World War II was and still is the most deadly war of all time, leaving 60 million people dead and countless others injured. It involved several nations, but left an impression on almost all nations worldwide. One word that often resonates from the thought of World War II is “holocaust.” It is something that, to this day, is taught in schools and is an important, yet tragic part of history. There are multiple famous pieces of literature that capture just how horrendous this war was, and some of the most impactful pieces are the ones written at the time of the war from someone’s perspective. Readers are able to view Paris just as it was during World War II through Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise. This book depicts what life was like in France in the 1940s, and…
William Adair's thesis focuses mainly on the central aspect of the novel, The Sun Also Rises, which is gossip. Throughout the novel, The Sun Also Rises, characters such as Jake would spy on others only to have information on the latest. Jake, for instance, was the main contributor about all the gossip, even spreading rumors about his own friend Cohn. Several months had passed before Jake took it upon himself to write a review of Cohn's novel with the intent to find more information to use against him. As readers progress through the novel, they'll slowly realize Jake's stories are not factual as he makes readers turn against Cohn or creates an ugly picture of Cohn's physical appearance. As the story continues Cohn is the most easily talked…
Redactive Poem The redactive poem I wrote about, is inspired by a page in the wonderful novel “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr. The main theme of it is that sometimes things or situations are not what they seem to appear. During the time of the war many presious artifacts, such as jewles, were stolen or loss forever. In this particular case, Marie and her father are constantly on the look out for a presious dimond called The Sea of Flames.…
In All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, the tragedy of World War II is exposed and seen through the eyes of the guilty men who aided in its vengeful mission. Nazism flourished, as it let the masses of Germany believe in their own self-importance again. Their dreams were revived. Adolf Hitler exploited this weakness by fabricating an opulent future for those whose lives had been ravaged by the Treaty of Versailles. One man with one idea lifted up an entire country, but he did not want or care for their hope.…
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is a novel about the impact war has on innocent people's lives. The struggles of people with disabilities in a time where people weren’t very kind to each other was mentioned often in the story. Doerr writes often about people who coped with and tried to cure blindness through curses, roadblocks, treasure hunts and terrible allies. It seemed that the search for answers and finding hope was the main theme of the story. But it was very sad and dark often, it was depressing in some parts.…
In the book, All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, many of the characters stories can seem fascinating to the modern reader. Marie’s story deals with her blindness, and how her father attempts to assist her by making a model of the neighborhood they used to live in, making puzzle boxes for her to solve on her birthdays, and even traveling with her on his back through the French countryside to Saint-Malo when the Germans attacked their town. Werner’s story, which is quite fascinating, deals with the grim, bleak, and cloudy lifestyle that he used to live in when he was an orphan. Eventually, through his innovative ingenuity, he manages to impress a German military official, and gets caught in the brutal trap that is the Wehrmacht. Werner…
The world can be a place full of darkness which can impact one’s everyday life. In Oliver Sacks’ essay, “The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See”, the people discussed live in a world of darkness due to their lack of sight, while in Azar Nafisi’s essay, “Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, the author and her group of students live in a dark would under an oppressive government. No matter what kind of darkness one lives in, he or she must make the best out of the situation. Although living in a dark world can be very tough at times, there are ways to escape. People who live in a world of darkness can find hope in their lives through their imagination.…
It is these kind of passages that riddle the novel. It is these passages that make it unique. Marie being blind might makes us think that her world is devoid of senses and colors, but it is just the opposite. Doerr spends an astonishing amount of time in the novel vividly describing Marie’s world and senses. He spends whole a chapter describing, through Marie, what a cave of snails feels like or what the crashing of waves sounds like. Even without her sight Marie’s world is full of senses. This also plays in the title All the Light We Cannot See. Aside from the metaphorical and figurative meanings, it has a very physical meaning to Marie. There literally a lot of light that she cannot see. But in her world all of this “light” is in her other…
Similarities exist between the characters in All the Light We Cannot See and the people during World War II; both in literature and reality, people experienced the effects of being influenced by the war. Education played a very important role in creating a loyal following for Hitler because children are easy to brainwash since they are still naive and clueless about what is wrong or right. At school, the students were taught to worship Hitler, every class would started with a song that would brainwash students to be loyal to Hitler and the Nazi Germany. Likewise, this idea was seen in the novel as Werner sings: “ O take me, take me up into the ranks so that I do not die a common death! I do not want to die in vain, what I want is to fall…
In The Embers and the Stars by Kohák the intersection of time and eternity is expressed. Kohák has focused on "natural" time, which is to say that time is not just what is expressed by a clock, or with a series of numbers on a clock. "It is, rather, set within the matrix of nature's rhythm which establishes personal yet non-arbitrary reference points." This means that time is not measured in seconds, minutes, or hours but by personal existence and experience. These "reference points" are experiences in your life that are meaningful and you help spatially distinguish points in time. Time as we know it is explained by Kohák as a "construct imposed upon nature's rhythm, subordination and ordering it". He does say that it is a useful construct, but as for the theory of relativity time does not hold up.…
The world can be perceived in many different ways. The blind, the deaf, children, adults, teenagers, parents, all “see” the world in a different way. It is an author’s job to convey how he “sees” the world to his readers. Oliver Sacks does this quite well. Through his use of analogies and other rhetorical strategies, Oliver Sacks greatly enhances the reader’s view of a newly sighted man’s life and in turn, the reader’s view of the world.…
Using powerful imagery and an interesting way of storytelling, Paradise of the Blind describes the Vietnamese people's idealistic hope of Communism and how that hope was betrayed. The novel is well-written in many ways, simultaneously questioning the faults of life in modern-day Vietnam in a stubborn manner and telling a tragic tale of family conflict. The descriptions of everyday life are plentiful and illustrative in ways that help move the story along. Author Duong Thu Huong has framed the story well by presenting much of it as flashbacks within flashbacks, enabling her to movingly expose the intricate weaving of events entwined with Vietnam's troubled history as all of this affects the present. While the book discusses the political aspects of Vietnamese life, it is not merely composed of observations on communism; Huong comments much more on family loyalty and the collision between traditional customs and the fast-evolving modern world.…
“The best novels stand the test of time, providing the reader with an interesting story as well as conveying important themes and ideas”…
This is a simple poem written by the African poetCharles Mungoshi, in which a boy talks about his every day life activity. The boy like all others desperately wants to convince others or even himself that hes a grown up, and so seek to copy the activities that old people do. He wakes up every day before the rising of the sun. The boy explains the nature around him, and how his life is simple or even sometimes tiring (he wakes up very early to work hard, like grownups do).…
- Sister of Julia Salas. She is small and plump, a pretty woman with a complexion of a baby with an expression of likeable cow.…