Ortiz Cofer’s ‘‘Aunty Misery’’ is a retold Puerto Rican folktale that appears to explain the existence of misery in the world. The story also asserts the value of death. While the tale is Puerto Rican in origin, there is nothing in its content that indicates this. The themes in the story are universal, transcending not…
Tag: Analysis
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – Essay – Explained
Carver had stopped drinking by the time Furious Seasons was published, but he had not yet returned to writing. When he did, his stories were markedly different from what they had been. The obsessions were the same, but the stories were much darker, reflecting the hell of marital discord and alcoholism that Carver himself had…
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – Analysis
Carver is best known for his minimalist writing style, as embodied in a sparse use of language and paired down prose. He is also known as a neorealist, capturing the working class milieu of blue-collar America with his mundane, naturalistic, everyday dialogue. Nevertheless, he does make use of figurative language throughout “What We Talk About…
That Evening Sun – Analysis
William Faulkner’s fictional world of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, is one of the most familiar locales in all of world literature. The families who inhabit the county—the Sutpens, McCaslins, Snopeses, and Compsons, among others—have family lives more vivid and more well-documented than many real families. As in the South in which Faulkner himself grew up, in…
Suspicion by Dorothy L. Sayers – Analysis
In her introduction to the The Floating Admiral, which Dorothy L. Sayers and other members of the Detection Club wrote collaboratively, Sayers set out the rules that the mystery writers were bound to follow: “Put briefly, it amounts to this: that the author pledges himself to play the game with the public . . ….
The Spinoza of Market Street – Analysis
Critic Lawrence Alexander has pointed out that Isaac Bashevis Singer “almost always writes as a Jew, to Jews, for Jews: and yet he is heard by everybody.” Other critics have concurred that it is through Singer’s very specific focus on the vanished world of Chassidic Jewry in the shtetls (small Eastern European Jewish communities) of…
The Pagan Rabbi – Analysis
Critics have noted that Cynthia Ozick’s stories are difficult. This assessment is in part due to the erudite character of Ozick’s literary style, which makes reference to literary, philosophical, and theological texts not necessarily familiar to the reader. In particular, there are many references to elements of religious doctrine, ritual, and observance practices specific to…
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka – Essay
While the young businessman Georg Bendemann is condemned to death in Kafka’s metaphorical world, the young commercial traveler Gregor Samsa in “Die Verwandlung” ( “The Metamorphosis”) must live out the last months of his life in the same world changed as a giant bug, which resembles a cockroach. Compared with “Die Verwandlung,” the little prose…
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka – Analysis – Symbols
Probably the two most memorable images in ”The Metamorphosis” occur in its first section: first the picture of Gregor Samsa transformed into an insect, lying on his back in bed and unable to get up, with all his little legs fluttering helplessly in the air; and second the picture of Gregor the giant insect stuck…
The Lesson by Toni Cade Bambara – Essay
The question of identity—of personal definition within the context of community—emerges as a central motif for Toni Cade Bambara’s writing. Her female characters become as strong as they do, not because of some inherent “eternal feminine” quality granted at conception, but rather because of the lessons women learn from communal interaction. Identity is achieved, not…