Some birds are too beautiful to be caged. It has such bright feathers and sweet songs that you feel guilty to imprison them (Stephen King, A Story from Different Seasons). Expectations imposed by the society seem to imprison such splendid creatures, crushing their dreams and hopes of achieving something they wish. People are withheld by the society and personal ideology. Social and gender norms confronts people to be normal, as seen in ‘Boys and Girls’ and ‘The Singing Lesson’. However, the society is not the only one to blame, personal mindset also imprisons us from within. We see physical (materialistic) and spiritual (non-materialistic) chains from ‘The Bet’ and ‘The Hunger Artist’. This essay will elaborate on the resemblances and distinctions of the 4 stories in terms of their approach.
Defining materialistic needs and recognition as success is a form of imprisonment. In ‘The Bet’, the lawyer accepted to be imprisoned for an exchange of two million bucks, costing his human contact. By utilizing objectivity, the characters are painted in a vivid picture, where readers are able to understand the thoughts and actions of the old banker. Furthermore, the story included third-person omniscient, where the lawyer’s thoughts confused the readers while piquing their
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No one understood his art, resulting in loneliness, therefore distancing himself from the audience. Similar to ‘The Bet’, this story utilizes third person omniscient, creating a sense of mystery towards the artist, allowing readers to ponder about his thoughts. Franz Kafka depicts the alienation of people who does not conform to the norms, showcasing the imprisonment of life. At the same time, it questions the readers if success should be measured by the amount of recognition gained. We see the artist trying to get people to understand his art but to no vain, causing him to spiral into
The purpose of this paper is to introduce, discuss, and analyze the novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. Specifically it will discuss the themes of racism and segregation, and how these strong themes are woven throughout this moving autobiography. Maya Angelou recounts the story of her early life, including the racism and segregation she experiences throughout her formative years. With wit, sincerity, and remarkable talent, Angelou portrays racism as a product of ignorance and prejudice. However, she finds the strength to rise above this crippling condition.
Franz Kafka’s trademark is ridiculing his and the society’s blatant stories in subtle manner. With the help of paradigms what can be seen is that Franz Kafka’s use of humour in oddly places to clarify the asymmetry of the organized world and heightens the tension. It was also used to create even greater gaps both in scene and story line, to further stress the blackness felt in many of his stories. Studying his works it’s evident that Franz Kafka saw humor not only as a defence against the pain and anguish he felt inflicted upon him by the outside world, but also against the pain he rained upon himself. This technique was used to stress on the horrors of the big bad world. Although there have been resemblances of the protagonists’ character traits to his own self, he has brought out not only his own problems but on how people magnify and in
Deep in the forest of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the caged bird sings on. The singing slaves in Douglass’s narrative are the caged birds of Maya Angelou’s famous poem, filling the air around them with desire: desire for a freedom so far out of reach—for “things unknown but longed for still.”
Birds are a common sight in most places people tend to be. These winged creatures are seen in bustling places like the pigeons that are in urban and suburban areas, the woodpeckers in rural regions, the crows on farms, and even in cages within buildings. In fact, these elegant creatures are so common a sight in society that they are often overlooked and underappreciated. This is similar to how women were and sometimes still are treated within society; they are given little appreciation when they are present and doing as they are told, but when they do not do as they are told they become a problem. This parallel that can be drawn between women and birds is used throughout Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening, in which its main character Edna Pontellier is often likened to and symbolized by a bird. Throughout the novel, the bird acts as a theme and symbol of both Edna and women in general.
Freedom. A goal. A liberty. A myth. So many descriptions for a single concept. Yet the main idea is the same: to be free of restrictions, free to be whatever you wish. It is a life necessity, one that was, unfortunately, and still is, restricted throughout history, resulting in many chasing after its acquisition. Humans currently live in a time, in several nations, where freedom is a right, a necessity of life freely given. However, throughout history, freedom has been kept to only a minority, resulting in individuals struggling to change society for freedom to be distributed to the majority of people, a battle that took years, centuries to accomplish. This fight for true autonomy took many forms, both violent and peaceful. Literary works, in particular, have been major agents to this cause, serving as both reminders of those struggles and remembrance to readers of the endeavors those authors sought to accomplish. Two particular works, The Awakening by Kate Chopin and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, spearheaded movements for freedom by tackling the prejudice of gender roles, expressing through their novels’ characters and experiences the arguments for individual freedom and the challenges that must be conquered to achieve those goals for future generations.
