Category: Literary Criticism

Introduction

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary writers, and also, there is no doubt that he’s one of the icons of the police genre and horror stories. He was born and died in the nineteenth century, and surprisingly, published his only novel in 1838, for the rest, he remained a journalist and writer of short stories.

This time we’re going to analyze one of Poe’s short stories that despite its clean and perfect narrative that seems linear and simple, for many, it’s full of symbolism towards life as well as towards the internal conflicts of a man: The Tell-Tale Heart. In this The Tell-Tale Heart essay, we will delve into the intricate layers of meaning woven into the seemingly straightforward narrative, uncovering the profound symbolism that reflects both the complexities of life and the inner turmoil of the story’s central character.

This story narrates the way in which the protagonist becomes a murderer, affirming that he’s not crazy because a person with little mental health wouldn’t have planned and executed a plan as perfect as his, taking care of every detail. The protagonist prepares to assassinate an old man with whom he lived, and at the end of the story, he ends up confessing his crime to the police.

What is the magic of this work written by Poe? Besides the active conflict within the protagonist’s mind about whether they should consider him crazy or not, the short story has aspects that invite us to analyze and find analogies everywhere.

Next, we will present what these aspects are, and what have been the criticisms that other people have offered about this magnificent work.

Argument of the story

Before immersing ourselves in the symbology of the story, we must bring up what The Tell-Tale Heart is about.

Written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1843, tells a man who tries to prove his supposedly mental health by giving details of how he planned and committed the murder of an old man with whom he lived. And confessing in a sinister and detailed manner all the reasons that led him to become a homicide.

The narrator insists from the first moment that he is a normal person, although his senses are very acute. The old man with whom he lives has an eye veiled by a pale blue film, like the eyes of vultures. This causes anxiety in the narrator, to the point that one day he decides to kill him.

He insists on the care he puts on and the precision of his actions, for example, in watching the old man sleep through a crack in the door. One day, when the old man opened his eye, the narrator decides to choke him with his own pillow. Then he tears up the body and hides it under the floor; finally, erase all traces. The police will come at the request of neighbors who have heard noises. The murderer invites them, confident, shows them the house and leads them to the room under which lies the dismembered corpse. Soon, the narrator seems to hear a noise. When he thinks horrified that it’s the heart of the old man who is giving him away, he collapses and confesses, loudly asking the policemen to raise the floorboards.

The most interesting part is that the story begins at the end. The beginning seems like a conversation with one or several people, and it has been speculated that the narrator is confessing to a guardian, a judge, a journalist or a doctor or psychiatrist. This may be so because of the need to explain the narrator in detail. What follows is a study of terror, but, more specifically, the memory of it, since the narrator tells of past events.

This preamble also serves to immediately capture the reader’s attention about what is being told. From this point, as was proper in Poe, each word is focused on the advance of the story, which makes this story short possibly the best reflection of the author’s theories about what a perfect story should be.

The engine of the story is the narrator’s insistence, not on his innocence (which would be normal) but on his sanity. But this reveals a self-destructive drive since it’s pretending to demonstrate sanity through guilt in the crime.

His denial of madness is based, above all, on the systematic nature of his homicidal behavior, on his precision and on the rational explanation of irrational behavior.

Thus, the final scene is nothing more than the result of the character’s guilt. Like many other characters in traditional macabre literature, passions dictate their nature.

Literary devices

Throughout the story, the author is responsible for utilizing literary figures outlined by the character in the story to denote certain key aspects of his attitude and personality. Some of the literary devices that the author uses are metaphor and irony. It also presents a series of images throughout the text.

Metaphors in The Tell-Tale Heart

A metaphor occurs when two things of a completely different nature are compared to refer to each other. According to Christoph Haase (2002), a metaphor “means of figurative language, an indirect comparison without a word showing this comparison.”. As Poe’s story unfolds, we can find a handful of metaphors. For example:

1. ‘His eye was like the eye of a vulture.’

The narrator mentions the reference of ‘vulture’s eye’ three times.

One way to interpret this is also to think directly about what this animal means. Vultures take advantage of the sick and the dead. If the old man is a vulture-like person, there is no way to know; nevertheless, this is what our narrator symbolizes.

If the vultures take advantage of the dead and almost die, and the narrator in the ‘vulture’s eye,’ does this mean that the narrator is dead or almost dead?

The eye also has some rather strange things. It seems boring and unseen, but it has strange powers. It makes the narrator’s blood cool.

2. “In the quiet night, in the dark silence of the bedroom, my anger became fear — for the heart was beating so loudly that I was sure someone must hear.”

Usually, in our daily life, we conceive our bedroom (and therefore, our bed) as a symbol of home, protection, and security. In contrast, in the short story of Edgar Allan Poe, this bed symbolizes exactly the opposite.

The narrator violates the privacy and security of the old man, completely defying him until he is murdered. This, from the perspective of Poe could mean that perhaps, that the element that provides us security, can be our greatest weakness icon.

Perhaps when (and where) we feel more secure, it’s when we are most vulnerable to others.

3. “The hands of a clock move more quickly than did my hand. Never before had I felt so strongly my own power; I was now sure of success.”

This, perhaps, is one of the most notorious resources during history and is mentioned four times.

A clock/watch is a representation of time. Although in this story, it can be said that time is watching death. Each tick of the clock symbolizes a movement closer to the inevitable death faced by all humans, and in this case, the death of the old man.

On the last night, our protagonist compares himself to a watch that is watching the death of the old man, and at the same time, controls everything that has to do with it. Then, the narrator becomes a walking watch of death.

The irony

Another of the main literary resources presented by the author is irony. Throughout the story, the protagonist emphasizes that he has control over his abilities, while the whole story proves otherwise.

Also, at the beginning of the story, the narrator doesn’t seem to give importance to the morality of his actions, diluting the commonly accepted principles (considering that the murder violates the rights and moral principles of the society in which it’s contextualized). The narrator put above morality, the acceptance of his mental health as something superior and almost supreme. The whole debate is not about whether he is good or bad, but about whether he is crazy or not.

Ironically, at the end of the story and when the narrator is not supposed to care about any moral precept, he feels guilt. This guilt is reflected in the way he ‘listens’ to the old man’s heart when the police are at home, and when this sound increases, forcing him to confess his crime.

However ‘perfect’ and ‘planned’ his crime may have been, as the narrator proclaims, a part of him succumbed to the guilt and a bit of morality that forced him to tell the whole truth.

Literary critique

There are mixed feelings and views from critics about this story. Some acclaim it, and others criticize the implausibility that exists even when it is a work cataloged as ‘realistic’.

One of Cassie Hillerby’s criticisms (2014) is that the realm of the ‘real’ world of this Poe work lost some credible aspects and that some of these could be of ‘another world’ to some extent. She comes to consider some details as incomprehensible using the theory of the mind.

More or less in that same line, David Rein (1960) claimed that the main character could be based on Poe and that he’s being guided by an ‘intense hostility’ that doesn’t have any external stimulus but comes from the man himself, who in this case would be the narrator.

On the other hand, Brett Zimmerman (2001) offers a different perspective since he offers his opinion on this Poe story from the point of view of rhetoric and slightly from a judicial point of view, criticizing initially the opinions of those who don’t suggest that the discourse of Poe in The Tell-Tale Heart is sufficiently rhetorical or argumentative. Zimmerman acknowledges that Poe managed to take the reader to the point he wanted through the ‘confession’ of his character, and despite any criticism from this author, we will take this as a positive aspect in the short story of Edgar Allan Poe.

Final notes

Criticized and acclaimed, there is no doubt that Edgar Allan Poe is one of the writers who went down in history and will remain in it for his creativity and magnificence at the time of writing (regardless of how many people claim that their talent is due to their personal problems, health diseases, and traumas during his life).

The Tell-Tale Heart is a short story that didn’t have much impact, not like other works of Poe, nevertheless deserves wide recognition for the vast use of metaphors and other literary resources that are able to keep the reader caught from the first minute. Not to mention the perfect eloquence that the narrator of the story has, and Poe’s strange way of presenting us with the mind of a murderer.

