'Traveling Through The Dark' By William Stafford

The quote "Character is what you are in the dark" - Dwight Lyman Moody has a few meanings. Mostly it means that you're different when you're alone. When you're around people they are influences of some sort. If you get into a situation when you're with people you might react differently than if you were alone, resulting in a different outcome. A lot of the time people aren't their true self around friends, or family, or whoever it may be for many reasons. A big reason is they don't want to be judged. Maybe they wanna look "cool" or get popular for something. Maybe they think they'll be looked at differently for being who they truly are. So basically fear of what others think keeps us from being who we really are. Fear can make us act different,

Once he circled around to end his nightly walk, “ he was within a block of his destination when the lone car turned a corner quite suddenly” then after the lone car “ flashed a fierce white cone of light upon him” (1). This event with Mr. Mead and the the lone car foreshadows that something is about to occur while he was on his way home from his routinely moonlit walk. After a conversation with the lone car,“ he passed the front window of the car he looked in. As he expected, there was no one in the front seat” (2). As the car started to drive down the dark streets only illuminated by the moon, Mr. Mead exclaimed “ that's my house, the car moved down the empty riverbed streets” (2). This foreshadows that even though he said that they passed his house, the self driving police vehicle continued to go down the street foreshadowing that Leonard Mead will not return home. This use of foreshadowing allows the audience to examine and reflect on how how technology has impacted this certain futuristic society with a great magnitude that Mr. Leonard Mead is seen as a completely different person for only being himself.

Darkness at Noon, written by British novelist Arthur Koestler in 1940, is a criticism of Stalinism and the methods used by the Communist Party in the USSR. The novel was set in 1938 during the Stalinist Great Purge and Moscow show trials. Even though the story depicts actual occurrences, it does not specifically name either Russia or the USSR, but the characters do have Russian names while other generic terms are used to depict individuals and associations. For instance, the Soviet government is alluded to as "the Party" and Nazi Germany is alluded to as "the Dictatorship." Joseph Stalin, a terrorizing dictator, is represented by "Number One." The novel is a strong and moving picture of a Communist revolutionary caught up in the terror

Most children are not very fond of reading books in school. I was one of those children until I read a novel called, “The Other Side of Dark” written by Joan Lowery Nixon in the 4th grade. My school had held a book fair during the week of open house. As a child, all children want the toys and games they had at the book fair, not bothering to even glance at the books. My mother told me to look for a book that was not only easy for me to read but something that I would enjoy. I walked around our petite library, which was where the book fair was being held, and scanned the various novels that were displayed until one caught my eye. I was only 10 years old looking for a book without the knowledge of what types of literature that interested me. As I turned the corner at the end of the library I caught a glimpse of a hardcover novel called “The Other Side of Dark”. On the back of novel I read the synopsis which was about a 13 year-old girl who was shot and put into coma until she was 17 years old waking up to discovering that her family was also murdered by the same person who shot her 4 years ago. I was quickly captivated by this summary on the back of the novel and persuaded to read further. Open house was coming to an end and my family and I headed back to our house in La Mirada, California. One of our homework assignments was to read at least 20 minutes a night to improve our reading skills. We quickly arrived at our home and I

“I’d go on my two bare feet. But when, with my brother’s jack-knife, I had cut me a long limber horse with a good thick knob for a head…The willow knob with the strap jouncing between my thighs was the pommel and yet the poll of my nickering pony’s head,” says the main character. He basks in the glory of his younger years, and longs for a time when he was oblivious to all of the evils of the world. Containing many simple phrases, the structure of the poem brings an airy vibe to the mystical imagery. “My teeth bared as we wheeled and swished through the dust again. I was the horse and the rider, and the leather I slapped to his rump spanked my own behind,” reads the poem. Descriptive verbs allow the reader to see the character’s movements. The reader is able to easily understand that the character is comparing himself to his horse which he becomes one with. The poem is written in a first person point of view in which the character is within and beside

