Summary: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is a careful character study of Keiko, a widowed bar hostess in Tokyo’s fashionable Ginza neighbourhood. At age 30, Keiko faces three life choices: to remarry before her society regards her as too old to do so, to become a kept woman of a wealthy business owner, or…
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A collection of high-quality academic essays.
Once Were Warriors: Summary, Analysis
Summary: Jake is an alpha male in a man’s world who engages in domestic violence as easily as he does a pub brawl. By reconnecting with her Maori roots his wife, Beth, finds the strength to break out from the cycle of violence and take her children away from Jake, but not before their teenage…
On The Waterfront: Summary, Analysis
Summary: After he is used to unwittingly set up Edie Doyle’s brother to be murdered, Terry Malloy begins to see those who run the longshoremen’s trade union for the thugs they have always been. He falls in love with Edie, and through her and Father Barry has his eyes opened to the injustices of life…
Om Shanti Om – Summary & Analysis
Summary: Om Shanti Om tells the story of Om, a junior artist in the Bombay film industry of the 1970s, and Shanti Priya, a big star in a secret marriage with a film producer, Mike. Om is in love with Shanti. Om witnesses the brutal murder of Shanti by Mike because he wants to marry…
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas – Analysis
Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” was first published in 1973 in New Dimensions 3 and has been published in many anthologies since. When it appeared for the second time in 1975 as part of her short story collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Le Guin added a two page preface in…
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas – Setting
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas was first published in 1973 in New Directions 3. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of enormous political, social, and cultural upheaval in the United States, and most likely the events of this period influenced Le Guin’s writing of the story. America’s involvement in the…
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas – Literary Devices
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is the story of Omelas, a city where everyone seems to be happy and to live in peace and harmony. Toward the end of the story, however, the narrator reveals that the happiness of Omelas is dependent on the existence of a child who is locked in a…
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas – Themes
Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic short story is of a Utopian society whose survival depends on the existence of a child who is locked in a small room and mistreated. Although all of the citizens of Omelas are aware of the child’s situation, most of them accept that their happiness is dependent on the child’s…
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas – Characters
The Child The child, whose existence is revealed toward the end of the story, is abused and mistreated so the other citizens of Omelas can live in prosperity and happiness. Locked in a small room or closet with no windows, the child is dirty, naked, and malnourished. It receives only half a bowl of corn…
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas – Summary
Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic short story opens as the celebration of the Festival of Summer is getting underway in the city of Omelas. There is an air of genuine excitement about the festival, with its flag-adorned boats, noisy running children, prancing horses, and “great joyous clanging of the bells.” The narrator, who never identifies…