Preview

Low Visibility

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
992 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Low Visibility
The short story “Low Visibility” by Margaret Murphy is a fictional story, which deals with many topics, such as violence, love, hate, oppression, and right and wrong and the story is told by an un­instructed and omniscient 3. person narrator who tells the story as it unfolds.
The plot takes off in medias res as we are thrown into a scene where Laura 's husband John is watch­ing television without any introduction. The structure in the story lets us jump a bit back and forth between two settings, as we are shown what is happening in the streets though Johns television, while we are also following the main characters in the apartment. So the story unfolds two places: the streets and John and Laura 's apartment. The setting shows that Laura and John does not have a lot of money, and are probably low class or low middle class because they live in an apartment above a shop, which is not normally a location those people would choose to live. There is also smaller details that support this, like the fact that John wears boots inside, and John feels that his wife should not be trusted with anything of value, which might be an indication that they don 't really have many things of value. The title “Low Visibility” is a synonymous of Laura. She does not have anything to say at home, and she is John submissive. Margaret Murphy plays on this pun, by letting Laura feel invisible to her very filling husband, John. At the end of the story, Laura walks outside and joins the people of low visibility. Thereby she gets over John, and she does not want him to be a part of her life any more. Margaret Murphy shows this by now referring to her by her real name. We don 't hear a lot of factual stuff about Laura, how she looks and so on, but we do know a lot about her character. She used to be a happy, out going person and now her husband has squeezed the spirits out her( P.8 l.19-24). Laura is now a humble, nervous, humourless, unhappy and very submissive person: “Better that he hurt her

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    In contrast, the role of the Chief of the Invisible People extends far beyond exerting power. He is a counselor who offers his advice to those in need, while allowing them to behave as they deem fit. This cooperative community flourishes in isolation because it has been left intact despite the encroachment of a globalized civilization that promotes competition and…

    • 1417 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man the narrator tells us the story of his life, that has led him to realize he is invisible to those around him. While the narrator is not actually invisible, society is unable to see his true self through the racial stereotypes and prejudices they hold. What the narrator does not see is when someone else is in this invisible place of society. When our narrator is with the other young african american men and they see the blonde women, they do not see her. All they see in that moment is something pretty that they want to wreck in passions of lust. We are given a couple moments where the narrator might be seeing through the societal view to what she is really like. The narrator talks about seeing her eyes “I saw…

    • 173 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Ralph Ellison introduces several different characters that encounter situations that interpret the way they are shaped. The people in the novel tend to use their experiences to adjust their judgement, which also allows the readers to recognize the character’s weakness and strengths. As the reader progresses in the novel, they realize how the characters overcome difficult scenarios their psyche changes in unexpected ways. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, women are objectified, stereotyped, and their issues were lessened.…

    • 902 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Intellectual, engaging, multilayered, and thought provoking are all descriptions of Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, not to mention influential. So much so that even the writings of Barack Obama are molded after Ellison's only novel published during his lifetime. The book follows an unnamed man with a talent for public speaking through his endeavors and life experiences, starting off with him recalling his tale and claiming to be invisible. Not physically transparent but rather that people never see him, only themselves and their surroundings, he then describes his living conditions in the basement of a large building in New York with 1,369 lights illuminating his living space.…

    • 2168 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Analysis of Cathedral

    • 721 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The short story “Cathedral”, written by Raymond Carver is a rather simple story with a complex and revealing true meaning. A man, the narrator, is upset or uneasy about the arrival of his wife’s’ long time friend Robert. The main reason for him feeling upset is because the wife’s friend is blind. The narrator has obviously never experienced a blind person and is full of stereotypical thoughts and beliefs. We learn of his prejudice toward blind people, become aware how his own life lacks any sort of meaning or self security, and we see how the narrator evolves as a direct result of the interactions with the blind man. This short story is told from the selective narrator position, where as we only can see into the mind of the narrator. The narrator is a dynamic character in this story and there are a few events that help transition the character over the course of the story.…

    • 721 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Lord of the Flies

    • 551 Words
    • 3 Pages

    How did anonymity play a role in this chapter? How did “the mask” impact Jack’s decision(s)? Why is the “mask” representative of their decent toward savagery? * Remember to follow journal response structure (text to text, text to self, text to world connection).…