This is an flawless story that is not only analyzed from the literature, but has been taken into account for studies of psychology and even oratory and law.

The Tell-Tale Heart is a work of art and should be recognized as an icon in Gothic literature, the one that Poe knew perfectly well how to lead.

Bibliography

1. POE, E.A. (1843). The Tell-Tale Heart.
2. HAASE, C. (2001). Understanding metaphors in everyday language.
3. HILLERBY, C. (2014). Mind-Style in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. The United Kingdom: The University of Nottingham.
4. REIN, D. (1960). Edgar A. Poe: The Inner Pattern. New York: Philosophical Library.
5. ZIMMERMAN, B. (2001). Frantic Forensic Oratory: Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Published by: Penn State University Press.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler takes you to the year 2024 environmental degradation and economic collapse have all destroyed American society. Diseases like measles ravage the population, people fight and die over water, and new drugs take over the survivors. The only safety is found in closed communities like the one Lauren Olumina lives in with her family trapped where suburban families have come together to survive. This essay will discuss the struggles that substance abuse and violence cause throughout the book and in the society we live in today. Substance use disorders (SUDs) are associated with numerous medical, psychiatric, psychological, spiritual, economic, social, family, and legal problems, creating a significant burden for affected individuals, their families, and society. Exposure to violent crime damages the health and development of victims, family members, and entire communities. Low-income communities and racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected. These topics play a big role in my life, coming from a low-income community where violence and substance abuse happen daily just like in Parable of the Sower. Octavia Butler uses the theme of violence throughout the entirety of Parable of the Sower. An effective way to view the violence in this novel is to, view it from the perspectives within which Butler positions it: it can be inherently harmful, inherently beneficial, and even a necessity for survival.

When it comes to illegal substances, society has determined that the use is harmful and has placed legal prohibitions on its use. This is to both protect individuals’ well-being and shield society from the costs involved with related healthcare resources, lost productivity, the spread of diseases, crime, and homelessness. The abuse of illegal substances has a direct connection with violence. For example, the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment noted that more than 75 percent of people who begin treatment for drug addiction report having performed various acts of violence, including mugging, physical assault, and using a weapon to attack another person. This shows that substance abuse affects the mental state of individuals and causes them to act in poor ways. In Parable of the Sower, there is a drug that makes individuals start fires in the community bringing them to destroy the homes of many families causing them to either end up homeless or dead. The two types of drugs in the novel are pyro and para tech.

In the novel, these drugs are believed to cause extreme pleasure which makes it difficult to quit. According to the author, Pyro makes it better than sex to watch the fire burn. Keith, Lauren’s brother, explains his close experience with pyro with his family, ‘Hey, I saw a guy get both of his eyes gouged out. After that, they set him on fire and watched him run around and scream and burn’ (Butler 97-98). The addicts of the drugs are known as ‘paints’ because they ‘shave off all their hair – even their eyebrows – and they paint their skin green or blue or red or yellow. They eat fire and kill rich people’ (Butler 98). Even Keith, who Lauren views as a psychopath, thinks that pyro is a bad drug that affects people negatively. The social importance of the paints killing rich people feeds into the division between the wealthy and the poor and the animosity that these breeds. The other drug is, Parateco – This drug is the reason for the hyper empathy syndrome that Lauren, Emery, Grayson, and other members of the community have. Called the ‘smart pill’ or ‘the Einstein powder’, Lauren’s mother used it in graduate school (Butler 11). It became the status quo for students to use the pill because it made it easier to learn and retain knowledge. Only later did the bad side effects of the drug come out. Lauren’s mother died while giving birth to her, and it is postulated that Parateco might have been the reason (Butler 10).

Arguably, the pivotal event of Butler’s novel is when Lauren’s community is destroyed and almost everyone is killed. During this event, everyone but Lauren and two other residents is brutally killed by either gunshot or fire, leaving their neighborhood in shambles. Butler uses this scene to help portray the harmful violence that occurs throughout the novel. Zahra Moss, one of the survivors, describes to Lauren how she was raped before she was able to escape. Those that destroyed the community were on the drug Pyro. Another instance of harmful violence related to drugs occurs when Lauren describes her brother’s death. “Someone had cut and burned away most of my brother’s skin. Everywhere except his face. They burned out his eyes […]” (Butler 135). When Keith decided to go beyond the gate, he got into dealing with these harmful drugs. His family suspects that he was tortured and killed by other drug dealers that saw him as a competition. These events show that the drugs are the basis of the harmful violence found throughout the novel.

Another perspective portrayed in the novel is that violence could also be beneficial for some individuals. After Lauren’s community is destroyed, she returns to find many of the street poor scavenging through the empty houses and stealing things from the corpses. Not everyone is able to live within the safe, gated communities; therefore, they are able to benefit from the violence that was imposed onto communities by stealing from people’s bodies or houses. Another example of violence being beneficial for some is the idea that violence can be used to end the pain. When Lauren and some others from her neighborhood go shooting one day with her dad, they come across some dogs that are potentially dangerous. After her dad shoots one, it doesn’t completely die. Lauren can feel its pain, and it becomes too much for her so she herself ends up shooting it. This can be seen when she states “With my right hand, I drew the Smith & Wesson, aimed, and shot the beautiful dog through its head”. Lauren only uses violence here to end her own pain and suffering, as well as that of the dog.

All things considered, substance abuse and violence in different communities affect the way the community functions and the way families work together as well. As explained before, exposure to violent crime damages the health and development of victims, family members, and entire communities. Low-income communities and racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected. Although a large number of people may believe that violence and substance abuse only affect the people who are engaging in these activities, substance abuse and violence affect everyone who is being surrounded by this activity as well. In addition to this, people who witness violence, whether it is hearing, seeing, or experiencing it, are at higher risk of PTSD.

Macbeth, a Scottish general driven by ambition and greed commits unspeakable acts and is then haunted by his guilt and paranoia. The play’s main characters are driven by the same theme which is the power of unchecked ambitions. Tell Tale Heart follows an insane narrator who tries to prove his sanity to the audience after murdering an old man with a “strange eye”. The main theme of Tell-Tale Heart is trying to escape your conscience after committing evil acts. The narrator believes whole-heartedly that he’s motivations are fair because he believes that the old man lives with an evil eye, but ultimately fails because no matter the circumstances or what you believe you cannot escape your guilty conscience. In both stories the main characters are similar and are built by relative characteristics and lead by their ambitions. Guilt, madness, superstition and murder. This themes not only make up the main characters but also build the rest of the stories. These themes will also make up the rest of this essay.

The theme of desire to kill is important in both stories. In both situations Macbeth and the narrator both succeed in the murder but in different ways. The narrator for seven nights contemplates to rip the old man’s blue eye out however as the narrator watches the old man sleep his eyes are shut and his desire to kill isn’t an urge. On the 8th night however as he’s watching the old man sleep, he awakens revealing that blue eye and finally the narrator strikes and kills the old man. The narrator chops up the old man’s body and hides it in an undiscoverable place, under the floorboards. Macbeth’s journey to madness begins when he murders King Duncan. The murder of the king is led by a prophecy from three witches. The trio of witches tell Macbeth that one day he will rule Scotland, Macbeth is not only filled up by ambitions but also motivated by his wife, who plans the murder by having Duncan stabbed to death and then framing the guards by rubbing them with the king’s blood. The similarities are that both Macbeth and the narrator plan their murder and cover it. The main difference between the two is their reasoning. The narrator kills the old man because of his craziness but Macbeth kills Duncan due to the prophecy from the witches.

