The Weather in San Francisco and Corporal by Richard Brautigan

The overall message in this poem is a drill sergeant educating young soldiers and preparing them for the harsh reality of war. He is not playing ‘Mr. nice guy’, he is being tough and strict to give the soldiers no easy way out.

Everyone dreams of living a happy and fulfilling life. Sometimes, we need a fresh start. In “Mammita’s Garden Cove,” Max daydreamed about a life where he could start over in Canada. He thought hard about his life in this new place. However, the situation didn’t unfold like he wanted. Cyril Dabydeen uses literary techniques such as diction, imagery, and irony to express Max’s intricate attitude towards his new home in Canada, and his old home on the island.

Ernest Miller Hemingway is known for his unique style and theories of writing, especially the iceberg theory. In the Death of the Afternoon, Hemingway says that “The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.” (92) Simple words, vivid images, rich emotions and deep thoughts are the four basic elements of the iceberg theory. Talk about how these stories illustrate four elements of theory. In both short stories, Hemingway describes scenery and characters with simple words directly to give readers a vivid image. Under this sketch, readers can know characters’ emotion and get the theme through their imagination and analysis.

“I do what I can for them, but it is not enough… though their bandages unravel… believe me I love them…” establishes conflict and insight on the complex relationship between the novelist and the characters in the novel “Marching Through a Novel” by John Updike. Updike shows the complexity of being a novelist and creating characters through personification and metaphors.

Do readers believe that any one person can turn their life into something beautiful, even when all they have seen in their life is ugly? Based on this non-fiction poem the narrator finally realized his life wasn’t as bad as it could be. In Baca’s “Cloudy day,” readers find a speaker very attuned to the outer world while being incarcerated. Born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was raised first by his grandmother and later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age 13, it was after Baca was sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison that he began to turn his life around: Jimmy learned to read and write and unearthed a voracious passion for poetry.

Smith, Paul. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. 1989. Print.

In the city of Waukegan, Illinois, a pair of expectant figures bore provocation for the latest addition to their miniscule family of two. Thus, on August 22, 1920, Esther Marie Moberg Bradbury, a Swedish expatriate, delivered an eventual novelist. To provide the necessitated essentials required to support his household, Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, the patriarch of their residence, utilized his capabilities by endeavoring as a lineman for power and telephone utilities. Through his zeal and persistence for his occupation, they were able to make ends meet for several annums and led a simple lifestyle in which Ray Bradbury, their son, developed a strong endearment for all miscellaneous illusory and imaginative. He thoroughly enjoyed the concept of enchantment, which was an attribute that his parents encouraged. Thus, the youth could often be caught perusing adventurous or fantastical compositions of distinct lengths and variety. From a very early point in the duration of his existence, he had adjudicated that he’d achieve immortality through his own generated compositions. He perceived that the heroes he’d comprised in his stories would long persist after his tangible existence had either disseminated or ceased to be in its entirety. In 1934, his new residency became Los Angeles, California where the enterprising, imaginative youth fulfilled his formal schooling and solidified his career as an author. To financially subsidize his individual costs and occupation, he bore the

Please Note: Diction, detail, point of view, organization and syntax are all devices that the author uses to make the tone of the story evident to the reader. Your commentary should

In the short story “ The Swimmer,” John Cheever expresses the idea that Neddy Merrill can lose everything if he denies reality. Cheever achieves this by employing various symbols during Merrill's cross county journey. The main symbols are the weather and seasons. Cheever uses the changing of seasons to distort the character’s sense of time and show the progression of Merrill’s life. In the beginning of the story the setting is described as a midsummer day and by the end of the story, Merrill is able to see the constellations of late autumn, meaning winter is near. The illusion of time allows the reader to understand the extent of Merrill’s state of denial, as his beliefs begin to contradict the reality around him. While Cheever uses the weather to describe how Merrill feels. When it is warm Merrill feels happy and youthful. However, when it becomes colder Merrill begins to feel weak and sad. To emphasize Merrill’s state of denial, Cheever employs the motif of alcohol in “The Swimmer;” the reader notices that when Merrill is presented with a reality that he deems unpleasant, he uses alcohol to enhance his state of denial. Through the critical lens of New Historicism, the reader can infer the author’s purpose for writing “The Swimmer” is to criticize the lifestyles of affluent people in the 1950s and early 1960s. Cheever focuses on the party lifestyle of affluent communities and how the use of alcohol allows them to deny the reality around their current misfortunes.

