Summary Of The Reverse Dive By Jessamyn Hope

In the fall of 2012, my mother almost succumbed to her illness. I had just begun my freshman year of high school midst angry conversations between my parents and the threat of separation. It would seem as if they bickered about the most irrelevant things, almost as if they had no other reason to fight other than the fight itself. Those moments were excruciatingly lonely, my father worked until the dead of night and my mother would come home exhausted from treatment. I now know that there was no one who felt more unvalued than my mother. I wish I had the ability to iron away this blunder that destiny had fabricated, however foolish this desire is.

“Hurry up, guys,” I yelled to my sister and mother. “Y’all are going to make me late!” It was October 4th, the night of the homecoming football game. The game started in fifteen minutes and we hadn’t even left the house yet. The frustration I had toward them kept growing inside me until I decided to leave without them and make them drive separately. I jumped in my car and quickly headed to the game despite the pouring rain. Certain rash decisions that are made throughout life can never be forgotten because they make such a huge impact in our lives. Sometimes something that seems horrible at first, may benefit you in the long run of life. The decision I made that night, turned out to be the one that I will remember forever.

A significant event in one's life forces a person to reevaluate their current situation and decide how they will adapt to a new situation, or cause them to look back on the steps they took to get into that situation. In life as well as in the literature Crosswalk In The Rain, and THE TENT DELIVERY WOMAN’S RIDE, people have to adapt to what is happening in their lives, despite conditions they may have been through in the past. In life at some point there will be crossroads that a person must cross, they can either look back at what they have done to end up in that position or they can look forward and see what they must do to continue moving forward.

Tim Winton’s short story, ‘The Water Was Dark and it Went Forever Down’, depicts a nameless, adolescent girl who is battling the voices inside her head along with the powerful punishments at the hands of her inebriated mother. The key concerns of life and death are portrayed through the girl’s viewpoint as she compares her life with her sad, depressed mother. Anonymous as she is, the girl constantly makes an attempt to escape the outbursts, that come as a result to her mother’s drinking, by submerging herself into the water. An extended metaphor is used when expressing the girl as a machine and her will to continue surviving in her sombre life.

The Past, an ever growing pool of time, is always biting at the heels of a person. It reminds him of what they have done wrong, done right, or when he did nothing. For most people, recalling the past leads to loose ends and blanks where memories should be. No matter how much a person may want to return to the past, it is not possible. It is lost forever. These forgotten moment lead to uncertainties and confusion in the present, and chaos in the future. Forgetting the past leads to spirals, spinning downwards as people look to what they have lost. They retrace their steps hoping to find a sliver of who they are and what may become of them. In the poem, Itinerary, Eamon Grennan shows how an individual searches through his past, but can never return to it. Through the poem and with a personal experience I will explain how individuals deal with uncertainties in their pasts.

Thomas Hardy, a famous novelist once said, “Fear is the mother of foresight”. This quotation may be interpreted in many different ways, one being that by experiencing fear, an individual begins to develop an ability to predict possible outcomes of their decisions. In Kari Strutt’s short story “Touching Bottom”, the protagonist decides to overcome her fear of murky waters, an action that results in her ability to foresee her future as being very independent. The main character’s fear affects her decision making process for much of her early life; if not for the interplay between the protagonist’s distressing emotions and inability to see her life as an independent woman, her choices may seem foolish and insignificant. The unnamed woman’s act of overcoming her fear by literally “Touching bottom” results in her movement away from her husband to enjoy a life on her own.

For this essay, I am going to be discussing the short story “Swimming” found on the New Yorker, and written by T. Cooper. I have chosen this story for many reasons, and among those reasons is the personal sadness I felt when I first read the story, almost as if the universe was placing a certain theme in my life, that only the main character could possibly understand. I am talking about running, the god given instinct felt by all men, inherent in the nature of fear, and brought out in all who feel sadness in its full intensity. Though in my short life I can not compare the sadness I have felt with that of losing a child at my own hand, but if I had been placed in that situation, if fate had tempted my soul with such a sequence of events, I would like to think I could find the strength to endure and the courage to not abandon all I had previously known. Yet I am able to reconcile the themes of grief, the mode of recovery, and the longing to escape such a terrible tale. I think in this piece, as I will discuss in later parts, the author was able to put into words a transformation we rarely get to observe in closeness, the kind of transformation that turns a kind man into a “just man” the kind of death that turns this world from a beautiful and happy place into a world that is closing in on our main character, that is forcing him to surface temporarily and gasp for air, much like he does when he finds peace in the water, wading breath after air, after sea. I firmly believe that

Adrienne Rich uses many poetic resources in her poem "Diving into the Wreck." In this poem a diver goes on a trip to investigate a shipwreck in the socially accepted schema. Rich shifts the role of the hero and the strategy for success in her second schema. In the second schema the hero goes on a journey where she discovers her true identity, both female and male.

