Sandra Cisneros’, “The Monkey Garden”, uses juxtaposition and personification to provide ominousness to her vignette. For instance, a bit after Esperanza first entered the garden following the family moving, she noted the “hollyhocks perfumy like the blue-blond hair of the dead”, comparing aromatic flowers to dull colored locks from the deceased, foreshadowing that there must be an upcoming negative event of some sort involving death. The foul use of corpses’ hair color to describe a fragrant plant is placed to accentuate their clear differences. Cisneros also uses personification to establish an ominous mood to this piece. For example, after stating the garden was taking over itself, the “flowers stopped obeying” their designated areas.
Do you ever remember being scared of monsters under the bed? If so, then you will relate to the young child in “A Barred Owl.” An owl hooting in the night scares a girl, but thankfully her parents are there to comfort her. In “A Barred Owl,” author Richard Wilbur uses imagery, tone, and personification to show how powerful words can subdue any emotion. Imagery plays an important role in relaying the message of the poem.
This passage captures the details and vivid colors that will be alluring to children and creates a wonderful imagery. Such as the "moths" and "sweet voiced threshers" this young girl is experiencing nature in its full glory. Furthermore, as children everything seems bigger and the description of the old Pinetree being a “landmark for the sea” shows and creates an image that glorifies this symbol of initiation.
How Richter’s Childhood Affected His Writing Authors often reveal their biases through their writing. In The Light In The Forest, Author Conrad Richter, the author shows bias towards the Indian culture over the white culture in the plot events of the novel. Richter favors some parts of the Indian culture, dislikes some aspects of the white culture, and was affected in his beliefs by his childhood. First, Richter seems to favor the Indian culture over the white culture in the area of their view of religion. One reason is that, in the novel, True Son, the main character, talks about the Indian form of religion.
Stumbling about among all those creepers. More grave nodding; they knew about nightmares.” Little children were frightened because they had no mothers to comfort them and protect them from the “beast” because they were stranded on an island in the middle of
The speaker of Maxine Kumin’s “Woodchucks” begins the poem as passive only describing what everyone is doing, but then transitions to a place of power describing all the things they have personally done. After careful examination of the poem, the poem seems to be about the Holocaust. The speaker describes how “gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right.” (Kumin). This then leads to the speaker describing what him and others were doing to the “woodchucks”, the speaker says, “both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,” (Kumin).
Julie Trip’s short story “The Fall” depicts the story of a young girl who spends her summer exploring the area around her house and collecting some of her findings. One day, Tara’s explorations lead her back to the woods behind her house, where she discovers a darkness to life, which brings an end to her childhood days. Trip’s clever symbolism, and description of the setting reinforce this.
The Thing in the Forest by A.S. Byatt is a fairytale like story that takes place during World War II. It captivates its reader with a mysterious lack of detail, keeping the fairytale aspect up to the imagination. Through symbolism, metaphors, and juxtaposing character development, Byatt shows how war and trauma kills childhood innocence. This story is about two young girls, Penny and Primrose, who are sent away from home during World War II for safety.
Excerpts from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, Document Analysis The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, is a renowned source of political fiction that pioneered the movement of food safety in the United States. The Jungle was first published in a socialist newspaper in 1905 and then later adapted into a novel in 1906 after popular demand. Sinclair initially wrote the exposé as a way to change the unfortunate circumstances of immigrant laborers, whose working conditions that were believed to be unacceptable for any laborer in the industry. Sinclair leaves short references of his political opinions in the novel in various locations throughout the text “As if political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable!”
Thoreau was a prominent and influential transcendentalist which meant that he believed modern society’s institutions, organizations, religions, and politics are all corrupt. He believes that people should go back to their roots in nature and be more simple-minded like our ancient ancestors who lived in nature. To think about it in more modern terms, he was practically a minimalist who believed people should only live with things essential for life, basic life necessities like food, water, and shelter. He quotes, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Thoreau 66). From the quote, we can tell that he believes that a life without living with nature and essentials only is a life wasted.
Growing Up Through Experience Readers of The Monkey Garden view the short story in many different ways. They interpret the monkey and the monkey garden as many different things. The monkey garden physically stays the same, but changes from the narrator 's mental aspect from the beginning to the end of the story. Interpretations on what exactly the monkey actually represents varies. Youth and innocence represent the best symbols of what the monkey really is from the point of view of the story .
The character Penny is a protagonist in Byatt’s story “The Thing in the Forest”, and is presented in two lives or stages: childhood and adulthood. As a little girl, Penny is described as “thin and dark and taller, probably older than Primrose, and had a bloodless transparent paleness with a touch of blue in her lips” (Byatt 3). In the later stages of the story, Penny is described as having a “transparent face that had lost detail – cracked lipstick, fine lines of wrinkles – and looked both younger and greyer, less substantial” (Byatt 12). This later description can be taken as a representation of the battering from life that Penny had taken from the encounter with the thing to separation and placement with strange families, a predicament shared by Primrose who now had the same
There was undergrowth—a mat of brambles and bracken. There were no obvious paths. Dark and light came and went, inviting and mysterious, as the wind pushed clouds across the face of the sun.” (355) The "thing" in the story was symbolized as the terror
Alice Walker uses imagery and diction throughout her short story to tell the reader the meaning of “The Flowers”. The meaning of innocence lost and people growing up being changed by the harshness of reality. The author is able to use the imagery to show the difference between innocence and the loss of it. The setting is also used to show this as well.
There was no chattering or chirping of birds; no growling of bears and no chuckling of contented otters; instead, the clearing lay desolate and still, as though it never wished to be turned into day. The only occupants were rodents and spiders who had set their home in the dank, forgotten shack. From its base, dead, brown grass reached out, all the way to the edge of the tree-line, unable to survive in the perished, infertile soil that made up the foundations of the house. Bird houses and feeders swung still from the once growing apple trees, in the back garden, consigned to a life of
