Theme Of The Last Rung On The Lalter

German-Canadian Eckhart Tolle once said, “Where there is anger there is always pain underneath.” Such a statement is hardly profound, but perhaps it is the key to understanding the narrator’s motivation behind killing his loved one in Carol Ann Duffy’s “Human Interest.” In the poem, an unnamed narrator speaks to the reader from his prison cell, where he is carrying a fifteen-year minimum sentence at for killing his cheating girlfriend. Throughout the short four-stanza poem, he takes us the reader through the how and the why behind the crime, but the most compelling part of “Human Interest” lies in its conclusion, where the narrator completely abandons all indications of anger to reveal raw grief, pain, and perhaps regret: “When I think about her now, I near choke with / with grief” (Duffy 12-13).

Guilt is a helpful trait that makes people less likely to make bad decisions and fix those that have been made.

People who do not like taking responsibility for their actions or because they fear the consequences of them, often blame others to feel relief and better about themselves. Once blame is put on someone else, guilt does not feel as powerful or harmful and this is how Brooks’ main character’s guilt after multiple abortions helps us comprehend Hemingway’s couple on his short story when hesitating on making the decision of an abortion. Both works create a similar idea when it comes to guilt. For instance, in Brooks’ poem, the mother

Sin can greatly affect people’s lives. Many of them will feel guilty after committing it. Depending on the seriousness, guilt can lead to many things like small things such as acting strange and looking like they are hiding something to deterioration of one’s health, they will look sick, their relationship with people will become strain, and even become paranoid. There have been many works of fiction that deal with this as a primary or secondary theme. There is a book in particular that deals with guilt as one of the most important themes, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Conclusively, this autobiography displays the strength of a man who was put through the mill and escaped in a most noble way. He had no vengeance in his soul. He was able to recover and return to his life, not without scars, of course, but back nonetheless. This taught me that many unpleasant things may happen in my lifetime, but that I need to push through it and not let tragedy or other people’s immorality alter who I

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud equates the unconscious sense of guilt with the unconscious need for punishment when it is evaded. The discontent in society arises through the ability to defend against guilt, but when guilt can be confronted and borne then civilization will truly be happy. In most cases, “the sense of guilt makes itself noisily heard in consciousness,” (Carveth, 2001) and the only way to alleviate this fault is through punishment, by helping others. In Great Expectations, characters face moral dilemmas and shame and must determine how to deal with it. Through the use of situations and characters, Dickens conveys that the only justice system is the human conscience.

By employing a haughty, callous tone and through her diction, Krauss characterizes the narrator as an insensitive individual who takes shelter in a cold professional role in order to shield herself from blame. Words like prominent, published, and celebrated establish the portrayal of the narrator as a successful author (Krauss 182). They also suggest an arrogant personality. When she writes, she is brutal, with no care for others’ emotions. Her only care is further success. Only a year after her father’s death, she writes about the intense shame a dignified man experiences with loss of bodily control. The narrator unsparingly uses such unembellished, detailing words as abandoned, humiliations, defecated, torturous, shame, illness, suffering,

History ingrains itself in the modern world. From the first to last breath people take, they create the history of themselves, along with the history of their ancestors and culture. Gordon Sheppard’s biography, HA! A Self-Murder Mystery, about the infamous Quebec author, Hubert Aquin, and Amy Zhang’s novel, Falling Into Place, about a fictional Liz Emerson, contain the theme of exploring seemingly-inconsequential past events to demonstrate how quickly a person’s past spirals out of their control. The two narrators, Gordon Sheppard and Liz’s imaginary friend, reflect on various relationships and memories their respective characters experience to gain a deeper understanding of the emotional state the protagonists are in at the time of their suicides.