    • 551 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In the yellow wallpaper, the narrator is the character that the readers feel sad for the most. The narrator is a young wife and mother whose physician husband, john claims that she is suffering from depression. He takes her to a rest cure treatment and locks her in a nursery with 'rings and things in the walls' to ensure a good rest for her. Yet, she loses her sanity under the circumstances of John's excess suppression and the distracting yellow wallpaper in the room. John completely holds the authority over the narrator and takes care of her so careful as if she is a little girl with the nickname ‘blessed little goose’ named by him. He asks her to control herself over her imaginative and storytelling power. The narrator wants to satisfy her husband and obeys him although she 'disagrees with' his idea and has 'heavy opposition’, and she ‘takes pain to control herself’, which ‘makes me (the narrator) very tired’. Not wanting to disappoint her husband and her desire of being an ideal mother and wife, she tries hard to be lenient and thus, she suppresses her creative fantasy even with pain. The narrator becomes completely detached from the outer world when john turns down her request of living in the room ‘downstairs that opened onto the piazza and had roses all over the window’. The suppression is so unbearable that the narrator starts to write her journal in order to express her stress secretively without anybody knowing. She finds relief in writing the journal as she mentions ‘it’s such a relief!’ It proves that the suppression by john makes the narrator afraid of telling him her inner thoughts, which makes their relationship distant. In the meanwhile, the narrator knows that john loves her very much but she doesn’t like the way he loves her. As the narrator loses touch with the outer world, she stays in the room and the weird yellow wallpaper distracts her attention. By using contrast, the change in the narrator’s attitude towards the wallpaper is shown clearly.…

    • 1643 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Everyone experiences that one pivotal moment in their life where everything changes; this moment defines who one is and establishes one’s place in the world. In Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, the narrator experiences his pivotal moment when he burns all of the papers in his briefcase. This moment shapes the meaning of the novel as a whole by emphasizing invisibility and self-discovery…

    • 553 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    “In the flood of the light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger- a fierce, bald, very dark Negro- glared at me from the glass… All the traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence.” This is just the start of the transformation John Griffin had to go through to create the ultimate sociological experiment in the 1950’s. Within the book Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, it can be argue that discrimination truly existed amongst the white citizen and black citizens, segregation existed beyond true realization, and persecution was wrongly institutionalized. The narrative writing of John Griffin goes into great depth of these very points revealing the life of a black man in the south.…

    • 1050 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Throughout the story, Cathedral, by Raymond Carver, readers are shown the other side of blindness. In the world, one may assume that there is just one type of blindness- being sightless. “My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to” (Carver, 1). The meaning of blindness goes much deeper than that. Through the actions and words of a character, the husband in this short story, readers are shown how much ignorance, fear, and confusion one can have for someone who has literal blindness. All these negative feelings towards the blind man leads to the husband finding the blindness within himself.…

    • 519 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Invisible

    • 944 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Madham is the self-built town. It’s a town made up of 22,400 matchsticks, it contains 109 buildings, all scratch built. There are two lakes, a football stadium, a cement plant, a hospital, two tunnels, a forest, and sixty feet of track. It has a population of 289 plastic people standing at less than half an inch tall, seventeen dogs, six cows, and eleven horses. Madham lies on 3 Ping-Pong tables and nearly fills the biggest room in the basement of a 17 year old boy who battles with his inner demons and his descent into insanity. Doug Hanson is a quiet kid, pretty much invisible, a “freak,” he gets beat up in school and the girl of his dreams calls him a worm. He tells his story in the novel Invisible, written by Pete Hautman, a novel that was named one of the best books for young adults of 2006 in America.…

    • 944 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Cathedral Essay

    • 1490 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Sometimes we have to look beyond what we see on the outside to understand something more deeply. In the short story Cathedral By Raymond Carver, the narrator has an attitude of being selfish, and jealous through the story. The narrator’s wife invites a blind man, Robert, to come stay in their house for a short time while the man visits family members of his own wife who recently passed. The narrator is not enthusiastic because blind people make the narrator uncomfortable, mainly because the narrator has no real experience with the blind. In addition, to his uneasiness with the blind the narrator is uncomfortable with the relationship his wife and the blind man have. The wife and Robert, the blind man, have maintained a close relationship via tape recordings mailed back and forth. Despite the narrators feelings about the visit, Robert shows up, and the three of them dine together. By the end of the story the narrator begins to understand and accept Robert and his blindness. In the short story Cathedral, Carver uses binary oppositions of blindness versus the seeing to show the theme of ignorance through the first person’s narrator’s journey from insecurity to openness.…

    • 1490 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The expereince of inconsequentiality has to do with feeling unseen and misunderstood. It is the belief that one matters little if at all in the world. It was a theme that pervaded many of their stories and was often accompanied by a tone of resignation and matter-of-fact telling. It was the participant who is responsible for the care of her younger sister while also trying to finish high school. It was the participant whose father was found murdered and had to be identified by his dental records the body was so badly decomposed who watched her mother swallow her grief as and become the sole provider for the family and who now lives with chronic and sometimes debilitating worries and anxiety about her family's saftety. This same participant…

    • 160 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The Pedestrian

    • 1233 Words
    • 5 Pages

    This short story is an example of Dystopian fiction – dealing with a society that embodies a flawed perfection – achieved at a cost.…

    • 1233 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Transparency

    • 495 Words
    • 2 Pages

    A lot of people take about the importance of transparency in international financial institutions but they rarely explain why it is so important. It is just taken as a given that it is important. There are actually a number of reasons why they are important but the main one is trust. No matter how sophisticated our economy has become all transactions still come down to trust, you have to trust the person that you are trading with. This requires transparency so that you can see what the other party is doing.…

    • 495 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays