Maltese Falcon Essay

It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities. This is evident in Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, which reiterates the story of Jeannette who is raised within a family that is both deeply dysfunctional and distinctively vibrant. Jeannette is faced with numerous barriers throughout her life. Despite the many obstacles set forth by her parents during her childhood, Jeannette develops into a successful adult later in life. One of these obstacles is the lack of a stable home base moulds her into the woman she grows up to be. Throughout her life, Jeannette must cope with the carelessness of her

Women have different personalities and motivations, and they form relationships with men for many different reasons. Some of these reasons include love, money, and even lust and manipulation. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett is a novel about Sam Spade, who is a huge figure of the hard-boiled detective genre. Sam Spade goes on a quest to find a valuable falcon, solve murders and jump over the obstacle that surround him on a daily basis. The novel is also about the three women who surround Spade during his quest. The names of these women are Iva Archer, Effie Perine, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and they all have different roles in Sam Spade’s life. In The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, Brigid O’Shaughnessy plays the role of femme fatale, Iva Archer plays the role of Spade’s unfortunate future, and Effie Perine plays the role of Spade’s right-hand woman.

The character helps understand the theme in the story, that individuality must be treasured in our society, because it shows what the emotional and physical links to the society in the book, as well as the mental states and feelings influencing the text.

A. Jeannette Walls, in her memoir The Glass Castle, demonstrates Erikson’s eight stages of development. Through the carefully recounted stories of her childhood and adolescence, we are able to trace her development from one stage to the next. While Walls struggles through some of the early developmental stages, she inevitably succeeds and has positive outcomes through adulthood. The memoir itself is not only the proof that she is successful and productive in middle adulthood, but the memoir may also have been part of her healing process. Writing is often a release and in writing her memoir and remembering her history, she may have been able to come to terms with her sad past. The memoir embodies both the proof

Choose a character out of the novel; describe the characters personality and placement in the novel.

According to the definition of the Moral Compass text, moral compass is the reflective, international adoption of values and behaviors as a framework for realizing the good in oneself, in others, and in the social and material environment. My own moral compass is constructed mainly by my parents and the eastern social values and principles of relationships, which are largely influenced by the thoughts and ideas of Buddhism, Taoism and the Confucianism. Among them, Confucianism affects my country’s social values and furthermore my parents and my moral compass the most. In the contrast of Western culture, Confucianism puts a huge emphasis on the relationships between individuals in family, school,

In the story “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding, he shows how the boys lost all innocence and civilization. The boys went from having innocent child minds to taking lives of other people, acting savage, and losing all civilization due to problems on the island. The boys had forgotten where they came from and became savage in order to survive; it was the need of survival that caused the loss of innocence among the boys.

     Of Mice and Men was written during a period of racism. In the 1960's it was important for everyone to get along with eachother because not everyone was equal. George and Lennie showed a great part in friendship throught the whole book. At the ranch in Selinas mostly everyone showed friendship in some way. Friendship was a great factor when the book was published because of all the racism going on at the time.

Author Thomas Foster thoroughly examines the overall concept of characters in his book “How to Read Literature Like a Professor.” He discusses round and flat character and how this impacts the eventual outcome of the characters, themselves. Although all characters are vital and add their own value to the plot, it just so happens that certain characters are more significant than others. This results in the more minor character suffering more hardships and in many cases dying in the story. This part of Foster’s book brought up many similarities to the novel “The Book Thief.”

On the other hand, Sam Spade’s tough exterior shows no sign of unequal treatment based on gender. He treats women with the same petty attitude as he treats men: “The hell it is, Miss O’ Shaughnessy, that a couple of murders… coming together like this get everybody stirred up, make police think they can go the limit, make everybody hard to handle and expensive” (Hammett 33). This quotation shows his lack of respect for Brigid who recently lied to him. He is mean and relentless in his pursuit for the truth even when interrogating women. It is not until he falls in love with Brigid that his tough exterior is broken down: “Spade combed [Brigid’s] hair back from her face with his fingers and said: ‘I’m sorry, angel. I thought you’d sleep through it” (Hammett 92). Symbolically, this quotation signifies the breakdown of Spade’s exterior to show his sincere personality. In the end, Spade’s high morals is revealed when he turns Brigid in for killing Mr. Archer at the beginning of the book: “At one point in the scene, Spade tells her that if she gets a break,

Dashiell Hammett who worked for a detective agency, wrote the novel The Maltese Falcon in 1929. In this novel the protagonist is a fictional character that Hammett created and named Sam Spade. Sam is a private detective hired by another character in the novel named Brigid O' Shaughnessy. Being a detective comes with many job responsibilities and being a private detective becomes even more complicated. In Hammett's novel there are many conflicts throughout his writing. Most conflicts have to do with Spade in some form considering he is the detective and also the protagonist. Are the conflicts in the story relating to Spade within himself; man versus self, or caused by another character; man versus man?

Hard-boiled detective fiction sets the scene for a cold and harsh reality. Dashiell Hammett’s, “The Girl with The Silver Eyes” is no exception to this rule. In this short story Hammett paints a picture of a brutally realistic urban center filled with characters that not many people would want to call friends. The realistic qualities of Hammett’s story are drawn from his own life’s experience working as a Pinkerton detective. The detective in “The Girl With The Silver Eyes” works for the Continental Detective Agency and is, therefore, known simply as the Continental Op. In the beginning of the story the Op professes, “a detective, if he is wise, takes pains to make and keep as many friends as possible among transfer company, express

In traditional hard-boiled American detective fiction there are many themes that seem to transcend all novels. One of those themes is the concept of power and the role in which it plays in the interaction and development of characters. More specifically, the role of women within the novels can be scrutinized to better understand the power they hold over the other characters, their own lives and the direction of the story. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon exemplifies the varying ways in which female characters attempt to obtain and utilize power in hopes of influencing, manipulating and succeeding.

“The Gutting of Couffignal” is a detective fiction short story written by Dashiell Hammett that focuses on the mystery surrounding the attack on the town of Couffignal by an unknown gang, and more specifically, the robberies and murders that ensue. Hammett’s story is classified as hard-boiled fiction, which Encyclopaedia Britannica defines as a “tough, unsentimental style of American crime writing” (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica). Due to its hard-boiled nature, “The Gutting of Couffignal” mainly focuses on the issue of large-scale crime in the city. However, throughout the story, Hammett uses gender stereotyping of both the protagonist and the antagonist by the readers

How does one define happiness? For many people, this question makes people think what exactly it means to “be happy.” Many philosophers have different views on the definition of “happiness,” but one that strikes several scholars is Aristotle’s view on happiness. Aristotle believes that happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with perfect virtue. This stems to another question, what is virtue? There are two types of virtues; intellectual and moral. Intellectual virtues engage in your mental capacity and moral virtues are the balance or imbalance of the morality of a moral decision. To achieve perfect virtue, moral virtue needs to have a balance, in which a feeling of emotion is rationale, with not too much or too little of that emotion (Aristotle, 11). Aristotle’s view of moral virtue is evident in several novels and films, but more noticeable in the classic film The Wizard of Oz. In the film, The Wizard of Oz, many characters experience feelings of emotion where they have too much, too little, and balanced feeling of emotion. All in all, several characters in the film The Wizard of Oz apply different feelings of an emotion, such as confidence, compassion, and courage throughout the story, resulting in showing Aristotle’s view of moral virtue as a plausible theory of a path to happiness.