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In the story written by Jack Finney, an assumed marketer at a grocery store risks his life for what he considers to be an extremely important piece of paper. More precisely, the paper flies out of his open window, landing on the ledge of his high-rise building. The paper lands too far beyond his reach, and because Tom cannot conceive of abandoning all of the research he has completed, he climbs onto the narrow ledge, beginning what becomes a physically precarious and psychologically agonizing journey to retrieve the yellow paper. I believe this to be exceedingly dim-witted, however understandable – as the modern pressures of civil life can cause one to place work above all else,…
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Thanatophobia is an irrational fear of death. Symptoms may include uncontrollable sweating, a feeling of insanity or loss of control, recurrence of gruesome thoughts, the inability to distinguish reality from fantasy, and the aspiration to escape from a situation where one feels his or her life is in harm’s way. Thanatophobia grasps and controls every aspect of one’s life. The main characters in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt” fall victim to this fear of dying and the anxiety controls parts of their life. Because Catch-22 takes place during World War II, death makes an appearance quite often. Heller concentrates on Yossarian’s struggle to stay alive in his battle against Catch-22. Catch-22 symbolizes death in that it…
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Motivational slogans appear everywhere, it seems. Printed on water bottles, or painted into murals, and sewn onto t-shirts, they fly their enthusiastic flags wherever the eye should look. One particular saying that has become quite popular lately reads, “live life to the fullest.” The average teenager sees it so often that they become callous to the truth of this simple, cliché saying. For God did indeed create humans to live their lives to the fullest, to enjoy their Creator's marvelous gifts of life and the world around us, and in doing so to give glory to Him who made all things. Unfortunately, the majority of the population rush through their nerve-wracked days, speeding from one thing to the next in order to climb higher on the social ladder as they disregard the true purposes that God created mankind for. Two examples of such people appear in a couple of short stories, one by Jack Finney and another by Kate Chopin. Tom Benecke in “Contents of a Dead Man's Pockets” undergoes a rattling event that causes him to reconsider his…
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Tom Benecke, the main character of Jack Finney’s Contents of a Dead Man’s Pocket, experiences many life events that change his priorities, such as realizing no one was going to help him off the ledge, breaking the glass to his apartment window, and when the yellow sheet flies out the window for a second time. Benecke went out on the ledge to retrieve his yellow sheet, but once he took his first few steps he found that it was not as easy or inviting as he originally assumed. Once Benecke made this realization he quickly modified his priority from job success to pure survival. The author writes, “He was simply not going to cling here till he slipped and fell; he told himself that now.” (47) Likewise, when Benecke recognized that the only way to get back inside was to break the window, he became torn on whether or not to risk the possibility of not fully breaking the glass and falling…
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Life’s events can change our priorities. Tom Benecke’s experience in “Contents of a Dead Man’s Pockets” by Jack Finney is a perfect example of this: before Tom’s experience on the ledge, all he cared about was work, his wife and family, but everything in his life came second to his work. After Tom nearly died, several times, he realized that he was doing life all wrong. It was not until he went through this traumatic experience that anyone could get through to him. If Tom’s priorities can change drastically anyone’s can.…
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In a world where everything previously known disappeared into ash, anyone would meditate on death. The wife was one to resort to death for comfort, whereas the husband remained faithful to life. Though the husband adopted his wife’s attitude towards death by the end of his life, he still differs from the woman in that he maintained hope for mankind even though he was resigned about his own life. In writing The Road, Cormac McCarthy successfully illustrated the conflict between life and death, hope and…
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too just accept death and let it happen. The literary elements I took from this story that were…
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He was standing on the ledge and was frozen, not knowing what to do. He was thinking, thinking about falling. He stood there frightened. His mind was in a whirl, thinking about what he would lose if he fell; his wife, the family that he could have, his life, his friends, his wonderful job, he would lose all of it. Then he thought about falling. Would it be so bad? His adrenaline went up as he thought about this. Tom’s mind went off again thinking about leaving this world, the life he would leave. His mind pushed everything he loved away and just thought about falling, falling, falling. The wind in his face, the weird feeling in his stomach that he loved, and the anticipation of hitting the ground. He started to sway which brought him back to focus, but that didn’t keep his mind from wandering off.…
