Personal Narrative Essay

Chaucer is no stranger to writing parodies of his own stories in The Canterbury Tales, as seen in the Reeve’s Tale working off of and following immediately after The Miller’s Tale. Similarly, The Friar’s Tale closely parallels and also follows right after The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Chaucer aligns these two tales to enforce the point that they should not be interpreted separately, but rather they should be accepted as an entire unit. And by implementing textual similarities, Chaucer blurs the lines…

execution. The dream vividly describes “the rifle roars with a deafening crack,” Amir sees the man that shot Hassan was himself. The personification of the rifle roaring signify a predator versus prey killing; this makes Hassan’s death more brutal and personal. The diction of “deafening crack” provides a more vivid image by not only describing what is being seen, but what is being heard. Amir being Hassan’s executor further intensifies his guilt; Amir blames himself for Hassan’s death and feels…

everyone’s well-being at heart. In this way she is different from Grendel’s mother; Wealtheow is a warm, benevolent presence whereas Grendel’s mother is evil and cruel, but both are unrepresented in the dialogue of the story. The way these characters’ personal traits are viewed by others also influences the reader’s perception of them. Grendel’s mother is “sullen … pitiful, foul” and is virtually unknown to anyone but her son (Gardner 55). In Beowulf, Hrothgar recounts how country folk have…

The novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings tells the story of Maya Angelou’s early life, full of overpowering situations from her childhood. Maya and her brother, Bailey Jr., face many difficulties but manage to come out ahead. Angelou tells their tales with a sense of wry humor, related to the reader through diction and imagery that leaves a lasting impression. One of the first difficult situations Maya faces was a rape when she was only eight. “Then there was the pain. A breaking and entering…

One's ability to see is often taken for granted as it is in "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver. The title suggests that the story deals with a cathedral, but it is really about two blind men; one physically, the other mentally. One of the men is Robert, the blind friend of the narrator's wife, and the other is the narrator himself. The narrator is the man who is mentally blind, and unknowingly describes his own prejudice. Carver writes the husband as a man with a very narrow mind. Two instances in…

I will firstly discuss “The Rape of the Lock” and how Pope here makes effective use of the mock epic through the course of the poem. The opening of this poem is a letter written to the actual subject matter of the poem Mrs Arabella Fermor, in this opening letter he discusses why he wrote the poem, what inspired him to do so, why he published this piece and also his reasoning for dedicating it to Arabella. The poem is split into five canto’s. The poem begins with Belinda the heroine of this story…

Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is a short story packed with many symbols and hidden meaning. Generally, it is about a man’s disease, his painful regret, and his inevitable demise. However, there is much more to the story than simply that. More substance can be found buried underneath the surface of the story. There is significant symbolic meaning scattered throughout it that adds to it and enriches it. Shoveling deep into the story is crucial in order to dig out much of its…

Edgar Allan Poe often demonstrates a type of madness in his short stories. Many times it comes from the first-person narrator. While the narrators are similar in the fact that they are both insane, they also have a lot of differences in the way that they are insane. A great way to compare the way the insanity differs in the narrators, is to compare two of Poe’s stories. Stories such as “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” do a good job showing the similarities and differences between the…

introduced in the mother's perspective. The son is very influential, oppressive and he knows his place. He has had issues from a young age such as outbursts and that he couldn't tell the truth. Sometimes he is quite introverted when it comes to his personal life. He likes to keep his things to himself and does not like being questioned. The mother on the other hand is a very sceptical person. She is interested in her son's life and how he spends his free time. After all the lies that the son had…

Point of View in ¨The Pit in the Pendulum¨ Edgar Allen Poe's first person narrator in ¨The Pit in the Pendulum¨ is a strong survivor but being in captivity is driving him insane. In first person the readers become the strong survivor, that is the unreliable prisoner of Poe's famous short story and they get a deeper, and more visceral experience because of it. In first person point of view the reader sees the story through the eyes of the narrator, their view and interpretation of the events.…