimensionally; instead of thinking and acting for himself, Candide surrounds himself with people who do the decision making for him. Only because of the wits and decisions of Cacambo, Old Woman, and Martin is he able to survive until the end of the novel. Voltaire contrasts Cacambo’s wisdom with Candide’s

Everyone, at one point in their life, will willingly use trickery to manipulate a person, for whatever reason, to get what they want. Considering this, there is no surprise that in “Old Milon” the main character, Milon, is considered to be a cunning person. Even though Father Milon is well known as being vengeful because of his actions, his vengefulness makes him become the cunning person he is. Throughout the story the author, Guy De Maupassant, shows the cunning Milon through his actions and decisions. While being humble and timid towards the Prussians, Old Milon gets their trust and avoids any trouble for a while.

Also, the characters throughout the story feel like Thumbelina needs a man to complete her and take care of her. One example of this, is when the mouse tells her she must marry the mole, because no one else will want someone as tiny as her. The mouse says, ‘’you have to marry the mole, who else will you marry’’? This quote explains that people are trying to convince Thumbelina that if she doesn’t marry this mole, she won’t find anyone to love her. Also, another example of this is at the beginning of the story when she gets kidnapped by the toad so she will marry the son. The toad explains to her that her son needs someone like her to cook and clean. This portrays to women that you must marry someone because you are weak and you are only good for cooking and cleaning. In the end it shows girls that without a prince to have "happily ever after" with, you do not have much hope at all.