During the Armenian genocide, which began in Turkey in 1915, the Ottoman government systematically murdered 1.5 million Armenians. In the historical novel, Forgotten Fire, by Adam Bagdasarian, the story of how young Vahan Kenderian survived the Armenian genocide is told. Twelve-year-old Vahan is forced to grow up at an alarming rate. He experiences tremendous loss and grief in a short span of time. Despite all of his troubles, Vahan is able to resist succumbing to his fears and never loses the hope that one day he will be safe again.
In Murry Taylor’s memoir titled Jumping Fire, Taylor takes readers to the Alaskan Wilderness where he and other firefighters parachute from planes to fight forest fires. These individuals are smokejumpers. Written from 1992 to 2000 the story documents a summer firefighting season in a diary style narrative. The author became an active smokejumper in 1965 and upon his retirement in 2000 was the oldest active smokejumper and the oldest to ever do the job. Taylor willingly jumped out of an airplane 355 times, with 200 being actually down to a burning fire.
In the memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, the author uses the fire motif to convey that all uncontrolled situations inevitably lead to chaos. Jeannette was cooking hot dogs when she grabbed one with a fork, turned around, and bent over to feed it to her dog. Her dress was against the stove, and it caught on fire. She quickly realized and panicked. She “smelled the burning and heard a horrible crackling as the fire singed [her] hair and eyelashes” (9).
In the novel Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian, Vahan Kenderian witnessed his world fall apart around him. First, his wise and disciplinary Father is taken away and never heard from again, then his two oldest brothers are shot in front of his eyes. Finally, he is taken away from his home and taken to a dilapidated inn. After he and his brother run away, he is forced to travel across Turkey with nowhere to go. Without his father’s wise words, he is forced to repeat that it all will build character and make him stronger.
In the novel, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, the author uses the fire motif to assert that attempts to control the uncontrollable will leave scars. For example, when cooking hot dogs Jeannette “Watched the yellow-white flames make a ragged brown line up the pink fabric on my skirt and climb my stomach”(11). The fire grows bigger and bigger with Jeannette stunned until Rose Mary puts it out showing that Jeannette is not scared of fire but in awe of it leaving her in a state of shock. Although because of this Jeannette will carry scars wherever she goes reminding her of what happened when she tried to control fire. After Jeannette asks herself about her experience with fire she thinks “I didn’t have the answers to those questions, but I did know that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire”(34).
No one believed her, but when the train came to a stop she was the only one who was sane when they saw the flames, the smoke, and the ash that came from the incendiary. Moishe and Mrs. Schatcher not only help drive the story forward through their words of caution but represent the effects of the Holocaust. These characters prove the author's claim,” It was as though madness had infected all of us”(Weisel
Chapter 2: Flames In this chapter, the prisoners were in the box cars full of 80 people, to go to their first concentration camp in Birkenau. While the car was compacted with many people, a lady kept on screaming and pointing that she saw a fire. This lady was sorrowful because she was separated from her family and
In preparation for this paper I chose to read Fire in the ashes: twenty five years among the poorest children in America by Jonathan Kozol. In this book Kozol has followed these children and their family’s lives for the past twenty five years. In his writing Kozol portrays a point of view most from his background and standing would not be capable of having. He portrays what life is like for those who have been let down by the system that was meant to protect them. Kozols writing style can be very blunt at times, not for shock value, but for the sake of portraying these children’s realities, and not sugarcoating the inequalities that they are faced with.
The novel, Fahrenheit 451, presents a future society where books are prohibited and the firemen burn any that are. The title is the temperature at which books burn. It was written by Ray Bradbury and first published in October 1953. In this novel, protagonist Montag changes his understanding in various aspects such as love or his human relationship throughout the book. However, among all of these, fire – the main theme of this novel – has the most significance as it also changes his understanding of knowledge from books.
Nobody could see a fire. This went on for days until they finally got to Birkenau. They saw huge furnaces and there was a terrible smell of burning people. Now they realized what Madame Schächter was yelling about.
She yelled fire many times as they get closer to the camp. They shut her up by hitting her many times but she kept saying it. “Jews, listen to me! I can see fire”(19). This shows that Madame Schachter could have seen the future.
Ms Schacheter’s: “Jews, look! Look at the fire! Look at the flames!” () “Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I was transformed into smoke under a silent sky. ”(p.
In Night, when Elie and the other prisoners were being transported to Auschwitz, young men beat and gagged a woman for screaming about fire and flames. Elie writes, “She is hallucinating because she is thirsty, poor woman…” (Wiesel 25). The cart ride was long and the prisoners were dehydrated and starving. The people in the cart thought the lady was crazy, screaming of death and fire.
All things are capable of change in our world, and the symbolism of fire in Lord of the Flies is no different. In the book a group of boys land on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere. They try to build a society built on the ideas of the adult society they came from. At first the boys seemed to be structured and ordered, but soon their primal instincts of savagery came out changing their system into a horrifying nightmare. Throughout Lord of the Flies, the strength and purpose of the fire created by the boys seems to be a meter of the boys connection to civilization, where towards the beginning it is strong and valiant, and then slowly loses its importance and burns out and finally it encircles the whole island due to its savage purposes
This is shown when he states “‘Fire! I see fire! I see a fire!’ There was a moment of panic. Who had screamed?