The literal cage depicted as the starving artist home metaphorically establishes the protagonist’s isolation from his entourage. Indeed, this physical barrier interrupts any real contacts from foreigners, beside the instants where they would touch his arms out of morbid fascination: “…even sticking his arm out through the bars to let people fell how emaciated he was, but then completely sinking back into himself” (Kafka 713). Intense
In conclusion, Franz Kafka’s story was about a man who turns into a cockroach for the remainder of his life and is very mistreated by his family. Like a cockroach, the common worker is one in a million, which drives us further into degrading our self-worth and assuming the worst of others. This is the modern view that readers can visualize while reading this story.
Fred Schepisi, director of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and Maya Angelou, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, present the themes of racism and cultural discrimination similarly, but their key characters battle for acceptance uniquely. Schepisi and Angelou both address racism against the protagonists, Jimmie who is Aboriginal and Maya who is African American. Similarly, cultural discrimination is discussed where Maya and Schepisi focus on how gender effects somebody’s actions. Both authors discuss acceptance uniquely, Schepisi focusing on how Jimmie cannot be accepted into white society because of his skin colour compared to Angelou’s biographical count of being raised in a segregated community surrounded predominantly by African Americans, and only had to fight for acceptance as a young woman once she moved to San Francisco. Both texts provide an unfiltered outlook of how racism effects both African Americans and Indigenous Australians. Although there are many similarities between the two texts one difference is the point of view the two texts portray.
During their growing up years, children struggle to find their personal place in society. It is difficult for children to find their place when they are given numerous advantages, but when a child is oppressed by their parents or grandparents, males in their life, and the dominant culture, the road to achieving self-identity is fraught with enormous obstacles to overcome. Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and Mary Crow Dog's Lakota Woman depict the two women's "triumph over formidable social obstacles and [their] struggle to achieve a sense of identity and self-acceptance" (Draper 1).
Secondly, the narrator and mistress in the short story “The Bird Song”, battles with wanting to become an independent women but is too frightened by what to expect to be on her own, she allows a renowned businessman to take advantage of her time due to her belief of not being looked at as equal which had been pressed into her mind by society. Throughout “The Bird Song”, the narrator displays a thirst for a husband, true love and the need to make a name for herself. Being a newly female college graduate transitioning into the workforce, she finds herself engrossed with a foreign well established
The poem “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou tells the story of two birds: one bird has the luxury of freedom and the second bird lives its life caged and maltreated by an unknown tyrant. Maya Angelou wrote this poem during the Civil Rights Era, the period when black activists in the 1950’s and 1960’s fought for desegregation of African Americans. This poem parallels the oppression that African Americans were fighting during this time period. In “Caged Bird”, Angelou builds a strong contrast that shows the historical context of discrimination and segregation through the use of mood, symbolism, and theme.
However, in the poem “Caged Bird” Maya Angelou characterizes the free and caged bird as, one bird symbolizing imprisonment and limitations while the other symbolizes freedom, which further develops the theme of inequality. The line “And dares to claim the sky” shows how unaware the free bird is and further develops the idea of its freedom. This piece of evidence shows how unaware the free bird is by exaggerating the extent of its freedom compared to the caged bird. In
Few novels capture the peculiarity of the human mind as well as James Joyce’s, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Frustrating and awe-inspiring at the same time, the fleeting ambiguity with which Joyce depicts Stephen’s character leave the reader often puzzled and asking the natural question, “What is this supposed to mean?” We can then remain in this state of perplexity or try to interpret the subtle clues, dispersed throughout the book, in hope of arriving closer to the hidden meaning of what the author’s intention was for his readers to comprehend. Perhaps the most unsatisfying obscurity of this novel is its ending—is Stephen successful in becoming the liberated artist he aspires to be? Is he truly released from the bounds of
It is when the artist begins to add nuances and harmonies to the melody that the work becomes inaccessible to the unlearned ear, thus isolating a portion of the audience. When works of art are created to express the universality of humankind they are more beneficial to it. As an example, this view is dissimilar to the view if Dante, who believed that the language of a work should be elevated. Tolstoy argues the more details that are given in the work the more opportunities for disconnection from its message the audience has (391).
As James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man unfolds, the central theme of isolation and rejection becomes evident. From birth to adolescence, the protagonist of the story, Stephen Dedalus, responds to his experiences throughout life with actions of rejection and isolation. He rebels against his environment and isolates himself in schoolwork, family, religion and his art, successively. James Joyce uses Stephen Dedalus' responses of isolation and rejection to illustrate the journey that the artist must take to achieve adulthood.