Bruce Bergman
eNotes Educator
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About
Writer and educator with an MA in the study of English Literature. Instructed in classrooms from 6th to 11th grade and college. Favorite writers in a list with no particular order: Walt Whitman, Joseph Campbell, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Wallace Stevens, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, J.M. Coetzee.
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Recent Activity
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Answered a Question in Things Fall Apart
Here are two ways to compare, contrast, and otherwise pair Things Fall Apart and The Alchemist. Faith Traditions and Communities of Faith Ideas (and conflicts) relating to specific systems of... -
Answered a Question in Death of a Salesman
The America Dream is commonly associated with both a materialistic and a philosophical self-determination. And self-determination is the key concept to consider when examining the American Dream.... -
Answered a Question in Anna Karenina
Tolstoy’s novel begins with one of the most famous openings in all of literature: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This line signals the novel’s most... -
Answered a Question in Anna Karenina
Fidelity is both a motif and a theme in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The novel opens with a drama surrounding Oblonsky’s infidelities and features an affair as one of its chief story-lines as Anna... -
Answered a Question in The Emperor of Ice-Cream
“The Emperor of Ice Cream” is a poem that can be read on several levels and is probably best understood as an existential commentary on the fleeting nature of life and so a testament to the... -
Answered a Question in The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost’s rather straight-forward “The Road Not Taken” is notable for many things, including its tendency to be misread. A poem often read as an assertive statement on the virtues of... -
Answered a Question in Invisible Man
The figure of Rinehart appears in Invisible Man as both cipher and symbol. While he never actually appears in the novel in person, he becomes an important point of consideration and comparison for... -
Answered a Question in Blues for Mister Charlie
Considering Baldwin’s views on conventional protest literature expressed in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Native Son in particular), a question arises as to how Baldwin’s own... -
Answered a Question in Literature
The Iliad and The Epic of Gilgamesh both belong to a conversation on ancient literature and, to varying degrees, to a conversation on myth narratives. Yet one is more fully "mythological" than the... -
Answered a Question in All My Sons
The title All My Sons resonates in a few ways with the content and the themes of the play. Although Joe Keller's relationship with his son Chris is central to the action of the play, the final... -
Answered a Question in The Odyssey
Odysseus is a rare hero in Greek tales in that he is rather righteous and level-headed. In many Greek tales, including the Iliad, the hero figures are driven by passion, ambition and arrogance (and... -
Answered a Question in Song of Myself
While there are several ways to draw thematic connections between Lady Gaga's song and Walt Whitman's long poem, the two works can be differentiated in just as many ways. Whitman's interests are... -
Answered a Question in Literature
In addition to drawing conclusions regarding modern tragic protagonists from 20th century and 21st century drama, we can look to both Aristotle and Arthur Miller for help in answering this... -
Answered a Question in Things Fall Apart
Okonkwo's suicide is an act driven by despair. This despair seems to come directly from Okonkwo's sense that his village culture/identity has disappeared. In ways that are quite real and deeply... -
Answered a Question in The Chocolate War
A number of positive qualities of the novel make The Chocolate War an easy book to recommend, generally speaking, but there are probably specific types of readers that we can discuss that may... -
Answered a Question in Things Fall Apart
One purpose of post-colonial literature is a consistent correction of the false perception that colonized people had no true culture of their own or were uncivilized before the arrival of the... -
Answered a Question in The Great Gatsby
Nick is related to old money because he is Daisy's cousin. Like Tom, Daisy comes from a wealthy background and might be considered a "Kentucky Blueblood." Importantly, however, Nick's own nuclear... -
Answered a Question in The Bell Jar
Race does not play a major role in The Bell Jar, but it does figure in as a subject for Esther's judgment, to some extent. In a novel about a character's conflicts of perception (pointedly... -
Answered a Question in Literature
The social-historical context for each era was considerably different. While the Romantic era writers were responding to the advent of democracy in the United States and Europe (and often... -
Answered a Question in Fences
The conflict between Cory and his father Troy is understood by each man differently. The idea expressed in the struggle between the father and son is connected to this difference in perspective, to... -
Answered a Question in The Bell Jar
In a microcosm of the larger and more impacting pressures that weigh on Esther, she also feels she is expected to have fun in New York City during her time at the women's magazine. This... -
Answered a Question in Forrest Gump
In Forrest Gump, the figures of leadership can almost all be seen as performing a role that aids Forrest Gump's development of self-definition and agency. Forrest (Tom Hanks) has a number of... -
Answered a Question in The Great Gatsby
Of the many fascinating questions that come to mind regarding The Great Gatsby, one of the most central questions is whether or not Gatsby is "good." Is Jay Gatsby a good person because... -
Answered a Question in Of Mice and Men
Of Mice and Men is a novel-as-play as was Steinbeck's later effort, Burning Bright. The constraints of the stage may ultimately be the most effective explanation for Lennie's vision... -