Sometimes in life, things happen to us that leave scars we try to wash away. So, each of us build walls to protect ourselves from the hurt, the pain but what happens once those walls are torn down? Toni Morrison, in her Novel, Beloved, shows readers what happens to open wounds once they are exposed. As the story unfolds we learn of a girl name Beloved, killed as a child by her mother,sethe, who believed to had been keeping her daughter safe from the horrors of slavery. Albeit when the child is resurrected the guilt that she managed to keep at bay is reborn. Nevertheless , beloved doesn’t just reopen the wounds of her mother’s past but everyone that lives in 124. Learning from Beloved that repressed thoughts don’t free us, but instead entrap us in our minds until we lose ourselves. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Beloved functions primarily not as a three dimensional character but as a physical embodiment of the main characters “rememory”: their past, suffering, and

Almost all humans being have the presence of guilt inside of them, whether people show it or not, it is there. Guilt can be so strong, it might even be able to defeat one’s will or word. Insecurity drives us to letting others influence us and take charge of making decisions for us to not face the consequences alone and have someone to put responsibility on to reproach them if we ever feel guiltiness. As the Roman playwright, Plautus, who once averred, “Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt” (Brainy). Plautus insinuates that a man who is fully aware of his wrong doings is tortured with regret and guilt. This idea can be applied to “The Mother,” an anti-abortion poem by Gwendolyn Brooks in which she expresses the emotional outpour of guilt by a mother who has aborted one or more times. With the same vision, Ernest Hemingway narrates the conversation of an American man and a woman at a Spanish train station while waiting for a train to Madrid, in his short story, “Hills Like White Elephants.” Here, both individuals discuss the decision of an abortion, constantly asking one another to make the final verdict to liberate themselves from any culpability or responsibility. Brook and Hemingway portray the guilt people can feel before or after making decisions. Indeed, both authors tell and seem fully aware of their character’s emotions that anyone would think they are actually sharing anecdotes instead of other people’s experiences. Through the use of a strong sense of guilt in Brooks’ poem “The Mother,” the reader is better able to understand the trepidation the couple faces in taking responsibility for a difficult decision of an abortion in Hemingway’s, “Hills Like White Elephants.”

A mans haunted at the lost of his wife wrestling between guilt and grief his life tacks a tremendous turn fore the worst- Guilt

Guilt is feeling anger, disappointment and/or shame to an individual for something they have done accidentally or purposely. One´s conscience haunts and eat them from inside out for the rest of their lives. Stefan Zweig, a novelist and a journalist, once said that ¨no guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.” This quote reflects to two short stories, ¨The Secret¨ and ¨To Kill A Child¨ where its characters made wrong choices that ends up to tragedy they would never be able to forget for it is in their guilty conscience. Trying to forget and not listen to an individual’s conscience is expressed differently regarding each work’s conflict and point of view, yet presented similarly regarding the delivery of the story’s purpose.

Jen sympathised. Guilt and fear were like a succubus that rode on your back all day, whispering in your ear, and crouched on your chest at night, goading you until you relinquished all thought of sleep. It had taken her years and the support of her friends to shake it off, and now she had Gary on her side. She doubted Mrs Laurence had told her husband about her father. He had the air of entitlement that came from a solid middleclass background and having an established place in the world.

William Maxwell’s novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, centers around guilt. In the novel an unnamed narrator uses a fictitious account of a murder-suicide to come to terms with the guilt he feels over a seemingly unimportant moment in his life: ignoring his friend, Cletus Smith, in a corridor after Cletus’ father commits a murder-suicide. This moment tears him to pieces well into old age. by ignoring Cleatus, he put him in the same circumstance that he is in: alone to deal with hardship. The Narrator feels alone in dealing with his mother’s death and father remarrying, and, by not acknowledging Cleatus, he left Cletus alone to deal with his mother’s infidelity and father’s murder-suicide. The fictional story that dominates the second half of the novel is used to help the narrator deal with this guilt.

Many times when discussing guilt when it relates to grief people have been known to “lose themselves”, meaning that they act differently than how they have in the past when they feel guilty. In Ava Dellaria’s book “Love Letters to the Dead,” Laurel moves schools after her sister dies and has trouble fitting in. However, she eventually makes friends and even dates an older boy named Sky who helps her discover who she is after the death of her sister. The theme of this novel is that guilt, especially survivor’s guilt, affects one’s identity.