Category: Character

In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance tells of how he advanced from a hillbilly to a relatively wealthy author. From a family and culture of drug abuse and instability, Vance made his way to one of the country’s most elite law schools and built a much more stable and sustainable life for himself.…

The Sympathizer’s main character, is an unnamed half-French and half-Vietnamese spy. The main character is an aide-de-camp to the general in the Special Branch, the central intelligence organization of the anti-Communist South Vietnamese Army. The narrator is shown as a trusted member of the generals circle, it is quickly revealed to the reader that the…

Near the beginning of , Wharton establishes that Lily would not indeed have cared to marry a man who was merely rich: “she was secretly ashamed of her mothers crude passion for money” (38). Lily, like the affluent world she loves, has a strange relationship with money. She needs money to buy the type of…

One of the tragedies in The House of Mirth by is that Lily Bart is unable to marry Laurence Selden and thereby secure a safe position in society. Their relationship fluctuates from casual intimacy to outright love depending on how and where Selden perceives Lily. Selden sees a beautious quality in Lily Bart that is…

After a close look at today’s society, an observer will find that within all , both people are equal partners. Today, this equality is something we believe to be a result of our basic human rights. However, in Shakespearean times, women were considered to be weak individuals whose purpose was to eventually get married and…

In recent years, the age of maturity in Western cultures has been pushed higher and higher as more education becomes necessary to pursue job opportunities. Crashing economies increasingly force children to rely on their parents after graduation. Despite the practical necessity of taking a few more years to set out entirely on their own, the…

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Caesar is a soon-to-be monarch who is murdered by a group called the Conspirators whose justification for their actions may be debated. Throughout the story, Brutus switches sides several times, starting as Caesar’s best friend, then going on to kill Caesar, yet ultimately ending his own life with an apology to…

Nineteenth century novelists used physical descriptions in their narratives to impose a thematic integrity onto their characters. Flaubert, it could be argued, likewise followed the traditions of realism and moderated Frédéric’s inclinations towards romanticism with an ironic and oftentimes pessimistic tone. Many characters in A Sentimental Education, in fact, are readable by Flaubert’s physical portraits.…

Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred details the harrowing journey of 26-year-old Dana Franklin. A modern black woman from 1970s Los Angeles, Dana is continuously jerked back through time to the land of her ancestors: early 1800s Maryland. Her task? Save her white ancestor, Rufus Weylin, from death. The risk? If she does not, she may…

The title of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is often criticized, argued that it should be titled Brutus, as Marcus Brutus is the tragic hero. However, the title is appropriate, as Julius Caesar, though insignificant as an actor in the play since he dies in Act 3 having a minimal amount of lines, impacts the characters in…