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Grief and loss are vital elements in this novel. Not only is Tom’s family grieving the loss of a loved one, Tom’s uncle Joe who died in the London underground bombings 2 years earlier, but there are other forms of grief portrayed within the text. Tom grieves the absence of his family. After the death of his Uncle, his father turned to drink, his mother left, his father left. Tom closed himself off from the world; his friends, family and the girl he loved.…
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With the help of Ruby Hornaday, Tom finally realizes that sometimes you just have to go for it. “Tom knows he’s risking everything, but how can he stop? How can he say no? To say no to Ruby Hornaday would be to say no to the world.”(Lines 209-210) During Tom’s final day, he gets the reader thinking by saying, “I used to think, Tom says, that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn’t want to spend it all in one place….” “But now I know life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we’re all very lucky to be part of something like that.”(Lines 550-557) Tom teaches us to not let fear hold us back from living our lives. We must simply go for…
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Ambition is a strong desire to do or to achieve something, which typically requires determination and hard work. In the story “Contents of a Dead Man's Pocket,” Tom the main character was very hard working and dedicated his life to his work, he believed that this yellow sheet of paper could help him be the best at work. When Tom decides to stay at home due to work instead of going to the movies with his wife, it shows that his ambitions for work can lead to the destruction of his marriage, if he keeps blowing off activities like this. “You work to much, though, Tom- and too hard,” said his wife. Another is when Tom is trying to get the yellow sheet of paper from blowing away due to the wind, then he goes outside risking his life chasing after…
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The father and son search for shelter and food in idle commercial stores and the son encounters many dead bodies and questions whether if they were also going to die. The boy is paralyzed by the adversity and suffering he had faced throughout his ruthless journey with his father. The boy questions their fate. He is implying that he is worried for the future. When the boy woke up from his tranquil sleep, he innocently asked his father if “[they] were going to die” (11). His father retorted, “Sometime but not now” (11). The father bluntly answered the question, knowing that he could not hide the inevitability of death. However, the father insisted that they should strive to stay alive regardless of how poor the circumstances will entail. The father wants to hold on to life delicately, even in the midst of a dangerous and isolated world. The father’s motive to stay alive is to spend time with his son and not to lose hope.…
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According to Tom memory, he states “There is a fifth character in the play who doesn’t appear except in this larger-than-life photograph over the mantel. This is our father who left us a long time ago” (925). Established from the opening, Tom proceeds into his memory creating a narrative in which he is depressed by because at the end, he too will leave his family. Wanting to have a bit of adventure, Tom leaves Saint Louis during a time when his family depended on him the most just like how his father left leaving only a picture above the mantel and the memories from each of the characters. “I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space - I traveled around a great deal” (975). In this soliloquy, Tom explains he is aware of being compared to his father and he should not receive any sympathy for his father leaving him because he does the same to his dependent family.…
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Primarily, the start of "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket" indicates that Tom, the main character, is in a jam because he chooses to stay home to do work instead of going out with his wife. Tom began with guilt reasoning to the fact that he is not going with his wife. His decision is final although he is tempted to go due to "smelling the perfume she had used." (pg.6) Tom wants to go with his wife and he knows that she is hurt because he is not going. However, he stays home and starts to work as one of his important papers flies out of the window and onto the ledge. He has a near death experience where "horror paralyzed him." (pg.10) This is because he was on the ledge of about a 12 story building. If he just went with his wife and had a good time, none of this ledge business would have happened.…
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In his play, Shakespeare expresses existential dilemma through Hamlet. Hamlet’s life so far has gone roughly in a negative direction. His father, the King of Hamlet, has passed away; and disappointingly, Hamlet comes back to a crowd that is busy acknowledging the new king, Claudius, and is forgetting about the death of his father. Shakespeare uses language to express theme through Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be, or not to be”. In his soliloquy, Hamlet asks himself whether he should kill himself, or keep going. Hamlet illustrates the strain that many people feel at one point or another, the world is just too much.…
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