“The Swimmer,” a short fiction by John Cheever, presents a theme to the reader about the unavoidable changes of life. The story focuses on the round character by the name of Neddy Merrill who is in extreme denial about the reality of his life. He has lost his youth, wealth, and family yet only at the end of the story does he develop the most by experiencing a glimpse of realization on all that he has indeed lost. In the short story “The Swimmer,” John Cheever uses point of view, setting and symbolism to show the value of true relationships and the moments of life that are taken for granted.

In the short story, “The Swimmer,” John Cheever uses precise literary devices to emphasize the true meaning behind what the average reader might first gather. Throughout this short story, Neddy’s journey is recorded through what he does and how the time changes. His actions of “jumping from pool to pool” show Neddy’s incapabilities of growing up and the falsehood that he lives in. John Cheever wants the readers to understand that Neddy’s life is only a downfall as the years go by, and that his outlook on life doesn’t change until he realizes all his actions have left him alone. To set the tone of the story, the author uses metaphors of different objects to show Neddy’s changes in life, change of diction to set a tone from excellence to weakness, and Neddy’s life paralleled through the imagery described in this short story.

She wants the audience to know right away that even though she is about to tell you the story of a difficult childhood, she did reach her goal in the end. After making this statement, Tan dives into her past and how she came to be where she is today. Her mother is the next most important point of discussion. Her mother influenced her writing style as well as her beliefs about her culture and heritage. ?Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her? (Tan, 2002, p. 36). The broken up English her mother uses is the next issue Tan focuses on. ??everything is limited, including people?s perceptions of the limited English speaker? (Tan, 2002, p. 36). Lastly, she talks about her education and the role it had on her deciding what she wanted to do with her life. ?Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me? (Tan, 2002, p. 39). By structuring the essay in order of importance, Tan reinforces her message that you can be anything you desire even with a different culture than the norm.

Many say that events, good and bad, from childhood shape a person’s future. Things like the death of a loved one, domestic violence, expectations and economic struggles can surely mould one's true self. However, the gap between finding the person they want to become and the one to avoid becoming is controlled solely by the way one chooses to handle these things in life. This is directly connected to the novel, Crow Lake by Mary Lawson, in which the life of Kate Morrison and her three siblings is depicted. The children are faced with tragedy when both their parents are killed in a fatal car accident and they are left orphaned to fend for themselves. The novel perfectly embodies what it takes to get through extremely tough times and push in order

The speaker’s tendency to overthink his choices and his inability to move on after a dissatisfactory outcome in “Prelude to Jumping in the River” by Katia Grubisic can be likened to the anxieties we often feel before and after making important decisions in our own lives. The missed opportunities that come as a by-product of the choices we make often cause us to overthink them, just as the speaker stood “at the edge of the bank [for] centuries” (9-10) unable to come to a coherent conclusion about whether or not to make the jump. It is crucial to weigh the costs and benefits while making an important decision. Nevertheless, spending too much time doing so will result in the opportunity passing you by. This is reflected in the regretful tone of

Have you ever made a decision that you wish you could go back on? We all have, my regrets start in my first year of high school. High school was a nice change of pace from elementary school, no more uniforms, no more time wasted on boring courses that do not interest you. The essay "The Step Not Taken," by Paul D'Angelo, is about an experience in his life, in which he was given the opportunity to help a total stranger, but ultimately chose not to. His decision eats away at him like a combination of guilt and uncertainty. The essay has a touching moral of that true happiness only comes from helping others. What I want to focus on, from the essay, is the idea that regrets will eat away at you if you choose to do nothing about them. My regrets during my high school years are my time in

The environment that kids grow up in shapes their personalities and their overall character due to life experiences. As shown in the book, Drown by Junot Diaz, Diaz focuses on a boy named Yunior who has a troubled upbringing due to the lack of empathy in his family. Due to the environment Yunior grew up in, his past self shows empathy, desire, and compassion, whereas his present self expresses a lack of self love, the ability to making good decisions, and knowing his role in the world.