Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, is a postmodern, anti war novel, involving the main character, Billy Pilgrim, and his transportation through the different moments of his life. The timeline of this particular book ranges all the way from when Billy was a small boy and all the way to his death. Because of the book taking place in many different times of Billy’s life and in many places of it, Kurt Vonnegut both hides and reveals truth in it. Many examples of this can be found throughout the events of Billy’s adventures, most notably before and during the fire bombings of Dresden.
Both texts, make use of of the reader’s interpretations to depict the character’s physical
The motif drives the plot and lets the reader analyze the developments that occur throughout both pieces of literature. The similarities and differences of the sins committed in both prose also allow the readers to see how differently the sin played a role in the treatment and development of the
Vonnegut as the author and narrator of the novel removes the doubt in the first chapter that not everything we read in Slaughterhouse-Five is true through the first words of the novel: “All this happened, more or less.” This opening line introduce the readers with Vonnegut story mixed with real and fictional events, a future which is blurred by past, time jumps from inner space and outer space and even human ethics verses extraterrestrial morals. Vonnegut managed to create a collision of these strange juxtaposition with true historical events narrated in an ironical voice. Victorious and glorious historical events such as “The Florence on the Elbe”, Sodom and Gomorrah down to WWII are portrayed with a humble language and through multidimensional
The commonality that these two stories is the use of characterization
In the short stories “A Rose for Emily” and “The Story of an Hour,” the authors use literary devices to create vibrant female characters. These literary devices include diction, imagery, language, and sentence structure. “The Story of an Hour,” written by Kate Chopin, opens with a woman, Louise Mallard, who has a heart disease, and her friends must gently break the news to her that her husband has passed away in a railroad accident. She mourns briefly, but then realizes that she can now live for herself, instead of just as someone’s wife. Shockingly, she walks downstairs after fleeing from her friends’ horrible news, and her husband walks in the door.
Their use of compare and contrast lets them effectively explain the difference between their experiences and those around them. Using these modes of rhetoric both writers are able to communicate a common theme of being or fearful of what the future holds for them. The fact that there is a common theme between these two essays shows that messages can transcend time, works of literature and experiences. Narration is most commonly used to tell a story. Both writers use narration to tell their stories and by doing so make them more personal.
It might surprise readers to know that, by the use of this lens, traces of these subjects can be found in almost any work despite the original nature and intent of the tale. A prime example demonstrating the power of the Marxist lens can be seen when the lens is applied to Kate Chopin’s short story, “The Story of an Hour”. This short conte depicts the brief sentiment of freedom felt by the fictitious character Mrs. Mallard as she learns that her husband has been killed in a railroad accident. However, her blissful reverie is put to death by death itself when her husband, alive and well, walks through the doors of their home to meet her. On the surface, this would appear to be a tale void of social, political, or economic association; how could such logical themes develop in such an emotional tale?
However, only seeing through the protagonist’s eyes, would cause the reader to be unable to see the big picture. Third person single vision is the only point of view that would work for Liam O’Flaherty’s short story, “The Sniper,” because the protagonist needs to be tough as he is fighting at war. Employing an outside narrator, or “a voice created by the author to tell the story,” to provide extremely descriptive details about the sniper’s appearance and subtle details about his surroundings is how
This study will make a short sketch about how these two thinkers grasp the individuation and rationalization of the body in their works, giving an analysis about where
In the novel we follow the protagonist, a young Victorian woman who struggles to overcome the oppressive patriarchal society in which she is entrapped. It is a story of enclosure and escape, from the imprisonment of her childhood to the possible entrapment of her daunting marriage. Throughout the novel Jane must fight against her inevitable future that society has already chosen for her. We see her attempt to overcome the confinements of her given gender, background and status. She must prove her worth against the men she encounters throughout her life, showing her equality in intelligence and strength.
“William Wilson” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”’s differences outshine their similarities. “William Wilson” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” characters are akin because in both short
This shows a balance between gender roles, as well as the embracing progressive changes within culture and society. In the story “The Story of an Hour,” by Kate Chopin, a third-person omniscient narrator, relates how Mrs. Louise Mallard, the protagonist, experiences the euphoria of freedom rather than the grief of loneliness after hearing about her husband’s death. Later, when Mrs. Mallard discovers that her husband, Mr. Brently Mallard, still lives, she realizes that all her aspiration for freedom has gone. The shock and disappointment kills Mrs. Mallard.
Besides the author and the reader, there is the ‘I’ of the lyrical hero or of the fictitious storyteller and the ‘you’ or ‘thou’ of the alleged addressee of dramatic monologues, supplications and epistles. Empson said that: „The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry”(Surdulescu, Stefanescu, 30). The ambiguous intellectual attitude deconstructs both the heroic commitement to a cause in tragedy and the didactic confinement to a class in comedy; its unstable allegiance permits Keats’s exemplary poet (the „camelion poet”, more of an ideal projection than a description of Keats actual practice) to derive equal delight conceiving a lago or an Imogen. This perplexing situation is achieved through a histrionic strategy of „showing how”, rather than „telling about it” (Stefanescu, 173 ).
In his essay Bakhtin provides an analysis of the relationship between individual utterances and the ideologically charged forces that affect them, he writes: “The dialogic interaction of a word among other words (of all kinds and degrees of otherness) creates new and significant artistic potential in discourse, creates the potential for a distinctive art of prose, which has found its fullest and deepest expression in the novel.” (275) i.e. there are dialogic relations between the narrator and the writer, the author and the character, the story and other stories, culture and text and society and text. A novel is in fact characterized by heteroglossiawhere many voices (writer, character, society) are mixed which gives originality to the text.