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Aria Beth Sloss One North Analysis

1493 Words6 Pages

An Expedition of Individualism [1] North by Aria Beth Sloss is a search for the true definition of love between the conflict of unity and individualism. Sloss depicts the father as obsessed with adventuring to the North Pole in a balloon while the mother is stuck between a contradiction of loneliness and independence. The mother finally learns to let go as she realizes that love is not to lay claim to another person. Sloss skillfully uses the iceberg in the beginning as an implication for the complexity of love, showing that though “the impulse is to lay claim to each new fragment of the unknown”, in this case love, one can drift apart from another person unavoidably “as they please” (1). Love can “form and break so easily” just like …show more content…

Compared to the father’s internal craziness, the description of the mother is far more reserved and composed – a contrast of movement and stillness. While the father has a mind vibrating “like a plucked string”, the mother “lies there in the dark” and “counts the minutes as they pass” (12). While he expresses his passion with a cycle of “exhilaration, exhaustion, frustration”, she tries to suppress her disappointment and sadness by “[pressing] her forehead to the glass” (16). While the mother sincerely and dearly desires the companionship at home, the father “finds himself listless, irritable” in the face of serenity and “absence of imminent disaster” (7). The whole tone of the description for the father is vibrant, accompanied by a lot of metaphors of him, the sky, or the balloon. By contrast, the approach to describe the mother is calmer, with a lot of psychological activities. The father’s underlying passion flowing and burning from within is for his expedition, not for the mother. However, what the mother expected is his love and a more spiritual adventure and what she does not expect is when “[the] father’s leaving turned from adventure to abandonment” (22). The contrast flows throughout the whole story and is an indication of the fundamental confliction between them because of their dichotomy of subject of

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The barrier between her and the neighbours after her husband’s death forced her to become reserved and quiet. Her and her son only went into town if they had to. They preferred to stay close to the garden where they felt safe. The death of the husband is the cause of the mothers’ complete change in character. The death let the audience connect with her on a deeper level to understand her pain and suffering.

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The conflicting interests of the mother and the father result in a situation where one must make a sacrifice in order to preserve the connection in the family. The flat depressed tone of the poem reflects the mother’s unhappiness and frustration about having to constantly

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Her powerful eloquence consisting of a loving tone and strong illusions strengthen her son’s trust in her. All mothers, including Adams, yearn for the happiness and well being of their children. The respect Adams holds for her son is so great that she allows him to embark on a voyage with his father. John’s success derives from his mother’s respect for him; she is fully aware of his intellectual capabilities. She trusts him to overcome any obstacle, regardless of its difficulty.

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“We live in a world where we rarely speak out and when someone does, often nobody is there to listen,” is a quote by Jaycee Dugard in her memoir A Stolen Life. Authors must be able to appeal to their readers in order for the story to be heard. While writing, they consider using multiple different tones and stylistic choices to entice an audience. In A Stolen Life, Jaycee Dugard utilizes a concerned tone and matter-of-fact style in order to express her emotions, provide readers with ample knowledge of her situation, and reflect on her life experiences. Jaycee Dugard never expected her childhood to be taken away.

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Normally, a house with young children is usually a vibrant and loud setting with the expectation of a mother who is without a break in order to tend to their every need. However, this mother’s world appears to be at a standstill or even perhaps at a breaking point as described in this section: “Sometimes there were things to watch-- the pinched armor of a vanished cricket, a floating maple leaf,” (8-10). She is most likely searching for ways to see her way out of her current situation or to fantasize a world where she can be at peace. She tries to focus on the simplicities of life such as the “floating maple leaf” (8). This mostly due to her hopes that life would slow down for a moment and so she could find some peace as well.

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From beginning to end, the son calls his father “Baba” to show his affection and admiration. Despite the father’s inability to come up with a new story, the son still looks up to him. This affectionate term also contrasts with the father’s vision of the “boy packing his shirts [and] looking for his keys,” which accentuates the undying love between the father and son (15 & 16) . The father’s emotional “screams” also emphasize his fear of disappointing the son he loves so much (17). Despite the father’s agonizing visions, the son remains patient and continues to ask for a story, and their relationship remains “emotional” and “earthly”--nothing has changed (20-21).

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The story is told by the point of view of the child, one of the two main characters in the story. The fact that the child is the narrator provides us the information about his excitement and expectations of seeing his father after a long time. The introduction of the father reveals many things about the narrator. Although he thinks of his father as a stranger, he can feel that it’s his own father coming down the crowd “I smelled my father

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to still keep established pace and tone, which is that calm, disassociated mood. At this point the father, the reader might think, is a construction of the husband’s mind, because the husband had focused on “the idea of never seeing him again. . . .” which struck him the most out of this chance meeting, rather than on the present moment of seeing him (Forn 345). However surreal this may be in real life, the narrator manages to keep the same weight through the pacing in the story to give this story a certain realism through the husband’s

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She addresses her father as “daddy” like a little kid, speaks in a child-like abrupt manner, and begins the poem with “you do not do/you do not do/ anymore black shoe,” lines that resemble the old nursery rhyme “There is an old woman who lived in a shoe”. However, this is not a happy child, but one with frustration and unresolved conflicts with her father, as she calls him “evil” and a “bastard”. Furthermore, the way an adult woman completely turns into her childhood self suggests an obsession and a fixation within the past, a phenomenon commonly associated with psychological deficiencies stemming from unsolved childhood issues. These observations correspond to how the speaker metaphorically refers to her father as a “black shoe” that she had to live in, showing her inability to overcome the shadow of her late father. Thus, by addressing him directly instead of referring to him in the past tense, the speaker confronts her obsession and tries to escape the

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