Superstition is what also drives the main characters of both texts. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth who are both very noble and loyal ultimately cause their downfall by believing in the witches and their prophesies. The witches and their prophesies can be related to real life fortune tellers who use “magic” and can be misleading. Macbeth’s last straw is ultimately cause by a “floating dagger”, the dagger is bloody and leads to Duncan’s room pushing Macbeth to commit the deed. The dagger is represented as ambition and foreshadowing, the king has not been murdered yet but soon will be. The use of superstition and supernatural forms symbolism in the sense that anything can happen for either Macbeth or the audience itself. In Tell Tale Heart superstition and supernatural is explained differently. Throughout the story the element of the supernatural is imagined by the narrator which the audience realizes. Supernatural is mainly used to create an unreliable narrator by highlighting the narrator’s delusions and irritational denial “why will you say that I am mad?”.

The final theme which is arguably the main point of both stories is guilt. In both texts guilt is used as a way of comeuppance after both protagonists commit evil acts. In Tell Tale Heart guilt is what leads to the narrator being caught and ultimately leads to his demise. After the narrator kills the old man, he shows guilt in many instances. Throughout the text the narrator’s point of view is shown to show that he cannot take the guilt anymore, finally he snaps “villains! I shrieked, dissemble no more! I admit the deed…”. the narrator’s guilt turns into further madness as he hears the old man’s heart beating but in no way could it be beating since the old man is dead. In Macbeth his guilt is shown right away when after killing Duncan Macbeth’s senses are heightened and paranoid. “How is it with me, when every noise appals me?” Macbeth uses a metaphor to compare his guilt for killing Duncan he believes that there is not enough water in the ocean to clean the blood from his hands.

There are many similarities and differences between the two texts when comparing both. Both texts share similar plot points and themes as the main characters commit murder and are then haunted by their guilt and conscience. The main difference is that they are driven by different motives, Macbeth is driven by ambitions and the narrator by madness.

Medea Analysis

Write a 500-word Synopsis of the play Medea (10 marks)

Euripedes’ play opens in Conrith with Medea in a state of conflict. Not only does her husband Jason marry another woman (Glauke, daughter of Creon the King of Corinth) but on top of this, Creon banishes Medea and her children from the city.

In the play’s opening, the nurse summarises events that took place before the play began. After a long series of trials and journeys, ultimately forcing Jason and Medea to seek exile in Corinth, they had settled down and established their family. Jason’s abandonment of their family has Medea emotionally damaged, to the degree that she curses her own existence, as well as that of her two children.

In the fear of a possible plot of revenge, Creon banishes Medea and her children from the Corinth. After a plead for mercy, Medea is allowed one day more before she must leave, during which she plans to complete her quest of revenge – the murder of Creon, Glauce, and Jason. Jason accuses Medea of reacting disproportionately. By publicly voicing these injustices, she has put their children and her own life at risk. He claims that his decision to remarry was in everyone’s best interest. Medea sees his weakness’, and she refuses to accept his offer to help.

Aegeus, the King of Athens, offers Medea refuge in his city in exchange for her wisdom of certain drugs that can cure his sterility. Now guaranteed a stay Athens, Medea is a step closer to completing her revenge, a plan that has grown to include the murder of her own children; the hurt that their death will cause is lesser than the satisfaction she will feel in making Jason suffer.

In an attempt to show sympathy towards Jason, Medea offers his wife gifts; a coronet and dress. Little do they know, the coronet and dress are poisoned and they eventually are the cause of Glauce’s death. Seeing his daughter killed, Creonmakes the dramatic choice of dying by her side embracing her and absorbing the poison as well.

A messenger recounts the gruesome details of these deaths, which Medea absorbs with cool attentiveness. In the play’s climax, Medea enters the house to stab her children, against the protests of the chorus. She then flees the scene in a dragon-pulled chariot provided by her grandfather, the Sun-God, Jason is left cursing his lot.

Write a 500-word character analysis on Medea, Jason and the Chorus. (10 marks)

Medea is the daughter of King Aeetes of the island of Clochis and granddaughter of Helios, the sun god. She is the protagonist of the play, a proud, self possed, and influential woman who takes an emotional journey from despair to sadistic fury. She used her powers to help Jason secure the Golden Fleece; then, having fallen in love with him, she escaped her country and family to live with Jason in Iolcus, his own home. During the departure over the Mediterranean, she murdered her sibling and dumped him over the edge, so that her pursuers would have to slow down and bury him. Banished as killers, Jason and Medea settled in Corinth, the setting of Euripides’ play, where they set up a group of two kids and increased ideal notoriety. All this happens before the action of the play, which opens with Jason having divorced Medea and taken up with a new family. She, in the end, retaliates for Jason’s treachery with a progression of murders, closing with the passings of her own children. Famously, the joy of watching Jason endure their misfortune exceeded her own regret at slaughtering them. Medea’s character has a strong effect on audiences as we are able to sympathize with her plight and understand her anger from being abandoned. Be that as it may, while her decision to kill her kids, Glauce and Creon can paint her as the antagonist of the play. She is also a cunning and cold manipulator: she sees through the false pieties and hypocritical values of her enemies and uses their own moral bankruptcy against them. Her vengeance is absolute, however, it comes at the expense of all that she holds dear. Medea is an influential lady who challenges the prejudices of the male-dominated societies that seem to have no place for her or her powers. She is passionate, vengeful, and unrelenting in her pursuit of justice.

Jason is the King of Iolcus and husband of Medea. In many readings of this story, Jason is the main antagonist. His ambition and faithlessness cause the tragic events of the play to unfold. In abandoning Medea for his own social advancement, Jason abandons his role as head of the household and breaks his word. He is depicted as an opportunistic and unscrupulous man, full of self-deception and repugnant smugness. He condescends to his wife, although she is in every way superior to him. Within the play, he is a shortsighted representative of the ruling class of advantaged men.

The Chorus is made out of a gathering of Corinthian ladies who have collected outside Medea’s house because of the loud wailing and lamentation they have overheard coming from it. In many cases, the Chorus can be taken as standing in for the audience of the play—reacting as the audience would. The chief difference, of course, is that the Chorus participates in the action and dialogue.

Write a 500-word analysis of the Themes in the play. (10 marks)

The charming intrigue of vengeance is the fundamental driver of the play’s ubiquity. Medea is happy to forfeit everything to make her retribution great. She kills her own kids, incomprehensibly, to shield them from the counter-revenge of her enemies; she also kills them to hurt Jason, although in slaying them she is damning herself to the existence of regret and misery. The revenge he is suffering was actually meant for her. He says, ‘The avenging fury meant for you/the gods have sent to me.’ Yet Medea escapes punishment for her crimes, while Jason is going to have his ‘head smashed in,’ as Medea predicts. As Medea says, the gods know who began the fight.

Medea is a woman of extreme behaviour and extreme emotion. For her passionate love for Jason, she sacrificed all, committing unspeakable acts on his behalf. But his betrayal of her has transformed passion into a rage. Her violent and intemperate heart, formerly devoted to Jason, now is set on his destruction. The Greeks were very interested in the extremes of emotion and the consequences of leaving emotion unchecked; they also tended to see strong passion and rage as part and parcel of greatness. Medea is an example of passion carried too far, in a woman perversely set on choosing rage over mercy and reason. The Chorus frequently mentions that passionate love is not desirable: ‘Love with too much passion/brings … no fine reputation.’ The Chorus prays that Aphrodite not fill a ‘heart with jealousy/or angry quarrelling’ but ‘bless peaceful unions,/using wisdom.’ The Chorus insists that love without passion but with moderation and wisdom is better because it does not breed destruction.

Part of the play’s power comes from Euripedes’s ability to make the audience feel sympathy for Medea despite her monstrous actions. At the end of the play, she reminds Jason of what she did for him in the past and how she has taken revenge for his betrayal. In abandoning her, Jason has not only dishonoured her, because a divorced woman is not respected but also deprived her of an identity. She betrayed her own city-state for him and in exile will be dependent on the help of King Aegeus. His lack of shame and his refusal to credit the help she gave him are further instances of betrayal. Medea also commits acts of betrayal and did so long before the beginning of the play. She killed her brother and betrayed her father to help Jason, and she manipulated the daughters of Pelias into killing him. Betrayal breeds betrayal as she uses her sons to deliver her deadly gifts to the princess and then kills them to make Jason suffer.

