Anna Avalon Anna Avalon is the narrator’s mother and the story’s protagonist. At the time of the narrator’s recollection, Anna is blind, though she was once able to see. Anna is the character who is most fully developed, the one whose history and emotions are explained and provide the meat of the story. Anna is…
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The Leap by Louise Erdrich – Summary
‘‘The Leap’’ begins with the narrator telling how her mother, Anna, is the surviving member of a blindfolded trapeze duo known as the Flying Avalons. Although now blind, Anna never stumbles or falls, never knocks over objects in the New Hampshire home she shares with the narrator, who has come back to her childhood home…
The Heavenly Christmas Tree – Analysis
The author of short fiction must be extremely economical in the choice of words and images. There is little space for nonessential commentary in a short story. One must therefore assume that in Dostoevsky’s short story ‘‘The Heavenly Christmas Tree,’’ there are no wasted words or images; everything is significant. Given that Dostoevsky devotes a…
The Heavenly Christmas Tree – Setting
Nineteenth-Century European Literary Movements Russian realism as a literary movement flourished during the latter half of the nineteenth century, which coincided with Dostoevsky’s literary career. His works and those of other prominent Russian fiction writers—including Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev—exemplified the characteristics of the realist movement. Russian realist fiction represented a reaction against the romanticism…
The Heavenly Christmas Tree – Literary Devices
Realism Dostoevsky is known for the realism he employs to describe his characters. Realism is a literary term used to describe an author’s presentation of the details of man’s existence in a way that is true to life. Sometimes it is used in conjunction with the term psychological. Psychological realism, a technique Dostoevsky employs in…
The Heavenly Christmas Tree – Themes
Poverty Throughout ‘‘The Heavenly Christmas Tree,’’ Dostoevsky portrays the poverty of the residents in his urban Russian setting. Not only does he delineate the effects of poverty on his characters but he also comments on society’s response to the poor. As the story opens, the narrator highlights the extreme conditions under which the boy and…
The Heavenly Christmas Tree – Characters
The Boy The unnamed boy is the main character of ‘‘The Heavenly Christmas Tree.’’ The narrator describes the child as a boy of six, or perhaps even younger. It is wintertime and he is lodging in a cellar with his ailing mother. Scared, cold, and hungry, the child leaves the cellar in search of food….
The Heavenly Christmas Tree – Summary
Dostoevsky’s short story ‘‘The Heavenly Christmas Tree’’ opens with the narrator observing that as a writer, specifically a novelist, he has created this story, although he has the sense that it surely must have actually happened at one time somewhere. As the narrator explains, a little boy aged six years or younger wakes up one…
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment – Analysis – Moral Lesson
There are different ways to appreciate a story like Hawthorne’s ‘‘Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.’’ It is often read as a story about growing old gracefully, a message that is buoyed up by the creepy elements that make the story interesting. On the other hand, the fact that it is written by one of the great names…
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment – Setting – Dark Romanticism
Dark Romanticism Hawthorne came at the end of the literary movement called romanticism, when the American version had evolved in several different directions. In Hawthorne, and in his contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe, the ideals of romanticism came to manifest themselves as an offshoot that literary critics refer to as ‘‘dark romanticism.’’ The romantic movement developed…