A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) reminded me that happiness is an eternal pursuit and to embrace the joy that my mundane life has to offer. The “treasure” referred to in the story is life pleasures. The author cleverly masks this in the beginning by using the words “it” and “here.” I was drawn to this story because of its sinister title, believing the house or its occupants would be the traditional antagonists. However, as I became immersed in the imagery used in the story, I realized I wanted the ghosts to find their “treasure.” I was able to create a mental picture of what is being described. Examples of imagery include, “The doors go shutting in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.” I felt as if I were right there with the ghosts as the moved through the house.
A Wrinkle in Time Reflects the Cultural Clime: Madeline L’Engle and America It is virtually impossible to pigeonhole A Wrinkle in Time. It is, first and foremost, a children’s novel. Its subject matter, however, deals with good and evil on a universal scale, tackling matters that confound many adults. It was groundbreaking in its approach, assuming that children would be more than capable of grasping its moral and scientific concepts. In fact, the scientific concepts themselves were quite revolutionary in their presentation.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Our memory organizes information, knowledge, and experiences within a complex internal library. We tend to think of this facility as an accurate historian or a safe storage vault — but it isn't. Think of our memory as a wandering novelist who constantly edits the past and assembles interesting bits of knowledge, information, and experience in new storylines. The movie is an interesting psychological drama that proficiently explores the emotional uproar of love and loss. Joel Barish is a confused and stunned young man who swept off his feet by a romance that takes him to places he never dreamt of going.
The story is told by the main protagonist Yorick. This makes the story a lot more personal as you are taken through events with the same emotions and opinions as this man. He appears to be reliable as nothing is too extreme or descriptive in order for the reader to question anything. This romantic novel, similar to ‘The Magic Toyshop’, has a stream of consciousness. Both of these contrast with the dual narrative in Wuthering Heights.
Kurt Vonnegut’s short story "Harrison Bergeron" is a satirical science fiction tale about the dark side of an ideal, utopian American society. Nothing is overtly suggestive of negativity, however, as the story is told through the third-person point of view of an objective narrator. Yet the implications and subtleties of the narrator’s descriptions are nothing short of tragic, often even comically so. Vonnegut’s use of dark satire evokes a strong response as it makes one quickly realize that this utopian society is more resembling of a dystopia. A dystopia is defined as a seemingly utopian society with at least one fatal flaw; in Vonnegut’s "Harrison Bergeron", the setting is "a ruthlessly egalitarian society, in which ability and accomplishment, or even competence, are suppressed or stigmatized as forms of inequality" ("Dystopia," online).
J.R.R. Tolkien writes, “The fairy-story is a foretaste of a life that does not consist on ‘endless serial living’ but nourishes ‘the oldest and deepest desire: the Great Escape’- from death itself (dlibrary.acu.edu).” These books are a great way for the mind to take a brief breather from all the problems and stress that are created in the world around us. When you read Harry Potter it frees you from the cling that one has on the world as it is or the idea of the boring disenchanting real world. Harry Potter being a fantasy story gives us the opportunity to let our mind make sense of something that is not in our realm of reality. These kinds of stories let our imagination grab hold of us and take us to a world that only the brain can conjure up.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty In the short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” I find Walter to be a very interesting character. He peaked my interest because of his day dreams and the humorous way he went about living. Walter seems to be rejected by society as well as his own wife. He responds to this treatment by going into a far away place and living out a more fun and adventurous lifestyle. By being absolutely unaware of the world around him, some feel that he is a very negative person.
While clearly pertaining to the fantasy genre, Grimm brothers’ tales have many realistic themes (family, marriage, fortune, heredity, power) veiled by an accessible language, an unambiguous style and an atmosphere of childish naïveté. However, the world evoked in the book does not belong to the children: innocence is sanitized (e.g. Hans in Luck), while manipulation and inveiglement are praised (e.g.The Raven). This collection is not a moral guide as it gives practical lessons about life. The unsuspecting reader does not enter a magical childlike land, but he progressively masters the art of manipulation.
In narrative terms, it serves as the catalyst for the introduction of the realistic concerns evident in the context of the novel. The magical allows the visualisation of the metaphor by bringing to life a literalized metaphor in the narrative. It helps to magnify the truth to huge proportions, allowing the readers to examine it and see it more clearly, thus forming a better understanding of Gregor as a character and the issues that he is facing. For Gregor, his metamorphosis from man to insect is representative of the ‘dehumanisation’ he is undergoing in his life. He is trapped in a situation where his work consumes his life;
However, being threatened of torture towards the end, his "fear of physical pain" dismisses the hero label stuck to Galileo showing that his instinct for survival and fear of mortal pain is human. This idea shows that Galileo is not necessarily fearful in character, rather it shows power of the will to survive which a common thread that runs through humanity. It shows Galileo’s pragmatic ideology, keeping in mind that he was a logical thinker and a scientist, in choosing life so he could continue his research rather than choosing the stake to become a martyr for his