Write a 500-word analysis of symbol and colour in the play. (10 marks)

The image of the crown can allude not exclusively to the princess of Corinth yet in addition to Creon (her dad, the lord) and to Jason, who was quickly ruler in his country of Iolcus. Medea has flouted the authority of Corinth by speaking against the royal crown and refusing exile. She then sends a poisoned golden crown, along with a poisoned robe, as a gift to soften the princess’s heart toward Medea’s children. The princess doesn’t want to accept the gifts, but Jason urges her to. After the princess arranges the ‘golden crown,/fixing it in her hair in the bright mirror,’ she becomes as bright as the mirror by bursting into flame. Medea’s jealousy, rage, and need for revenge have transformed a symbol of authority into a weapon that destroys the royal house. It is fitting that Jason is the person who urges the princess to acknowledge the gifts because his betrayal of Medea is the cause of his new bride’s death.

Medea and Jason’s marriage house symbolizes their time together as husband and wife. Symbolically, all action and dialogue in Medea take place outside of the house. The play starts with the Nurse commenting and then talking with the Tutor about how the union between Medea and Jason is broken, making them ‘enemies.’ During this opening, Medea’s offstage cries from within the marriage house can be heard to punctuate the tale of betrayal the Nurse is recounting. Medea’s cries draw the Chorus to her door, from which position it serves as a moral conscience to Medea even though its advice does not alter her plans. Medea destroys the marriage house completely when she kills her sons within its walls. One child cries from within, ‘Help me … help,’ and other boy calls out, ‘What do I do? How can I escape/my mother’s hands?’ These cries symbolize the final obliteration of the marriage. The door of the house is now closed, never to open again, just as Medea and Jason’s marriage has been irrevocably destroyed by his betrayal and her revenge.

The final scenes with Medea escaping in a winged golden chariot bring awe and fear. Helios was the god in Greek mythology that brought the sun up and down each day by riding his golden chariot across the sky. Medea is the granddaughter of Helios, and her use of his chariot symbolizes her partial divinity and her female pride and strength. She claims her victory when she rises beyond Jason’s reach and says to him, ‘You’ll never/have me in your grasp, not in this chariot.’ While she escapes punishment in her chariot, her flight also reinforces her portrayal as an outsider who is not entirely human.

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’brien emphasizes that diverging into reality is far more difficult than adapting to war. As the story continues, a variety of themes are taking a large role into defining what it means to tell a true war story. The theme constantly shifts due to the portrayals of numerous characters being depicted. In the duration of the novel’s storytelling, O’brien answers what it means to tell a true war story using the character’s tones, the narrative point of view and genre.

In regards to the war, the tone shifts from emotional to clinical and manipulative to epic as O’brien begins telling his story. This story is an introspective memory story and a self-conscious examination of the methods and reasons behind storytelling. The narrator is unreliable and speaks of the necessity of blurring truth and fiction in a true war story. Due to his constant alteration in tone as he speaks, he has complete confidence that his story is truthful both in and out. O’brien mentions, “The town could not talk, and would not listen. ‘How’d you like to hear about the war?’ he might have asked, but the place could only blink and shrug.” (Speaking of Courage. 32) Even when he shifts reality from under our feet, or uses oblique phrases like a town ‘blinking and shrugging’ coupled with casual language like ‘How’d you like to hear about the war?’, we never doubt that he knows what he is doing, and that his manipulations and language choices serve a purpose. O’brien also uses strong, straightforward tone on the other hand to emphasize a more direct side of the story. O’brien says, “There was something restful about it, something orderly and reassuring. There were red checkers and black checkers. The

playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larder strategies. There was a winner and loser. There were rules.’ (Spin, 32) Nonetheless, O’brien most likely uses this direct tone to help the readers better understand the character’s traits and feelings in a “true” war story.

Most of the stories are told from the first person, but on several occasions, O’Brien uses the third person as either a distancing tactic or a chance to let one of his platoon-mates, such as Mitchell Sanders or Rat Kiley, tell his story. Although these stories are being told in third perspective, the narration quickly shifts to first person in the section “Love” as O’brien is talking to one of the characters in the story. Eventually, we realize this character was O’brien himself, but unnamed due to the fact that he accepts more responsibility in third person rather than the first. In relation to this, a narration from a third perspective view is being told in “The Man I Killed”, as there were a wide series of unconnected observations and different fantasies of the young, dead soldier that was killed. O’brien says, “He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star-shaped hole.” (Good Form, 115) In that being said, O’brien explains what it means tell a true war story by putting himself in this point of view and detaching himself from the facts and fantasizing about the daintiness within this soldier with the mystical and beautiful outcome of it.

Moreover, O’brien uses the genre of war to explain what it means to tell a true war story. Because O’brien finds the truth of the Vietnam War too complex to explain through a story, he uses other postmodern techniques such as nonlinear narrative and a blatantly ambiguous relationship with the truth. Most importantly, O’Brien has a main character who is named after and shares some biographical details with himself, but who is also totally not the same as O’Brien. He also uses magical realism to try to express the “weirdo” nature of life in Vietnam during the war. One example is when O’Brien tells the über-short true war story about the guy who unnecessarily jumped on a mine for his friends in ‘How to Tell a True War Story,’ and all the soldiers have a brief and hilarious conversation in the time between the mine going off and them actually becoming dead. It wouldn’t be possible for that conversation to actually occur, but without it, O’Brien’s story would lose its sense of both camaraderie and obscenity, and therefore be untrue. Another example is when O’Brien and Azar play the horrible prank on Bobby Jorgenson in ‘The Ghost Soldiers’ and O’Brien’s spirit lifts out of his body to become one with the war: “I was

the land itself… I was the beast on their lips—I was Nam—the horror, the war.” (The Ghost Soldiers, 138) Obviously, it would be impossible for O’Brien’s spirit to jump out of his body and fuse with the land and the war. Magical realism is used here to make O’Brien’s descent into savagery more tangible, which makes the physical world resemble the emotional one.

To conclude, O’brien uses the three themes of tone, narrative point of view and genre to define what it means to tell a true story. As he runs from the main facts of storytelling, O’brien uses these themes with complete truth but also a twist to emphasize the direct meaning. O’Brien tells us that a true war story is not a moral story, that you can tell a war story is true if it contains obscenity and evil. Therefore, he combines what he imagines and fantasizes versus the actual reality itself, giving us the “perfect” true war story.

William Golding’s “Lord Of The Flies” explores the actions and experiences of several boys stranded on a deserted island. At first, the boys value logic and reason, voting Ralph as their “chief”. Many of the younger boys in the group are conflicted without the comforts of their parents and homes making it difficult for anybody to lead the group effectively. Piggy, a boy focused on being rescued using logic and reason, sides with Ralph and their joint efforts are motivated by having the group’s best interest at heart. A selfish, and power-hungry Jack soon takes drastic measures to take charge over the group. Many of the boys either by choice, or force join Jack’s rebellion blindsided by his sense of security and deceitful charm. Soon after Jack’s rise to power, his tribe begins to become savage, relying on instinct rather than logic and reason. Ralph’s remaining members Piggy, and Simon are killed at the ruthless and determined hand of Jack who seeks complete power. Ralph is saved by chance of the arrival of a naval officer who has come to rescue the boys. Golding through the course of the novel reinforces the idea that a leader must (A) have the groups best interest and (B) go against the people’s wishes if it is for the benefit of the group. Additionally, having the same values and goals of the people one is leading, does not mean they will go forth and follow through with goals they have set out to do.

