Summary: Deewaar is the story of two brothers, Vijay and Ravi Verma, who follow widely divergent paths as adults – Vijay is a dockyard worker and later smuggler, while Ravi is the honest cop. When the management threatens to harm his family, their father an honest trade union leader is forced to sign an agreement…
Tag: Analysis
The Decline Of The American Empire – Summary and Analysis
Summary: Eight friends, four women and four men, most of them academics, spend a sunny September day chatting about culture, history, food and sex – mainly sex. The men, history professors Rémy and Pierre, their gay friend Claude, an art historian, and teaching assistant Alain, spend the afternoon in a comfortable country house by the…
Daughters Of The Dust – Summary and Analysis
Summary: Daughters of the Dust is a 1991 American film written and directed by Julie Dash. Set at the turn of the twentieth century in the Gullah Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, Daughters of the Dust is the fictional account of the Peazant family on the eve of some members’…
Lady With A Lapdog – Summary and Analysis
Summary: For many viewers of this cinematic adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 1899 short story, the plot is familiar before the film begins. The middle-aged Dmitrii Gurov (Aleksei Batalov) meets the young Anna Sergeevna (Iia Savvina) while vacationing in Yalta. Their friendship quickly transitions into a romantic affair. Gurov’s unconcerned snacking on watermelon following their first…
In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried: Analysis
What is most striking about “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” widely considered one of Amy Hempel’s finest and most moving stories, is its compression and its pain. The writing here is terse; much is left out. The parts left out are what give the story its emotional power. This same minimalist style…
A Good Man Is Hard To Find – Analysis
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is one of the most widely discussed of all Flannery O’Connor’s stories. It also provides an excellent introduction to her work because it contains all the major ingredients characteristic of the remarkable literary legacy left by a woman who only lived to be thirty-nine years old and who…
Gimpel the Fool: Analysis
“Gimpel the Fool” is widely viewed as Isaac Bashevis Singer’s most popular short story. Singer originally wrote the story for a Yiddish newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward, and then Saul Bellow translated it into English for The Partisan Review in 1953, bringing “Gimpel” and Singer to the attention of American readers. Gimpel is a kind…
The Gift of the Magi – Analysis
It would be difficult to find a reader of short American fiction who does not have at least an acquaintance with O. Henry’s story “The Gift of the Magi.” This story, penned for the Christmas edition of a weekly magazine, is essential O. Henry. It is as synonymous with his name as its technique of…
The Fall of the House of Usher: Analysis
What happens in “The Fall of the House of Usher”? This story contains many suggestions of psychic and supernatural influences upon the feelings of the narrator and the nerves of Roderick Usher. But the influences are not defined. No ghosts appear. Surely, Poe as craftsman intended the story to do what it does, to arouse…
Everyday Use by Alice Walker: Analysis
Alice Walker’s early story “Everyday Use” is clustered around a central image: quilting and quilts. Her use of this metaphor is important to critics because she went on to develop the theme more fully in her later work, especially the novel The Color Purple. Simply put, the quilt is a metaphor for the ways in…