The interplay of dark and light motifs underlies the narrator’s most recent hardship. On his way home on the subway, the narrator comes across his brother’s name in a newspaper and “stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside” (Baldwin). Riding in the light of the subway car, the author makes the non-suspecting narrator subject to suffering, unguarded by the protective cloak of the outside darkness. Made vulnerable by the exposed light and people surrounding him, the narrator is hit harder by the unexpected news than if he had read it in the darkness of his private room. Under the “swinging lights,” the narrator is not prepared to cope with the troubling news. This emphasizes the importance of light as a symbol for one’s need of camouflage to properly cope with tragedy.

As we examined the essay “Sonny’s Blues” and “The Rich Brother” that may not have a great deal in common, but with more analysis in to the stories it becomes clear that they are similar but still have their own uniqueness. The stories are “The rich brother” which was written by Tobias Wolff is known for short stories or memoir and “Sonny’s Blues” which was written by James Baldwin also an American writer best known for its eloquence or rhetorical force in his writing. Both writers a best known for their famous writing than span for decades.

A narrative is constructed to elicit a particular response from its audience. In the form of a written story, authors use specific narrative strategies to position the ‘ideal reader’ to attain the intended understanding of the meanings in the text. Oliver Sacks’ short story The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is an unusual short story because it does not display conventional plot development; the story does not contain conflict or resolution of conflict. The genre of the story is also difficult to define because it reads as an autobiographical account of an experience Sacks had with a patient while working as a neurologist. Although it is arguable that the narrative is a work of non-fiction, it is nevertheless a representation, distinct

Imagine loving a stranger but knowing you’re unable to be with them, Dana Gioia perfectly shows this in his poem “Summer Storm”. As Gioia’s poem is read, one can conclude that the speaker feels a love towards a stranger and feels the love back for a moment. Unfortunately is unable to be with this person because nothing was pursued. One could conclude that the love is forbidden or our other person is unsure of who they want to be with or who they are. Gioia uses rhyming in his poem to help the readers gain a personal connection to it; he also uses end rhyming in the second and fourth rows of each stanza. Gioia uses enjambment as well, which can be viewed as a run-on sentence used in a poem. He uses tone in his poem, which allows the reader to feel the pain of the speaker as he goes through a heart-wrenching experience, but also experience the feeling of a short relief as the speaker experiences someone having interest in him. When one finishes the poem one can identify that the speaker is also the author.

He wrote this poem based on the Battle of Balaclava because a huge mistake was made by the authoritative figure, Lord Raglen, which caused many deaths. Although the troops knew "some one had blunder'd", they did not question it. He wants to show that even though a person is higher, richer or more powerful than other they can still be vulnerable in making errors. This questions Victorian authority and whether they are making the right decision concerning the lives of British people. Poets in the twentieth century have also taken this argument into account most namely in Siegfried Sassoon's "The General" where their leader is described as "an incompetent swine".

Not everything was as pretty as it seemed, their family had issues that they had to overcome and the fear of loosing the battle away and at home was something that he struggled with on a daily basis when he was young. His mother was left with the entire burden when his father left and it eventually became too much to handle. His mother became an alcoholic and he and his family suffered tremendously from his mother’s sickness. He felt like if he had let his father down when he came home to find this out. Living with all females and putting up with them was too much for him that he decided to convince his father to send him to military school. This was the best thing that happened to him, because from here on he lived an Army world.