Ralph’s witts and natural ability to lead make him very favorable among the group. Although there is a charm about Ralph, ultimately, it is his words and ability to make executive decisions which will satisfy all people making him best fit to lead the group. Before making any decisions, Ralph considers the feelings of others, allowing him to appeal to the vast majority of the boys. At one of the first meetings between all of the boys, Ralph suggests “We want to have fun. And we want to be rescued…We must make a fire.’ ‘A fire! Make a fire!’”(37-38). Ralph’s use of the word “fun” when suggesting making a fire allows him to persuade the boys to accomplish their unified goal of being rescued. With many of the boys ranging from ages 6-12, and the stress of being stranded great, having fun is one way to take their minds off of the situation they’re in. Ralph’s diplomatic approach to the group is at first successful, but soon he finds that communication and words will not get the boys to do what he believes is beneficial for the group. Days after the group agreed that they needed to build shelters, Ralph finds himself discouraged, “Two shelters were in position, but shaky. This one was a ruin…’they keep running off’”(50). Ralph discovers that his words are not enough to motivate the boys to build the shelters. Although Ralph is able to get the boys to agree to certain actions, he finds that they do not follow through. Without the collaboration of all group members, the group is destined to fail. While Ralph uses a more diplomatic approach in his leadership, Jack uses his high social status to intimidate and taunt others. A frequent victim of Jacks, Piggy, is often ridiculed for the way he talks, his weight, and his inability to see without his glasses. After nearly setting the whole island on fire, Piggy asks a simple request from the group, “‘We ought to be more careful. I’m scared-’…’You’re always scared. Yah-Fatty!’”(45) Jack often takes any opportunity he can to make fun of and tease Piggy. Jack’s application of social power proves ineffective as he deters boys from joining his tribe. Rather than bringing the group together for good, Jack seeks to divide the group. The stark contrast between Ralph and Jack’s demonstration of social power allow Golding to show how one is able to use social power for both the good of a group to bring them together and how it can further separate groups.

Not only must a leader communicate goals and motivate their group members, they must use reason and logic to back these goals. A leader who use logic and reason can make smarter goals for the group. Piggy, although not well respected in the group uses logic and reason to influence Ralph and his proposals to the group Piggy is highly rational and and intelligents, he strives to establish a civilized society very similar to the one he is accustomed to back home. Piggy is one of the most mature boys on the island, he finds that many people do not appreciate his sense of maturity and his consideration of logic over other traits. During the first interaction on the island between Piggy and Ralph, Piggy is quick to ask “Aren’t there any grownups at all?”(8) Quick to establish a leader, Piggy is an advocate for stability and order. When the scare of the beastie travels throughout the group members, Piggy is the first to suggest moving the fire from the mountains to the beach closer to their camp, “Only Piggy could have the intellectual daring to suggest moving the fire from the mountain.”(129). Piggy’s use of logic in moving the fire to conserve both time and energy is just one example of Piggy’s intellectual leadership. Although Piggy uses logic and reason to make decisions, his low social status makes him an ineffective leader, instead of leading, Piggy suggests ideas to Ralph which helps him to be an effective leader. Unlike Social and Physical power, it is hard for intellectual power to be used for evil. This helps to portray Piggy as mature and intelligent throughout the course of the book as he uses his quick thinking to attempt to help the group become more civilized. Although intellectual power considers all aspects of a situation, without social power, intellectual power is ineffective. Golding reiterates the fact that social power can help influence a group and with intellectual power create a more civilized, and effective community.

Jack’s ride to power did not come about using social or intellectual power. Contrary to the use of words, logic, and reason, Jack utilizes his physical power to assert his dominance over the boys on the island. Jack uses physical power to force boys to join his tribe and to do whatever he asks of them. Jack’s lack of social and intellectual abilities make him rely on his strength. Jack, does not seek for the group to be rescued, instead, he lusts after power. This lust for power often makes him use extreme measures to get what he wants. Jacks abuse of power can be described as, “authority sat on his shoulder and chattered in his ear like an ape.”(150) Whenever Jack receives any authority, he uses it as an opportunity to benefit himself over others. Jack does not have the best interest of those in his tribe and instead focuses on making himself look better. Jack’s lack of leadership skills often forces him to use physical power. Jack uses his strength to intimidate and scare off his opposition. Shortly after killing Piggy, Jack attempts to let Ralph know that he is next, “‘See? See? That’s what you’ll get! I meant that!’…Viciously with full intention, he hurled his spear at Ralph”(181). A bloodthirsty and savage Jack resorts to violence and death to gain complete power of the boys. Jack believes that if he kills Ralph and his followers, all of his problems will disappear. This is not true however, he continues to struggle for power and feels threatened when other boys question his authority. Golding emphasizes that violence is not an ample and civilized way to go about gaining support. Violence appears to cause more damage than it resolves problems. Golding implies that power should not come at the hand of death.

Overall, Lord Of The Flies exploits the faults in different types of leadership. Social power can bring a group together and motivate those to accomplish a common goal, however it relies on the mercies of those in the group to go out and follow through with their agreed upon actions. Intellectual power uses logic and reason to effectively make the most realistic decisions, but without a voice, it cannot have an effect. Lastly, physical power is not an effective tool as it almost always results in the death of others. Golding throughout the story suggest that in order to be an effective leader, one must have all three powers to create stability in a group. One must also sometimes go against what the people believe to be good if it is the right decision. Although there are many types of power, some may be more beneficial and healthy for a group than others.

Psychologist Emma Kenny once said ‘The world is a scary place, knowing how to confront fear is a good thing. Risk and fear are something we need in our childhood.’ While fear can be a scary thing, reading things that may enforce feelings of fear can be essential to a middle schooler. I believe that horror stories such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe are appropriate for students within my age range for the following contentions: it has necessary educational value and it teaches fundamental lessons.

For one, the Tell-Tale Heart has a value that is beneficial to one’s quality of educational experience. The main character is also not usually a character that a middle schooler will read, so it allows them to see and analyze an abnormal role. This allows students to be able to identify unreliable narrators, which is an important comprehension skill. The Tell-Tale Heart allows students to be able to translate olden speech into modern speech. By reading the Tell-Tale Heart we increase our vocabulary and by denying students of reading it, they won’t have similar occasions to excel higher than what they currently are. This is important for two key reasons. First, fairness. It is unfair to deprive children of the opportunity of learning important things that can help them in the future. No fairness​ makes the entire school system obsolete and reduces the quality of future education, independently linking into jobs and pushing students out of the learning space. Secondly, education. Education is pivotal because better education can create better policymakers and shift community norms regarding bias and inclusion. When we allow children to read The Tell-Tale Heart, it will increase the quality of education which helps students in future educational roles and careers.

Furthermore, the Tell-Tale Heart teaches key lessons, such as the notion that there are consequences to destructive behaviors. For example, on pages 92-93, the main character commits a murder. As a consequence, they not only turn themselves in but face legal repercussions. Also, in lines 150-160, the narrator lies to authority figures. While they manifest their guilt in an extreme way, the narrator feels guilty nonetheless. This shows that you should feel bad for lying to authorities figures, even if you have participated in unethical matters. To continue, in general, the horror genre is beneficial to children. According to Scary Tales, horror stories increase awareness in children. This elucidates the impression that by sheltering someone from fear, we are not appropriately quipping them up for society, where such a thing is as natural as the air we breathe and preventing them from assimilating something that can keep them away from perilous incidents. Due to the Tell-Tale Heart being such a prominent work in horror, students can reap these benefits from reading this.

Critics may claim that the Tell-Tale Heart is not appropriate due to the gore, however, you should not evaluate this claim. This is because it is non-unique, seeing as teens already expose themselves to violence and gore through things like video games. In fact, 97% of adolescents play video games and 66% of adolescents play video games that may contain violence. It would be better to read stories like the Tell-Tale Heart because there are multiple underlying benefits to reading Poe’s story whereas video games have been proven to negatively affect the behavior of children. In addition to this, when you read a story, you have the option of visualizing what you are reading, while playing a video game forces you see the gore. Also, according to Flood ‘16, parents prefer their children to read horror stories. 73% of parents believe horror stories help kids decide what is good and bad, 53% believe they help children learn to cope with difficult situations, and 48% believe they help children conquer fear. If children are already introduced to what the other side is saying and parents’ majority of parents prefer when children read horror stories, their entire claim is false.

