The author conveys the protagonist’s thoughts, feelings, attitudes and beliefs through a variety of techniques. The audience is aware of Tom’s growing guilt through the technique of first person writing. ‘Like I said, that was a low point.’ (p124) The convincing, idiomatic, subjective voice of the teenage narrator creates a confidential relationship with the readers, as well as keeping them engaged. It also gives us insight into Tom’s inner most thoughts.…
Cruel and terrible events forever leave a mark on our memory. Especially, when these events are directly related to person, the memory reproduces every second of what happened. Unfortunately, humanity fully cognized the term of "war". "Facing it" by Yusef Komunyakaa reveals another several sides of the war. Poem tells the reader about which consequences, the war left and how changed people's lives. The hero identifies itself with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, mourns all those killed and who did not return. That is why the poem is dramatic. War has become a part of the hero's life, even after the ending.…
Most memoirs are written with the intention of telling the author’s significant experiences, each conveying their individual purpose. In both Jeannette Walls’, The Glass Castle, and Mary Karr’s, The Liars Club, the authors utilize their dysfunctional childhoods to achieve their independent purposes. Walls uses numerous strategies to achieve her purpose of the memoir being a way to accept the past and to not let the past define oneself. Unlike Walls, Karr also uses her strategies to show the endurance of love and family through thick and thin. Together both novels are able to tell their own individual stories and get through to the readers utilizing contrasting strategies.…
Write a story about an experience that affected you deeply and ought to be known by others. The story can be written in prose, can be a poem, can be a short story, can be a song, or…
William Zinsser has advice for writing memoirs. “Be yourself”, “speak freely”, and “tell your own story” (Zinsser, 2, 4, 6). It applies to many different memoirs.…
I found Sherman Alexie’s “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” particularly interesting in terms of style and voice. The narrator seems very nonchalant about all of the events that occur in the story. The main premise is that the narrator, Jackson, a homeless Native American, finds his grandmother’s regalia in a pawnshop and aims to buy it back from the owner. He can buy the regalia back for a thousand dollars, so he sets off to try and make the money.…
This should be a reflective piece of writing with focus on your past achievements, current situation and future plans.…
Ostensibly the story of a son’s attempt to access and narrate his parents’ fragmented Holocaust biographies, Mark Raphael Baker’s The Fiftieth Gate also subverts the convention of second-generation memoir writing. A composite of detective story, love story, tales of hiding, and vignettes of discovery, The Fiftieth Gate has themes that are synonymous with the difficulties of the narrative construction of the Holocaust as an event “at the limits”: the search for appropriate interpretive vessels sensitive to the expression of often unspeakable memories of first-generation survivors, the traumas of intergenerational transmission, and the child’s adoption of a vicarious Holocaust identity as one of many complex responses. Baker’s relentless subjection of his parents’ memories to forensic historical analysis based on empirical evidence also revisits the vocabulary of speaking the unspeakable commonly associated with the long-standing debate about the Holocaust and its preferred modes of representation.…
A. Jeannette Walls, in her memoir The Glass Castle, demonstrates Erikson’s eight stages of development. Through the carefully recounted stories of her childhood and adolescence, we are able to trace her development from one stage to the next. While Walls struggles through some of the early developmental stages, she inevitably succeeds and has positive outcomes through adulthood. The memoir itself is not only the proof that she is successful and productive in middle adulthood, but the memoir may also have been part of her healing process. Writing is often a release and in writing her memoir and remembering her history, she may have been able to come to terms with her sad past. The memoir embodies both the proof that she has successfully graduated through Erickson’s stages of development while also being the reason that she is able to do so.…
“By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909” (Packer p.1). Not exactly how one would think a brownie girl would act, but that’s the trope, author ZZ Packer sets in every one of her stories, in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Like most authors, ZZ Packer has her own style of writing. She uses similar patterns and techniques throughout her collection of short stories. I will look at two of her stories and how they relate to her style of writing.…
Elders in a family often tell youngsters stories of their past. Moreover, Steven Zeitlin, Amy Kotkin, and Holly Cutting Baker, assert in “Family Stories” that “Family stories are usually based on real incidents which become embellished over the years” (10). These stories tend to change as people age and experience various situations. Canfield’s short story “Sex Education” depicts Aunt Minnie, a woman who faced a traumatic sexual experience as a teenager, telling her story to an audience of younger generations at three different stages of her life; each account is told in a different manner as she experiences various situations that involve sexuality, namely experiences with her son Jake. Through the plot’s development of Aunt Minnie differently telling a terrifying experience thrice as time passes, and characterizing her differently, from immature to serene, as she goes through life, Canfield conveys the theme that time and experience may change one’s story.…
In his book, William Zinsser defines unity as the anchor for good writing. It means that, in a prose, a writer should maintain unity. Let it be the pronoun, the tense or the mood, there should be unity in the whole prose and the reader must be in a state to understand the right context about what the writer wants to say. For example, consider a situation, where the writer is supposed to explain a situation or a scene that he is observing or experiencing, he must be able to make the reader visualize the scene. He must use the right tense and must put himself in the right place of conveying or expressing his feelings. The writer must consider himself as an audience and then write. The tense and the mood used to express his views must be common…
How to Start an Autobiographical Essay An autographical essay is a personal narrative written in the first person about your life and experiences. Universities often require this type of essay in admissions applications. A potential employer may also want to read about your life. Newspapers and magazines are also interested in autobiographical essays of famous or otherwise newsworthy person. A very long autobiographical essay makes an autobiography, a popular genre in literature. Since they appear easy to write and have a reputation for being dull, it is essential to start an autobiographical essay with a piquant sentence.…
Alison Gopnik reveals the core of human nature- our unique ability to use our brain for imagination, something she refers to as counterfactuals. In her essay, “Possible Worlds: Why Do Children Pretend?” Gopnik discusses “the woulda-coulda-shouldas of life”(163) in great detail expanding on her point “ human beings don't live in the real world”(163). Her argument is that our lives are consumed by the alternate realities that run simultaneously with the real world events. Gregory Orr claims to have lived these realities as evident in his memoir “Return to Hayneville”, where Orr revisits his participation in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. A memoir- by definition- is an authors way of revisiting their past experiences and summarizing their achievements and also analyzing what would have changed if they had done something different. The theories of causations affected the decisions and actions of Orr and others who played a vital role in the way that Orr revisits his experiences. Gopnik’s theory of counterfactuals illuminates the darker side of Orr’s memoir, his flurry of emotions which explains how and why we pretend.…
Adeney, Elizabeth, The Moral Rights of Authors and Performers, (Oxford University Press, 2006) 25, 26-30…