In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien the author tells about his experiences in the Vietnam War by telling various war stories. The quote, “It has been said of war that it is a world where the past has a strong grip on the present, where machines seemed sometimes to have more…
The Terminal Man was about the neuropsychiatric section of a hospital doing a breakthrough surgery to help reverse the effects of psycho motor epilepsy. The patient’s name was Harry Benson. Harry had psycho motor epilepsy because he hit his head in a car accident and it resulted in brain damage. Harry was a good subject…
Edgar Allan Poe, whose personal torment so powerfully informed his visionary prose and poetry, is a towering figure in the history of American literature. A Virginia gentleman and the son of itinerant actors, the heir to great fortune and a disinherited outcast, a university man who had failed to graduate, a soldier brought out of…
In The Stranger, Albert Camus portrays Meursault, the book’s narrator and main character, as aloof, detached, and unemotional. He does not think much about events or their consequences, nor does he express much feeling in relationships or during emotional times. He displays impassiveness throughout the book in his reactions to the people and events described…
The Sting is a classic story of revenge for the death of a good friend. Instead of the revenge being an eye for an eye, Hill has the leading characters get their revenge by coning the, man responsible for the death, out of his money. Within the first ten minutes you are grabbed into the…
The story speaks of two girls who are born to be comrades. Annabel and Midge lives in the same milieu, and likes to eat the same kind of foods and sandwiches. The author describes in detail the way of living of these two friends. They like to eat sandwiches full of sugar, chocolate, butter, and…
Stephen King’s The Stand is a thrilling novel that portrays the forces of good against evil. In the year 1991, a plague strikes America, leaving only a few thousand people alive who are “immune” to the epidemic. Of the survivors, those who serve G-d instinctively join in Boulder, Colorado, while those who worship the “Dark…
An extraordinary story about an extraordinary robot. In the twenty-first century the creation of the positronic brain leads to the development of robot laborers and revolutionizes life on Earth. However, to the Martin family, their household robot NDR-113 is more than a tool; it is a trusted friend, a confidant, and a member of the…
Setting Only at the beginning of the book, the story is located in England, but later all the events are transferred to Africa. The actions of The Place of Lions develop mostly in Serengeti Plain, Tanzania, in a savannah full of wild animals and danger. In the book there is not showed the exact year…
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is the story of moral corruption by the means of aestheticism. In the novel, the well meaning artist Basil Hallward presets young Dorian Gray with a portrait of himself. After conversing with cynical Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian makes a wish which dreadfully affects his life forever. “If…
In William Saroyan’s play The Oyster and the Pearl there is a lot of symbolism. The theme of the play is to take it easy and relax and life will be much happier. Harry Van Dusen is a barber that has a philosophy of “Take it easy.” He tries to spread his philosophy by talking…
In the book the Outsider by S.E. Hinton Ponyboy is the main character, in the book he is mostly referred to as Pony. Pony has two brothers, Sodapop and Darry. Pony is fourteen and doesn’t have any parent’s; they died in a car accident. Pony and Soda and Darry all live in the same house,…
The story of Silas Marner is a beautiful, eloquently told story which gives the reader a vivid depiction of the period in which it takes place in a rustic village in England in the 1800s. The story evokes many emotions from the reader as well as teaches some moral lessons about life which are timeless.…
In The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway describes an old fisherman and the unfortunate trials he faces as his “luck” runs out. Through the novel, the fisherman, Santiago, replicates Hemingway’s ideal man, a noble hero. Hemingway had a Code of Behavior that he himself followed. He had morals that were strict and an…
Chapter One Here we learn that a small town has been taken over by one of the many Nazi groups during World War Two. Mr. Corell “The town good guy”, the way I view it, sent the town postmen and policemen on a boating trip, keeping them from the invasion (we learn later that “The…
The Mill on the Floss is a book written by George Eliot, whose real name is Mary Anne (later Marian) Evans. There is a great deal of autobiography in this book. The facts of Mary Anne’s life do not match Maggie Tulliver, but there is an obvious reflection of her own life. Book One: Chapter1-13…
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers is the story of an adolescent girl who triumphs over loneliness and gains maturity through an identity that she creates for herself in her mind. It is with this guise that twelve year old Frankie Adams begins to feel confident about herself and life. The author seems…
In The Martial Chronicles, Ray Bradbury provides a glimpse into the future that not only looks at people from a technological standpoint, but from a human one as well. His well crafted, almost poetic stories are science fiction in setting only. They put much more emphasis on the apathy and inhumanity of modern society, rather…
Shirley Jackson’s insights and observations about man and society are reflected in her famous short story “The Lottery”. Many of her readers have found this story shocking and disturbing. Jackson reveals two general attitudes in this story: first, the shocking reality of human’s tendency to select a scapegoat and second, society as a victim of…
Everybody has read a horror story before at some point, but a story from Alfred Hitchcock is different because at the end he leaves the reader thinking what has happened. In “The Knife” he uses Plot, Setting, and Conflict to do just this. Edward Dawes and Herbert Smithers are just two friends having a drink…