In summation, I believe the Tell-Tale Heart is pertinent for middle schoolers. This is because of my contentions that include educational value. The Tell-Tale Heart improves the quality of education, which is important on the premise of fairness and future education. Without those two impacts, students cannot learn skills that help them after middle school. My second contention was that the Tell-Tale Heart teaches key lessons that are necessary to function in society. For example, from the narrators actions we can learn that there are consequences to doing unethical things, such as lying, killing, and stalking. The Tell-Tale Heart can also show the significance of telling the truth, although the reason why may be extreme. Opponents of this may claim that the gore of the Tell-Tale Heart makes it inappropriate, however this is a non-unique issue that I have proven to be fallacious. For these reasons, I believe the Tell-Tale Heart is appropriate and necessary for students within my age range.

Have you ever said something you shouldn’t have? In the novel To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the novel tells the story of two young children coming of age, with this being said, the key to maturity is controlling your emotions. Jem showed this throughout the novel as he started to grow up and acted more maturely than when he was younger. The main character, Jean Louise Finch, or mainly referred to as Scout, her older brother Jeremy Finch or also referred to as Jem, her father, Atticus Finch, and their black maid, Calpurnia, played a big role into Jem’s coming of age. Many would argue that Scout came of age since she matured over time, while this is true, Jem showed to improve himself by becoming more mature and growing up.

Going into part two of the novel, the reader can already tell Jem isn’t acting the way he used to at the begging of the novel. For example, in chapter 12 scout states, ‘Jem was twelve. He was difficult to live with, inconsistent, moody'(Lee 153). Jem is changing, Scout notices his change behaviour as he starts to mature and become more independent. Atticus soon realises the problem with Jem and can understand what he is going through. For example, ‘Atticus said no, Jem was growing. I must be patient with him and disturb him as little as possible'(Lee 153). This proves that he is slowly starting to mature and changing in many ways throughout time. In this chapter, it introduces the change of behaviour in Jem which concludes that he is starting to mature and is also going through puberty.

Also in chapter 12, it shows how Jem’s patience is decreasing when Jem used to stand Scout but as he’s starting mature he pushes Scout away. For example scout says, ” He ain’t that old,’ I said ‘all he needs is somebody to beat him up, and I ain’t big enough.”(Lee 153). This means that Jem is starting to act more independent and wanting to be alone which results into him avoiding Scout. Also Calpurnia noticed Jem’s change in attitude which concludes that he was going to act more maturely and not like a little kid anymore. For example Scout says,‘“Baby,’ said Calpurnia, ‘I just can’t help it if Mister Jem’s growin’ up. He’s gonna want to be off to himself a lot now, doin’ whatever boys do, so you just come right on in the kitchen when you feel lonesome. We’ll find lots of things to do in here”’(Lee 154). This proves that this was Jem’s coming of age as he demonstrated in the chapter that he was growing up and acting more his age. He also demonstrates how his emotions soon started to change as he started to grow older acting more maturely and independent.

Many would argue that Jem’s coming of age was more in chapter 22. Jem shows remorse when Tom Robinson was pleaded guilty just because he was black. For example it says,” His face was streaked with angry tears as we made our way through the cheerful crowd”(Lee 285). Jem is aware of the situation and disagrees the judge’s opinion which to him is unfair. This only shows how emotional he got when Tom Robinson was pleaded guilty and accused of rape when Jem thought he was innocent. Although in Chapter 12, it demonstrates how Jem is acting more independent which is part of coming of age and is strongly shown in the passage. For example Scout says,” The beginning of that summer boded well: Jem could do as he pleased Calpurnia would do until Dill came”(Lee 154). This showed how Jem was coming of age by him acting more of a teenager. This concludes that Jem is coming of age by growing up by not acting like a little kid anymore and starting to reveal his true colors in what he is becoming

As you can see, Jem came of age throughout the novel as he grew older. He learned that by controlling his emotions he can become more mature. In that being said, the key to maturity is controlling your emotions which Jem managed to show in the novel. By him being a young boy to maturing into a teenage boy and by learning new lessons through his own experience. The theme corresponds with Jem’s coming of age by him being able to control his emotions more that what Scout and Dill could. As one matures, they gradually begin to develop ways to maintain themselves.

In the Science fiction novel the parable of the sower, author Octavia Butler narrates a disturbing dystopian future, failing government of the United States, set in the 2020s, see from the eyes of Lauren a young African American and the Protagonist of the story. This future from the novel was Butler’s very own prediction of what the future will be a future filled with climate change, violence, and chaos. Butler’s prediction of a future is almost disturbingly accurate in our society today even though the book The Parable of the Sower is published in the year 1993, but it’s not really surprising because Octavia Butler graduated from Pasadena City College with an associate of arts degree with a focus in history and she knew like all the historians knew that history just repeats itself. Butler’s dystopian future is not far from our modern society today and if we continue in our reckless, corrupt, and capitalist-driven society where we step on other people with no empathy and big companies take nature for granted to destroy everything for profit and oil, We will likely to end up in this type of future in chaos and there will be no turning back. Here’s my reason why we are moving toward Lauren’s world of the 2020s.

First of all, because of pollution and climate change, both worlds Our’s and Lauren’s suffer the same environmental problems. the novel starts when Lauren and her stepmother are talking about how things are very different from then and now how the stars in the sky are very visible at night then unlike now. Lauren said “I look up at the stars and the deep, black sky “why couldn’t you see the stars”? (Butler 5). Luren and her stepmother can’t see the stars in the sky because of what we know in our modern society is called “Light Pollution”(The inappropriate or excessive use of artificial light – known as light pollution – can have serious environmental consequences for humans, wildlife, and our climate). According to the CNN newspaper article Loss of the night: Light pollution rising rapidly on a global scale By Manisha Ganguly, Ganguly claims that “excessive artificial light is not good. A landmark study published last year found that 83% of the world’s population and more than 99% of the US and European populations were affected by light pollution and could not see the stars at night”. Light pollution is a growing problem in our society but no one is really focusing on these problems. We take stars for granted what if we can see them anymore and they are just gone for good like in Lauren’s world of 2020. On the same page, Lauren’s stepmother talked about how big companies are creating more carbon that makes their world too hot but they can’t do anything because they’re poor and do not have the power against those big companies. Lauren’s stepmother says “ Lights, progress, growth all those things we’re too hot and too poor to bother” (Butler 5). Big Oil companies today do help to progress our lives but it comes with a lot of consequences like increase in climate change, pollution, deforestation, and polluted sea, all of these consequences are sometimes irreversible, and going against these big companies are most likely useless because of the power they have. In the article from ST.Louis Post-Dispatch Study: Eight oil companies produce as much pollution as the entire U.S. by Jessica Shankleman Bloomberg claim policy make stopped making laws to protect the environment but instead President Donald Trump to slash environmental regulations and possibly withdraw from the landmark Paris Agreement, which promises to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial levels. This leads to Oil companies expanding more and more and carbon footprints are going off the charts according to the study in the same article “The whole oil and gas industry combined produced about 40 percent of the world’s 832 gigatonnes (832 billion metric tons, or 917.1 billion tons) of carbon dioxide equivalent released in the past three decades, according to CDP”. Even though we care about the environment we can’t do anything about it because the president allows it and it’s not illegal so like in the novel parable of the sower common citizens have no power to stop these oil companies from polluting the world.

Second, today a lot of people suffer from wealth inequality this results in the growing population of homeless people, and the rich just keeps getting richer and the poor stays the same, the same thing is happening in Lauren’s world of the 2020s but way worse. Lauren explains how people can barely afford their essentials every especially for health care. For the street poor, unable to afford medical care, even a minor wound might be fatal. I am one of the streets poor, now. Not as poor as some, but homeless, alone, full of books, and ignorant of reality (Butler). Like today people even tho they work hard it’s not enough because they are not making the money they are supposed to. “A lot of people in America don’t realize they might be two checks, three checks, four checks away from being homeless,” said Thomas Butler Jr. Not having enough money in a paycheck is one of the leading causes of homelessness in America. According to New York City’s website, the city’s unique right-to-shelter mandate ensures “temporary emergency shelter” for every man, woman, and child who is eligible, every night. But not in the City of Angels, where two-thirds of the country’s 40,000 homeless people are without shelter.

