Ceremony is the story about Tayo, A Native American World War II Veteran, and his struggle to find himself. He struggles to adapt to a world where his people have to fight between the “whites” say is the true path, and what his culture says the right path. Ceremony displays Tayo’s struggle by comparing his…
Have you ever had that eerie feeling in the back of your mind that something just is not right? It is as if there is some unknown reason that a situation has a different meaning than what is obvious. This feeling is the disguised backbone of Raymond Carver’s story, “Boxes”. In this story, the son…
Walter Miller, in the novel A Canticle For Leibowitz, mocks the way we are as humans, particularly in those ways that lead to regressive thinking. The novel pokes fun at the attention to impractical details, such as to the spent copying the Leibowitz blueprints. Miller also mocks humans by describing the inordinate amount of attention…
Throughout the novel The Call of the Wild, we follow a dog named Buck through his journey through the Klondike. We experience a transformation in him, as he adapts to the cold, harsh land where he is forced to toil in the snow, just to help men find a shiny metal. Buck seems to almost…
One writer who has not received nearly enough credit for his works is George Gordon, who later became known as Lord Byron. This is the man who wrote his own poetical version of Don Juan. Don Juan is a man who is known for being able to arouse the desires of women and to love…
Throughout the play of “Julius Caesar” Brutus makes many mistakes or harmatias, which eventually lead to his tragic downfall. Although Brutus makes many harmatiasm these three are the most important. The largest harmatia that Brutus makes is listening to Cassius, in the beginning. Another harmatia Brutus makes is deciding not to kill Antony. Brutus also…
Abraham (Bram) Stoker was born November 8, 1847 at 15 The Crescent, Clontarf, North of Dublin, the third of seven children. For the first 7 years of his life Stoker was bedridden with a myriad of childhood diseases which afforded him much time to reading. By the time he went to college, Stoker had somehow…
Isaac Asimov was born in 1920 in Petrovichi, Russia. When he was three years of age, his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn, New York. Asimov turned to full time writing in 1958. This accomplished writer is best known for his novels dealing with science fiction. However, his works extend to…
In October of l989, Macaque monkeys, housed at the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit in Reston, Virginia, began dying from a mysterious disease at an alarming rate. The monkeys, imported from the Philippines, were to be sold as laboratory animals. Twenty-nine of a shipment of one hundred died within a month. Dan Dalgard, the veterinarian who…
Characters The main character in the book is Ian Malcolm, a middle-aged mathematician and a little bit of an explorer. The man who set up the exploration, Richard Levine, is a rich and reckless yet well-known adventurer who spends a lot of his time and money exploring different places around the world and helps at…
CHARACTERIZATION The main characters of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov are, as the title suggests, the members of the Karamazov “family,” if it can indeed be called such. The only things that the members of this family share are a name and the “Karamazov curse,” a legacy of base impulses and voluptuous lust. References to…
This story starts off with the Dorking Drama Group who are making a play everything is going well until gruesome accidents start happening but the group ignores it until a prop falls down and kills someone. The police do an investigation but conclude that it was a accident so the play goes on, but everybody…
Reading about individuals whose ways of life are dramatically different from our own provides readers with fresh insights into their own experiences and ideas. A reader of A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt, may not be accustomed to the actions of the play’s characters. Though, it is important to figure out and understand…
Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5, 1850 at Chateau de Miromesnil in France. He was a descendent of a very old French family. As a boy, Maupassant went to school at Yvetot in Normandy, and then attended Lycee at Rouen. During his childhood and youth in Normandy, he picked up a great deal…
Arthur C. Clarke, a science fiction author, has had a very interesting life. Arthur was born on December 16, 1917, in Minehead, England. He was the oldest of four children. His two brothers were Frederick and Michael, and his sister’s name was Mary. As a child, he enjoyed science very much. He lived on a…
In every author’s life, there is an event or sequence of childhood/ early adulthood events that have shaped the author’s life and general point of view. These events often color or influence the author’s outlook and filter their way into the author’s work. In Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte, this is clearly shown. The reader…
In the novel, Billy Budd, by Herman Melville, Captain Vere is the “tragic hero”. He is neither good nor evil, but rather a man whose concept of order, discipline, and legality forces him to obey the codes of an authority higher than himself even though he may be in personal disagreement. Captain Vere is sailor…
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” written in 1797, has been widely discussed throughout literary history. Although critics have come up with many different interpretations of this poem, one idea that has remained prevalent throughout these discussions is the apparent religious symbolism present throughout this poem. “The Ancient Mariner” contains natural,…
John Steinbeck always makes it a point to know about his subjects first hand. His stories always have some factual basis behind them. Otherwise, he does not believe that they will be of any value beyond an artistic impression. Therefore, most of his novels take place in California, the site of his birth and young…
The Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf is the most important work of Old English literature, and is well deserved of the distinction. The epic tells the story of a hero, a Scandinavian prince named Beowulf, who rids the Danes of the monster Grendel, a descendent of Cain, and of his exploits fighting Grendel’s mother and a Dragon. …