A time of decency and aspiration soon appeared as a time of brutality and outrage. The 1960s were a period of social revolution and turmoil. Through changes in politics, equality and war, many Americans acted as a catalyst for change. John F. Kennedy took office as the first Catholic President of the United States who radiated a symbol of hope. While Martin Luther King Jr. preached notions of change during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The racial divide of blacks and whites were heightened in society. Protests appeared to demand equal rights for women and to end the war in Vietnam. In Rosemary L. Bray’s memoir, Unafraid of the Dark, Bray openly reflected on the life she had growing up in a low class family in Chicago. Bray describes the hardships

Society often fail to understand and see the mental pain that individuals carry throughout their lives. Some people bear its burden, while others suffer greatly because of it, to the point of choosing self-destruction. The narrators from “The Gargoyle” (Davidson) and “Walk to Morning” (Boyden) both experience this pain that ultimately sets them on a course to a deep pit. They survive their near-deaths and later encounter unique life-changing people. As a result, they become better individuals.

Both the poem, “Walking at Night With my Son, James,” by Joe Bruchac, and the excerpt we read from the novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, by Anne Tyler, despite having vast differences, shared a common theme. This theme was that everyone must come to a time in their life where everything changes. This can be scary, but it can allow for people to see the world in a whole new way, and do things that they had never before thought possible. The tone of the poem is nostalgic, as a young boy is coming to the end of his childhood, and becoming an adult. His father watches proudly, but sadly, as he knows that soon his son will be living independently. However, for the time being, the father and son are just spending a nice afternoon together,

Howard Thurman removes the window dressing in the African American experience of segregation in America. Thurman in his book, “The Luminous Darkness” paints an obscure portrait that delved deep into the consciousness of Black men, women and children freshly freed from chattel slavery. Two hundred years of slavery and one hundred years of darkness seeping into each soul perpetuated by an evil explained only through the Word of God. Although this book was published in the 60’s, the stigma segregation continues resonate in the souls of those who remember and perhaps even in the souls of those who do not.

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.

All the light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, chronicles the lives and relationship between Marie and Werner, two children who grew up in France and Germany. The society around them forces discriminatory ideals that cloud their perception of the world, but they find its meaning through their own self-definition. In this, they are both guided by a single radio and the message and legacy that it contains. Throughout the book, the author isolated the two characters, but also created subtle connections between the two. The most important of which would be the radio. It created a bond between the two where they learned from each other’s experiences and struggles. All the Light We Cannot See recreates a new picture of the world by contrasting the two separate journeys taken by Marie- Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig to gain that image, which is guided by the power of a radio and the message it contains, ultimately leading to the meeting of the two characters that officially forms an image of the world where one’s actions are valued more than one’s physical features.

Driving down a narrow mountain road, “Traveling through the dark,” the narrator of the poem encounters a deer. This line might fool the reader into believing the poem has a happy theme however, the first word of the second line reverses this belief. The deer is actually “dead on the edge of the Wilson River Road” (2, 911). The traveler decides to send the deer over the edge of the canyon,

One main way the theme of death is illustrated is through symbolism of the deer, canyon, and river. The deer is a roadblock which must be dealt with before the man can continue on his journey. He cannot simply push death to the side of the road. Here, the deer would rot and fester; instead, as Stafford states in the first stanza, " it is usually best to roll them into the canyon" (line 3). The way to deal with this problem is to discard of it immediately and to not hesitate at all. Literally, this is true for the safety of other motorists. Furthermore, it is necessary to deal properly with this problem so one can continue on their path in life. The canyon, and river at the bottom, therefore come to symbolize the depth of our individual souls; we push problems into our souls, and slowly deal with them. By doing this, our problems and death, may be symbolically washed away.

In William Stafford's "Traveling Through the Dark", there are conflicting themes between birth and death, man and

In a postmodern world it is worth contemplating in what we can put our faith. Does culture, religion, or God merit our trust? Or is this a world of mechanical and biological evolutionary processes void of any meaning and purpose? The Sunset Limited, “a novel in dramatic form,” by Cormac McCarthy, is a dialogue between two persons who approach each other from opposite worlds to answer these questions. Black, a born-again believer and ex-con, and White, a nihilistic college professor, attempt to determine whether belief in God is viable in this world and if life is worth living. Despite Black’s efforts to convince him otherwise, White remains a Depressed Self who denies God’s existence, affirms his view of the world as deranged, and leaves to complete his suicide.