Newest Literature Essays

"Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it in hiding." ---Ralph Waldo Emerson

A society constrained to specific social standards reprimands those who do not conform to such principles. In the process, a...

During the Elizabethan age, love sonnets traditionally told the story of men in love with unattainable women. However, Spenser's sonnets from his sonnet sequence "Amoretti" defy the general pessimism and give an optimistic look at love. In fact,...

For Benjy and Quentin Compson, memory in "The Sound and the Fury" is a tool for discovering and escaping reality. Both brothers have trouble seeing the past as part of a chain linked to both the present and the future. Benjy does not recognize...

A sense of 'authorial design' in William Faulkner's 'The Sound And The Fury' does not make itself apparent until the second section of the book, narrated by the suicidal Quentin, although the seeds of this design are planted in the earliest pages...

In Faulkerâs The Sound and the Fury, Caddy, the central figure, is never given a voice. Instead, her character is revealed through the narratives of her three brothers. Since the novel is largely surrounded by the concept of alternating truths,...

In The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner draws attention to Benjy's ability to watch through his inability to speak. His character tends toward omniscience, as he constantly stumbles upon (or takes part in) various clandestine acts but does not...

William Faulkner presents the story of Caddy in The Sound and the Fury in a unique and precise way by showing how her family views her. Caddy's life becomes the central conflict in the lives of the Compsons, and her story, paralleled with the...

In the postwar South, the relationships between men and women were beginning to shift. Gwendolyn Chabrier writes, "While the prewar South was traditionally a patriarchy, at the time of the war and particularly afterwards, that paternal system was...

I remember the first time I really heard classical music. As long as I can remember I have loved music, but growing up, no matter how many times my parents dragged me, kicking and screaming, to the symphony, or my piano teacher tried to teach me a...

In The Sound and the Fury, the fated Compson family is a portrayal of both the declining old South and the new South that rose demonically out of its ruins. Through the Compsons, Faulkner personifies at once the mournful self-pity of a fallen...

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury deals with man's relationship with time and sequence. The complexities of the book, from its variety of narrators to the order of its chapters, support Faulkner's primary experimentation with time. But The...

As Quentin Compson travels through the countryside with his college friends, the reality of the situation becomes terribly confused by memories and past feelings. After a little girl follows him for miles around town, his own sexuality reaches the...

Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say. I says you're lucky if her playing out of school is all that worries you. I says she ought to be down there in that kitchen right now, instead of up there in her room, gobbing paint on her face and waiting...

As the referent of the individual, the body functions as a site for contradiction, resistance, and reassertion. It embodies a set of rules that delineates individual space through an exclusion of that which is not self. In Goethe's The Sorrows of...

From the beginning of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Werther emphasizes his connection to Nature in order to embellish the tragically creative persona he presents to Wilhelm. As his infatuation with Charlotte grows and he laments the injustice and...

James Baldwin provides several constructions of black masculinity through his two texts Everybody's Protest Novel and Sonny's Blues. Since this essay is comparing works from the same author, it is essential to look at what these constructions are...

Music is a powerful language which speaks to us, moves us, and fills us with emotion. In Sonny's Blues, the voice of Jazz mediates the relationship between two brothers. As the older brother's appreciation of music grows, he understands better the...

William Wordsworth and William Blake were both distraught by the plight of man in the early nineteenth century. Their separate but somewhat unified visions of man's problems are displayed in their poems "Lines Written in Early Spring," (lines...

Blake was undoubtedly a fierce critic of many aspects of 18th century society, and through his poetry, called on people to free themselves from the 'mind-forged manacles' which religious dominance and social conventions had placed upon them. His...

In literature, what does it mean for somebody to fly? Ovid's Metamorphoses, chronicles of Greco-Roman mythology dating over 2000 years ago, depicts the failure of flight through the fates of Icarus and Phaeton, victims of hubris. Written by Toni...

THIS IS A NOVEL SOMEWHAT IN THE TELEGRAPHIC SCHIZOPHRENIC MANNER OF TALES OF THE PLANET TRALFAMADORE

The foreshadowing of events in Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five' is as much a subtle indication of things to come as it is an expository...

"Fate: 'what has been spoken,' a power beyond men's control that is held to determine what happens" (Webster's Intermediate Dictionary 270).

Everywhere in the world, people attribute events to fate because of the belief that one has no control...

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is the tale of a gawky World War II veteran/soldier, Billy Pilgrim. His wartime experiences and their effects lead him to the ultimate conclusion that war is unexplainable. To portray this effectively,...

In Sister Carrie, the city is the narrator. It is the main focus of the book, and greatly impacts all those who are influenced by its magnitude. For some, it is a beacon of hope and a promised land of wealth and opportunity, while for others its...