As one retired stage driver remarked, "Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away." The statement by Harmon Gow, a resident of Starkfield, relates to Ethan Frome, the protagonist of the novel, Ethan Frome. This book pieces together the enigmatic life of a man bound by the shackles of silence and isolation. By deftly heightening suspense and foreshadowing plot, Edith Wharton explores nature's degeneration ofhuman spirit and vitality.
The descriptive language used in the second stanza assumes a certain brilliance when the poem reflects a positive tone when he says “the wide wide heavens!” He uses a sense of heightened colour when describing the nature surrounding him, e.g. “purple heath flowers!” Coleridge realises toward the end of the imaginative journey that nature is all around us for those who have the desire, passion and determination to search for it. Conversational tone is also conveyed in ‘Frost at Midnight’. Frost at Midnight is in an secluded cottage during the stillness of night. “The frost performs its secret ministry” at the start of the first stanza implies personification used to establish the stunning silence of nature and the frost falling outside.
While these descriptions cause the reader to be able to imagine the cold, dark, dreary weather, it is the raven that causes the setting to really set itself into the reader’s mind. In the first stanza the reader is introduced to the tapping and rapping that is made by an unknown source, but it is not until the end of the fourth stanza that the protagonist finally opens the door to face what is making the noise. Upon opening the door the protagonist sees only darkness: and Poe writes, “But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token†(27). These sounds, which the reader assumes are made by the raven, helped to set the eerie and ghostly setting of the piece. Without the raven, the mysterious force at play would have never been realized.
Life is made up of times of sadness and times of gladness. Compare Dawe’s poems and One Day of the Year when considering this. Life is a journey comprised of both wonderful and troubled experiences. Set in the 1960s, Seymour’s play “The One Day of the Year” (“Day”), makes a commentary on the nature of relationships, similar to that of Bruce Dawe’s poem “Enter without so much as knocking” (“Enter”). The theme of conflict is prevalent in these two texts, as well as another one of Dawe’s poem “Victorian Hangman tells his love” (“Hangman”).
In it the idea of a traditional ghost story is suggested which shows us forewarning for the rest of the novel. A ghost story relies on atmosphere, often shown through weather and the gothic genre. The weather is a huge signal throughout the novel, which is used as a signal to when terrible things are about to happen. For example, the nine lives causeway is described as ‘submerged and untraceable’, this suggests that Eel Marsh house is miserable and that everything is hidden. From this the reader can see that Susan Hill has explored the theme by creating it as a forewarning through the weather and setting.
The name suggests that the protagonist is an ordinary person sharing the surname of so many others, but also has the ring of a hero like Churchill. The weather seems ever so customary to Britain; horrible basically so readers could associate to this also. The smell inside the building is one that readers would recognise, all this familiarity enables people to be able to build up a mental image of how Orwell envisioned this dystopian world to be like, readers could
Chapter Four Write a detailed, analytical response to this chapter. Shelley utilises a lot of description and imagery throughout this section of the novel. For example, she opens the chapter illustrating a “dreary night of November”. Her use here of pathetic fallacy immediately sets the tone as bleak and dull. She continues, using phrases such as “the rain pattered dismally against the pane”, to create a subdued and hopeless atmosphere.
We can see 3 symbols in the first chapter — prison, cemetery and rose. They respectively represent the Puritan Society, mortality, and pain or human’s beautiful but fragile hope. This sets a gloomy opening for the dark novel, in which readers can hardly find any merry plots. Also in chapter 7, the outré garden of the Governor’s Hall divulges problems of decay and disrepair in the Puritan society in Boston. The main symbols are the scaffold and the scarlet letter, they have a key difference in function — the scaffold witnessed the changes of the characters as time went by, while the scarlet letter seemed never change, imposing the same burden on Hester Prynne, and brought out the theme of the story － the effects of sin and guilt on human heart.
Ambrose Bierce’s Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge In cursory read of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” which often involves close attention to the dream escape of Peyton Farquhar and the plot of this Ambrose Bierce story, one of the more striking elements of the tale is the cold and distant narrator who relates, with icy distance, the scene before him in meticulous and often, what may seem like unnecessary detail. This highly distanced narrator in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” creates a sense of distance for the reader as well and by the end of the story, when it is clear that Farquhar is dead, the ending is all the more shocking because the narrator sets himself as being highly credible for real events because of his precision with the beginning details and exact descriptions. In short, for this essay on “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, examine the narrator as a developer of reader trust in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek” and examine the way in which he or she lends to the shock of the ending via narrative techniques. One of the strange paradoxes concerning “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce is its strong and disconcerting blending of genres. On the surface and, in fact, for the first-time reader of the story, until the end this seems like a quintessential work of realism but in fact, as the conclusion reveals, it is anything but realism; it is more surrealism as it is discovered that this was an elaborate dream.
The Fabric of Genres in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winters Night a Traveller by Arka Chakroborty and Shouvik Bhattacharya ‘“Reading,” he says, “is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing that is made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present…”’ - If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (page 72) As the World War II poised the humanity at the bottom of an intricate topography of darkness and despair, the postmodern imagination sought to express itself and its pessimist idea about life and existence by discontinuing or by attempting to discontinue with all the traditional attributes of literature as well as society. Postmodernism tried to elbow itself away even from some modern techniques as the postmodernist authors and critics found those techniques already “institutionalized” and conventional. Postmodernist works frequently combine aspects of diverse genres. The purity of genre within a text –an idea originated with Aristotle in his Poetics-is something which postmodernism rejected quite boastfully and the distinction between “high art” and “low art” which the previous literary ages accepted readily was now out of ark in the terrain of postmodernism. Besides not bending towards the traditional elitist “high art” postmodernists have also a tendency to appeal to the popular culture like cartoons, music, “pop art”, and television.