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An Analysis Of Tim Gautreaux's 'Waiting For The Evening News'

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In the short story “Waiting for the Evening News”, the author, Tim Gautreaux creates a negative tone towards Jesse and how he deals with his actions and that tone creates a theme of the importance to take accountability for your actions. He does this by characterizing Jesse through his thoughts and actions, the imagery of the crime scene, and through the people he interacts with during his hiding. Gautreaux characterizes Jesse as a selfish, drunk man who will not own up to his to decisions to give the character room to change and to progressively learn he needs to take accountability for his actions. One of the common ways that Gautreaux shows his negative attitude towards Jesse is by characterizing him as a nobody. The narrator says, “The sense of being invisible made Jesse think he could not be taken seriously, which was why he never voted, hardly ever renewed his driver’s license, and paid attention in church only once a year at revival …show more content…

One of the first people the author has him cross paths with is the barber, “I ain’t heard of a wreck,” Jesse said. The barber bobbed his head. “Awe yeah. You come in from the forest, hey? You from Mississippi, right? Hay-baling time and all that shit.” Jesse found himself nodding, glad to be given some kind of identity.” Jesse has not come to terms that what he has done is wrong at this point in the story and the author shows that by how he reacts to the barber. Instead of telling the barber he was the man that caused the accident he gets excited about how the man is giving him some sort of worth. This interaction shows Jesse’s initial attitude. Then as the story evolves he calls his wife and she says, “I know you messed up big, but please don’t come back here. If you turn yourself in, find a single policeman somewhere and do it. Baby, these people think you

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62.How has the narrator become invisible? The narrator has become invisible in the sense that he is the only one around him that knows he exists. There is no one left that is able to see him, his feelings or his behaviors anymore due to him realizing that the Brotherhood is not striving for the people of Harlem's best interests. He begins to understand that in society he is just a black man and that in itself debilitates him.

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To illustrate, Mr. Levine walks to a building everyday to carve his old village the way he remembers it before the Nazi’s took it over, and destroyed it. This is a form of art therapy. Next, Mr. Cassavant is also coping with his trauma. The source of Mr. Cassavant’s trauma is because of the death of his son, Eddie. Eddie was hit by a

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He then asks the speaker to close his eyes and draw it, and the speaker has an epiphany, saying that he felt placeless, and was feeling like he never did before. I believe that this was him realizing the importance of understanding and empathy. However, in Car Crash While Hitchhiking, the speaker does not change throughout the story. He was on a lot of drugs in the story, and at the end the author depicts him being in some sort pf psych ward. He is hearing voices and is being handed vitamins by a nurse.

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The main character continuously faults himself for the way that others treat him . When the character is treated as though he is as bad as a rapist he feels “ embarrassed, and dismayed..” (542), when he has done nothing wrong to get this kind of treatment ,and he is only being judged by his race. Staples uses diction and syntax to make it sound as if the character believes that it’s his fault that he is stereotyped. This emotional appeal grabs the audience’s attention and their sympathy.

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When one examines Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, immediately one notices the duality of being black in society. Ellison uses the narrator to highlight his invisibility in society, although African-Americans have brought forth so many advances. This statement best represents the novel as the narrator examines his location (geography), his social identity, historical legacies of America, and the ontological starting point for African-Americans. The “odyssey” that the narrators partakes in reflects the same journey that many African-Americans have been drug through for generations.

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The main protagonist of the novel, Tom Joad, is known in story as a man with no regret. Although he had murdered a man and spent many years in prison, he showed no regret as he rarely brought up his past. Instead, he worries about his current problems and the issues his family is facing. Although he seems certain in his actions he does exhibit inner moral conflict as he soon found himself learning that he can’t always act, such as when he is unable to get a job and support his family. This situation, taking place during the middle of the novel, forces him to learn to be able to reflect on his problems without taking action.

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He assesses the damage to his mother’s vehicle. The protagonist had earlier rebelled against morals and standards, but he now wants to return to normalcy. At the

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The narrator defining himself as invisible shows how he feels unrecognized and unseen, and through the novel, he defines this repeatedly. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (Ellison 3). In the prologue, the narrator clarifies that he already showed himself as invisible, though he later says he doesn’t complain. The invisible man’s identity relies on the narrator. Through the novel, the narrator is shown being unseen though as the novel progresses, there is a sense of the narrator losing his invisibility, like when he had disguised himself as Rinehart, he sees an unfamiliar perspective and notices more things that he usually wouldn’t see, or the people that wouldn’t see him before, they saw him then.

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The authority structure of the Invisible People is very different from the authority structure of the American society. In the American society, people must abide by a set of rules and laws and if one does not respect those laws they will face consequences. On the contrary the Invisible People live in a society where they are not told what to do, they do not have laws that they have to follow, as implied by the chief’s statement “If I told a man to do what he does not want to, I would no longer be chief”.

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Simply put, Invisible Man builds a broader narrative about vulnerability and disillusionment. Through his conversations with Ras the Exhorter, Mary, and members of the Brotherhood, the narrator lifts his blinding veil and learns to unravel the binding expectations that marked his past—his grandfather’s departing words and the idea of the self-traitor (Ellison 559). Throughout the text, Ralph Ellison’s prose illuminates the interiority of his characters—their depth and inner voice. “That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact.

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Ellison shows the reader through his unique characters and structure that we deny ourselves happiness, tranquility, and our own being by the ridicule of other people, and that we must meet our own needs by validating ourselves from within instead of our value being a composite of the society that ridicules our being. Ellison's own struggle and connection to mental intemperance is the one of his great differences in the world to us and to see someone else's struggle puts our own life in context. In Invisible Man a single takeaway of many is that society turns us invisible, a part of its overall machine, but we have to learn not to look through ourselves in times of invisibility and not confuse our own blindness for invisibility as one may lead to the

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The friend, Todd Clifton, is selling Sambo dolls on the side of the road, a highly racist and derogatory doll that perpetuates the stereotype of blacks as non-human performers for other’s entertainment. Clifton, in contrast, was a handsome, intelligent, and politically active member of the Brotherhood who is shown to want to help Harlem and push for black and white equality. The Invisible Man is both shaken by Clifton's blatant betrayal of his own race and saddened, yet again, by the theme of black repression by those who claim to try and help. However, later he chooses to forgive Clifton at his funeral, thinking to himself “Yes, the dolls were obscene and his act a betrayal. But he was only a salesman not an inventor, and it was necessary that we make it known that the meaning of his death was greater than the incident or the object that caused it” (448).

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