Lastly, our world’s growing violence and gun violence can be comparable or be very similar to Lauren’s world of 2020, Lauren explains how her their father told them that in their world they should have the knowledge of how to handle a gun on else they will likely be killed outside by a person with a firearm “Armed people do get killed most often in crossfires or by snipers but unarmed people get killed a lot more often” (Butler 38). This part of the article can be comparable to a newspaper article from the New York Times Should Teachers Be Armed With Guns? Natalie Proulx according to the author President Trump suggested giving teachers guns because of the increasing number of school shootings that result in a lot of death and giving the teachers guns will lessen the fatality of the incidents than actually making gun laws. In chapter 20 Lauren explains more about the violence that she sees happening outside “ In some places, the rich are escaping by flying out in helicopters. The bridges that are still intact—and most of them are—are guarded either by the police or by gangs. Both groups are there to rob desperate, fleeing people of their weapons, money, food, and water—at the least. The penalty for being too poor to be worth robbing is a beating, rape, and/or death. The National Guard has been activated to restore order, and I suppose it might. But I suspect that in the short term, it will only add to the chaos.

Social Hierarchy has existed for decades. The societal construct based hierarchy places people into categories defined by their financial standing across a scale, ranging from upper class down to the poverty level. The upper and lower class are often segregated, living in different parts of town and having different experiences due to the opposite lifestyles that they live. In Nicholas Sparks’s novel, The Best of Me, Dawson Cole, a boy from an unprosperous, criminal family meets Amanda Collier, a wealthy, robust girl from Pamlico County, in Oriental. Their relationship is prosperous, but due to their different aspirations the relationship takes a misfortunate turn. Later in life the two individuals are reunited, and both learn how the stereotypes of their social class can impact them negatively. Major roadblocks that they must overcome begin with objection from Amanda’s parents. The Colliers disapprove because Dawson is of a lower social class than Amanda, hence he is unworthy of her. Secondly, the dilemma that Dawson is faced with when their conflicting plans for their future clash. In Kasie West’s novel The Distance Between Us an oppositional view is portrayed. The lower class family does not like the wealthy because they judge them as obnoxious and selfish (254). The novel tells the story Caymen, a teenage girl helping her mom run a failing porcelain doll shop that is drowning in debt and Xander, the son of a successful hotel franchise owner. In their journey of a relationship they face dire struggles. They must overcome they opposing opinion that Caymen’s mother forces and the internal battle that Caymen struggles with as she feels like she is going against her morals and values by dating Xander. Both relationships must endure a lot of obstruction including rebellion, objection and identity crisis. Though, all relationships face conflict, being of opposite social standing makes it nearly impossible to maintain a healthy relationship.

In The Best of Me Dawson and Amanda meet in high school, when they get paired up for a chemistry assignment. They went to school together for years, but never exchanged much of a conversation until Junior year (Sparks 16). Amanda Collier was popular and came from a prestigious family. They are the opposite of Dawson’s family who reside in a trailer park. His mother left when he was young, leaving Dawson with his abusive father and cousins. His family is known for many treacherous acts (10). Dawson decides to run away and hide in his Neighbor Tuck’s garage where he works fixing cars. Tuck is a very significant person in Dawson’s life. He states “Tuck had become the most important person in his life, and Dawson couldn’t imagine anything that would change that. Until the day Amanda Collier entered his world.” (16). This shows how very important Amanda is to Dawson. He values her among anyone else in his life and their social standing did not influence how they viewed each other at all in the beginning of their relationship. The only thing that affected the relationship was the fact that Amanda was off to University and Dawson did not want to hold her back from reaching her full potential.

As for its counterpart, The Distance Between Us. Caymen meets Xander while working in the family doll store trying to sell him a doll for his grandmother. When he walks in, she immediately makes a judgements about him. She thinks to herself, “The untrained eye might not pick up on the richness oozing off this guy, but I know rich and he reeks of it” (West 2). She also assumes that he has had “a lifetime of privilege”(3). Caymen has never met this boy prior and knows nothing about him, in fact she refers to him as “ Mr. Rich” (2). Overtime, Xander continuously returns to the doll store bringing treats like hot chocolate and walks her to school in the mornings to get to know her. Throughout the process of Xander trying to get to know her, Caymen pushes him away because she wants nothing to do with a rich guy. She makes snarky remarks to him trying to drive him away. While she is hanging out with her best friend she starts to make fun of him when he comes in for a visit “Another day where mingling with commoners helps you appreciate your life more?”He is offended, but again returns another day to try to win her over.

The relationship between Dawson and Amanda is something that both of them want, and are willing to fight for. Dawson really exaggerates the saying “If you love somebody, set them free” by Richard Bach. Their relationship ends only because Dawson loves her enough to let her go to live her life. Caymen does not want to be with Xander because she is afraid of many problems that will arise if she is with him. She fears that he is judging her and she does not want to go against her mom’s wishes. She even tries to force herself to be in a relationship with a boy named Mason. He is in an uncouth garageband and falls in the lower class. This in turn portrays him as a more compatible bachelor for Caymen. This is not practical, because she loves Xander. Caymen’s mother dislikes all people of the upper class because her wealthy, ex abandoned them and moved to New York City. Caymen’s mother has left her with this ideology that all rich people are bad and are only looking out for themselves, when in reality Xander really cares about Caymen. The problem is not that she hates Xander. She is afraid of the life that he leads. In a conversation between the two about their fears, Xander asks, “ Is there anything you’re afraid of?” which she in turn thinks, “You”(West 117). Caymen is fearful of what Xander stands for; the money, the power, all of it is a foreign concept to Caymen.

One of the biggest obstacles standing in Amanda and Dawson’s way is their parents. Amanda’s parents, the Colliers are wealthy and know very well who the Cole family is, as does everyone else in the small town of Pamlico. They are the kind of people that you avoid, so of course when they discover that Amanda is fraternizing with Dawson Cole they are concerned. Their concerns do not consider Amanda’s feelings because Dawson and Amanda are happy together. Amanda’s mother begged her to break up with Dawson and her father stopped talking to her (Sparks 19). Dawson believed that “everything and everyone seemed stacked against them”(19). Truly the odds of the relationship working at the time are not the best. The constant fight in the Collier family home regarding the relationship began to drive Amanda closer to Dawson and It caused her heartbreak. While Dawson loves her a lot he hates to see her go through this. Due to the fact that Amanda’s parents are so concerned about their relationship “he gently suggested that it might be better for her if they stopped seeing each other.” (19) Dawson does not want their relationship to end, but he can see that Amanda’s parents are not going to back off. Dawson is aware that her parents dislike him. Most people in Pamlico county do, but the Colliers have a specific dislike to him because he is lower class. Mr Collier even calls Dawson “a worthless piece of white trash” (18). The Colliers look down on him because if people were to see a Collier dating a Cole, it could ruin their reputation, which is something especially important to people in the upper class. After continuing the relationship a bit longer, Amanda’s parents put their foot down and tell her that if she is going to continue her relationship with Dawson they are going to kick her out of the house and they will not pay for University. She considers this and decides to stay with him, but Dawson is not as naive as Amanda. They begin discussing how it would work out for them to move in together and Dawson realizes that he needs to breakup with her or she will not go to school and everything between Amanda and her parents will be ruined. If Amanda’s parents were okay with the relationship, they would have stayed together. Even though Amanda is soon off to university. They planned to call and visit every so often, but with the burden of Amanda’s parents their relationship is nearly unattainable to maintain.

