Category: Character
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A Comparison Between Annie Barrows’ Potato Peel Pie Society and Mary Ann Shaffer’s Awakenings in The Guernsey Literary
Awakenings in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society In the novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, writer Juliet Ashton falls in love with Guernsey, an island in the English Channel occupied by Germany during World War II. One day, she receives a letter…
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Comparison of Main Characters in Things Fall Apart and Moby Dick
The novels Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Moby Dick by Herman Melville feature two uniquely different characters who similarly strive for fulfillment amidst uncertainty and danger, completely devoid of moral qualms about extremities taken in pursuit of this. At face-value, the two seem to be paving distinct paths as tribal leader Okonkwo craves…
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Analysis of Prospero as a Public Ruler Or Solitary Wizard in The Tempest
In William Shakespeare’s final play, “The Tempest,” the playwright spins a magical web of a story that, although being comedic and light-hearted, subtly addresses the issues of absolutism, power and the monarchy. The main character in “The Tempest” is a man named Prospero. Formerly the Duke of Milan but exiled to a by his pernicious…
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Ahab’s Character Destruction in Moby Dick
Captain Ahab, the fifty-eight year old commander of the Pequod, is one of the most fascinating mortals in literary history. The reader witnesses him teetering between sanity and madness, with the latter winning each slight battle and eventually conquering his entire mind, body, and spirit. This, however, does not simply happen to Ahab, for he…
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The Tragic Heroes of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi
In Chapter Three of Leech’s The Critical Idiom: Tragedy (henceforth shortened as Tragedy), the traditional Aristotelian view of a tragic hero is defined as an exalted person, usually of high rank, who is held because of said rank “in a position of recognizable eminence” (34). Eminence is a key component of being and recognizing an…
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The Portrayal of Caliban as a Sensitive Creature by Shakespeare
Caliban is certainly one of the most complex and contradictory characters in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, at different points embodying the poetic, the absurd, the pathetic, and the savagely evil. For this reason, he is also one of the most interesting and fiercely debated of Shakespeare’s characters. It is hard to imagine how Shakespeare intended Elizabethan…
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A Look at The Story of Willy Loman and Tragic Events that Affect His Life
I chose to read by Arthur Miller because I believe that he was a very talented American playwright and his plays always interested me. As I was marking the book and reading the play, I made sure to jot down any symbols or imagery that I felt were important and should be discussed later on.…
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The Veiled Woman: Female Innocence Comes “Undone” in Marlow’s Hero and Leander
Although the nature vs. nurture debate seems as though it is a rather contemporary argument, it was actually a common thematic element of Elizabethan literature. Christopher Marlowe, in particular, focused on human behavior and the influences of natural instinct versus learned habit. In his “minor epic” Hero and Leander, Marlowe genders nature and nurture by…
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Identity Change of Characters in ‘Mother Night’
In today’s society, almost anything is possible to achieve, a fact that makes it so that nothing is ever as it appears. Things change constantly, whether we agree with such changes or not. This idea is especially notable in the people of the modern world, who undergo phases in life when they change who they…
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Linda and Catherine’s Role in The Things They Carried
Throughout The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien often alludes to Kathleen, his daughter, and Linda, his childhood friend with cancer. However, Kathleen and Linda do not exist. O’Brien includes them in his story because they allow him to interact with the reader within the text without actually interacting with the reader personally. Kathleen represents the…