Answered a Question in Of Mice and Men
Lennie's final isolation is foreshadowed by Curley's wife's death. The young woman who shares her faded dreams with Lennie and her sense of frustrated solitude dies at the hands of a man who has... -
Answered a Question in Things Fall Apart
When we say that the villages of Mbanta and Umuofia "accepted" the presence of the missionaries, we should be clear that we mean the villages tolerated the English people without embracing or... -
Answered a Question in Antigone
In addition to the several excellent distinctions drawn in the previous post, we can take a thematic approach to distinguishing Julius Caesar and Antigone. While both plays deal... -
Answered a Question in Oedipus Rex
In Oedipus the King (also known as Oedipus Rex), the male characters dominate the play in terms of numbers. The men are the heroes and the villains in the sense that the conflict on stage and in... -
Answered a Question in The Piano Lesson
There are many reasons to read August Wilson's play The Piano Lesson. Among the first reasons that come to mind is the idea that this is a (relatively) contemporary work of American drama.... -
Answered a Question in Waiting for the Barbarians
The blank faces of the children in the repeated dream are ambiguous in their meaning to some degree. One way to explain the blankness is to connect it to the conclusion that the magistrate comes to... -
Answered a Question in A Doll's House
There is a wealth of information on Ibsen's A Doll's House here at eNotes. In addition to a summary of the plot of the play and a run-down of the characters, there are pages analyzing the... -
Answered a Question in Literature
In brief, writers will opt to examine ideas according to genre demands (some writers will use poetry and others fiction or drama and these choices will determine to some extent how an idea will be... -
Answered a Question in The Great Gatsby
In judging Gatsby's character in The Great Gatsby, it is probably best not to see Gatsby on a scale of good and bad or positive and negative but instead in a somewhat more complex way. We... -
Answered a Question in The Catcher in the Rye
By introducing Holden as a socially and academically disengaged person who is experiencing his failures through a membrane of bitter humor, Salinger sets up the narrator as a reactionary figure. We... -
Answered a Question in Literature
Discrimination in terms of race, class and gender has been explored in many films over the years. In fact, one of the staples of Film History courses famously deals with race and is now seen by... -
Answered a Question in Notes of a Native Son
Although much of the focus of James Baldwin's essay is on the dispossession of Black Americans and the troubled aspects of the writer's relationship to his father, "Notes on a Native Son" works its... -
Answered a Question in Mahmoud Darwish
This is a poem about conflict over identity. This conflict arises when one group, defined here as an outside/anterior group that has claimed local authority, attempts to take ownership of another... -
Answered a Question in Leonard Cohen
The song "Dance Me to the End of Love" depicts a cycle of traditional romantic (married), love but in this depiction the romance is intense. It is intensely felt and intensely needed from its... -
Answered a Question in Oedipus Rex
In Scene I, Tiresias describes Oedipus in this way: "When it comes to speech, your own is neither temperate/ Nor opportune. I wish to be more prudent." In these lines we can see one way to... -
Answered a Question in The Kite Runner
The similarities between both of these instances are at least as striking as the differences. In each case, Amir is rescued from Assef. The socially powerless character (Hassan/Sohrab) protects the... -
Answered a Question in Sula
The "Bottom" is part of the town of Medallion, Ohio, situated in the hills above the town "and spread all the way to the river." The story of how the Bottom came into being is recounted in the... -
Answered a Question in Things Fall Apart
In Things Fall Part, father-son relationships play a significant part in the narrative. The first chapter discusses the ways in which Okonkwo’s entire persona is shaped as a response to his father,... -
Answered a Question in The Souls of Black Folk
DuBois was interested in progress and progress has certainly been made since the publication of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. Voting rights and equality of citizenship have been more fully and... -
Answered a Question in Death of a Salesman
Willy Loman is central to Miller’s play and his importance is demonstrated, in part, by the fact that other characters discuss him when he is not on stage. Some of the play’s most poignant lines... -
Answered a Question in Things Fall Apart
While Okonkwo does end up taking his own life, the question of his personal responsibility for this particular fate is a complex and interesting one. Achebe’s protagonist certainly possesses some... -
Answered a Question in As I Lay Dying
Modernism has come to be identified with a few specific stylistic methods and a few over-arching themes. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying exemplifies the hallmarks of modernism in both of these areas as... -
Answered a Question in Fences
There are a number of examples of symbolism in August Wilson’s Fences. The most prominent example of symbolism comes in the repeated use of fences (variously literal and metaphorical) in the play.... -
Answered a Question in A Raisin in the Sun
The most important thing that Walter wants from Ruth is support. He feels trapped in a limiting job and hopes for more for himself (and for his family). Many of the requests Walter makes... -
Answered a Question in The Great Gatsby
Comparing Fitzgerald’s vision of the American Dream to his most famous character’s vision of the American Dream is an intriguing and challenging task. In brief, we might say that Fitzgerald, the... -
Answered a Question in The Namesake
Gogol finds that he cannot be comfortable as an individual with a stable and acceptable identity while living “in between” cultures, with a Russian first name, with a Bengali family outside of...
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