Not only are the odds against the relationship, but Dawson has his own set of dilemmas. He is unable to go off to University even though he is very smart. His father used to beat him for having good grades because it made him look like he thought he was better than the Coles. His father seems to be insecure with himself because of how he lashes out every time he sees him being successful. Mr. Cole wants to belittle Dawson down to make himself look stronger. Dawson can see past this and knows his father is weak, but that does not help the fact that he is very low on money and if he left, his father and cousins would probably come after him. There is no way Dawson is leaving Pamlico County and he thinks that there is more out in the world for her. Dawson is living in Tuck’s garage and fixing cars for money, buying only the necessities until his father and cousins, Ted and Abee, show up at the garage demanding money from him. This is a battle that Dawson loses. His father returns weekly for the money and Dawson feels like he is conformed to a life of being a poor failure who does not deserve Amanda. Between his neglectful father, and Amanda’s parents disapproving of him, he is beginning to believe that he is “a worthless piece of white trash” (18) like Amanda’s father called him. Dawson is well aware of the fact that society dislikes him because of his family which just makes him loathe them more.

In The distance between us, Caymen’s mother has a vendetta against the upper class because her ex husband was rich and she is stereotypical to people of the upper class to arrogant and self-centered. Because Caymen is well aware of her mother’s hate towards rich people, she is afraid to even tell her mother about her relationship. This puts a strain on her relationship with her mother as well because they are close and tell eachother everything. When Caymen finally tells her mother about the relationship, her mom does not react well. Her mother, Susan is trying to protect her from the pain that she suffered when her rich, husband left because she still feels hurt and used. She means well but when Caymen tells her that she is in a relationship with Xander, she reacts by saying “That’s all you are to him though. Fun. Can’t you see that? You are just a little bit of excitement for him, Caymen, something different, until he’s ready to settle down for real… if you trust my judgement or care about my opinion at all, you won’t”(254). Caymen’s mom is passionate about her not being with Xander anymore and is nearly shaming her for dating him. This conversation escalated to Susan yelling “Your father never wanted to see you! That’s my point Caymen. Don’t you get that? He left us”(254). The fact that Sausan brings up Caymen’s father Proves how She is relating Caymen’s relationship with Xander to her old relationship. Caymen and her mother are angry and avoiding each other for a while which pushes her closer to Xander. further damaging her relationship with her mother. It is not healthy for Caymen to rely on Xander only because she is angry with her mother and is unsure of who else to turn to. This is a burden in Caymen and Xander’s way because she can not balance her relationship, when she is having family conflicts. Caymen really cares about her mother’s opinion, but she does not want to stop seeing him. Caymen’s mother shaming her for dating a rich guy really takes a toll on Caymen’s confidence in the relationship, leaving her with conflicts throughout.

While Caymen struggles with the conflicts with her mom. She also struggles with society judging her for being poor. It leads to her making a ton of false assumptions and judgments about other people. It starts with Xander taking Caymen out for dinner with his friends. They enter the restaurant and are greeted by his friends. One of them says “You taking in strays now Xander?”(125). Caymen is very angered by this statement and goes home. This eventually leads to Caymen being angry with Xander for a while and they stops talking for a bit. She makes false assumptions such as that Xander is just using her to feel better about himself, like some kind of charity case. She goes through an internal conflict where she feels like she has to date Mason instead of Xander because he is in the same social class as her. She does not like Mason that much, he is not a gentleman and most importantly he is not Xander. She feels as if she can not date Xander because he is rich. Caymen believes that she is not good enough to date Xander to the point where it makes her insecure, while Caymen’s mom believes they are too good for rich people, like they are superior when really she is just full of envy because of how she was treated in the past ,even though it may be different for her daughter.

In comparison The best of me and The Distance between us have a common theme of parents rejecting their children’s significant other, but for opposite reasons. Dawson is not good enough for the Colliers because he is poor, while the Caymen’s mom dislikes Xander because he is rich. She just makes assumptions about him and his intentions such as “in a few weeks Xander will be done seeing how the other half lives” even though he really intends to be in a real relationship with her, so it is a bit obnoxious and judgmental of her to think that of him. Both of the poorer characters also suffer from their parents inadequate attitudes. For Dawson, he is suffering his father’s drunken, abusive tendencies while Caymen suffers from her mother’s judgmental attitude and her mother keeping secrets from her in the time when their business is going bankrupt. They both struggle with the internal battle of not knowing if they should continue with the relationship because of the hurdles in their way. Both of them has the odds stacked against them and while Dawson and Amanda are always willing to work through their problems, whereas with Caymen and Xander if a rough patch hits she leaves and stays mad at him for a week while she deals with her conflicts alone, until eventually they get together again. From the beginning the odds were not in either relationships favors, but the struggles that the impecunious characters face make the relationship much more difficult to maintain.

After the time spent at Tuck’s cottage with Amanda, Dawson feels like everything is going perfect, it is just like the old times when they were teenagers, in love. They both sat there thinking “There was a moment, just a moment, when she was able to imagine a different life that might have been hers, the kind of life she knew the she’d always really wanted.” (140). They both realize how good they go together, but just when everything is going perfect, his past begins to sneak up on him. Dawson has successfully avoided his father and cousins for the past 20 years, but when he returned, he was found by Ted and Abee. They recognize him and still have it out to get it. Dawson walks into a restaurant and sees that chaos has broken loose, he is trying to help someone get out but as he is leaving he is shot by his cousin Ted. Amanda and Dawson are star crossed lovers. They are destined to not work and once again the odds are stacked against them.

Caymen faces the struggle of the doll store that is run by her and her mom in a large sum of financial trouble and her mom leaves her in the dark about their financial situation and family situations. In the end Caymen finds out that her mother’s parents, Caymen’s grandparents are the richest people in California. Her mother hides the rich life from her, and any information about her father hidden from her. This leads to despair and frustration because Caymen did not think that her mother would lie to her, especially about such big things, but it makes her lose trust in her mother and causes her to be distraught. Even though her mother was only trying to protect her from the stress that it would have put on her if she had know all of those things. Caymen is also frustrated with how much responsibility she has at the doll store. She even says “for just one second I think of a life without the doll store. For that one second I feel free.”(43). The doll store is suppose to be passed on to her even though Caymen does not really want to run the doll store forever. With all of the combined stresses it makes it difficult for her to handle her relationship with Xander, as that is just another thing to worry about. Xander is also seen to have a problem similar to Caymans. His father expects him to run the family Hotel chain, but Xander has no desire to fulfil his father’s wishes. This makes Caymen annoyed because he thinks they are the same when she thinks that she has went through more than he has because of her social status. “I want to tell him that if he thinks he has found some sort of connection with me through our similar situations he should think again.” She thinks to herself. Caymen does not see his issue to be similar to hers. She sees nearly all of his issues to be invalid because he is very rich. It is an unfair assumption for her to make as having a lot of money can often lead to problems on its own.

Throughout both novels it is a common occurance to see the lower class characters struggling emotionally throughout the relationship. Their main struggles were bittersweet, while Dawson finally finds the life that he has dreamed of for the past twenty years and is with Amanda, he is soon murdered, but his heart saves Amanda’s son who was in an accident. While Caymen discovers a ton of secrets that her mother had been hiding from her, but in the end her mother gives her permission to meet her father and she meets her grandparents. While this did cause them both confusion and pain it also gave them something that they had been desiring for so long.

In conclusion, The Best Of Me by Nicholas sparks and The Distance Between Us by Kasie West both offer different viewpoints on people of different social classes. Spark’s book shows how the rich family disapproves of the boy from the lower class, while West’s book shows the opposite perception of how the upper class boy is judged as obnoxious and rejected by the lower class. While both characters have something to overcome, It is clearly portrayed that the more indigent character in the two books has more to overcome with their internal struggles as well as either being oppressed and judged by other members of society.

Works Cited

1. “Richard Bach Quotes.” BrainyQuote, Xplore, www.brainyquote.com/quotes/richard_bach_136009.
2. Sparks, Nicholas. The Best of Me. Grand Central Publishing, 2012.
3. West, Kasie. The Distance between Us. Scholastic, 2014.