Emily Knight

Probably the biggest motivation for Lia to recover from her eating disorder is his step-sister Emma. Emma is eight years old and a sweet, loving, normal little girl. Unlike everyone else in her...

The question of Hamlet's delay in avenging his late father's murder is a question critics have argued about for centuries. Why, if he knows his father was murdered by his uncle in the very first...

The one of the main conflicts in Catching Fire is an internal conflict, as Katniss determines whether or not she wants to be a part of the growing rebellion against The Capital. It is interesting...

Indirect characterization involves the author demonstrating what a character is like by that character's words, actions, and appearance. This is as opposed to direct characterization, where the...

The answer to this question changes as the novel progresses. At the beginning of the novel, Tom comes across as a fun-loving trickster, making mischief for his own entertainment and gain. This is...

There are a number of the different types of conflicts in the novel. Man vs. Man: Tom has adversarial relationships with a number of different characters throughout the novel. The big man vs. man...

One of the many thoughtful things that Pi has to say about his two passions (and later his two majors in college) is that both are out of fashion. In the modern world, people are becoming more...

Narrative point of view refers to how the narrator (or person telling the story) is positioned in relation to the actual story itself. Narrative point of view is interesting to consider in The...

A lot happens in this final act of Hamlet, so narrowing everything down to those five remaining boxes is challenging. If I were you, I would start with a list of all the major things that happen...

Chapter 7 The chapter begins right after Pony's tearful reunion with his brothers Soda and Darry. While the boys wait together for news of Dally and Johnny, reporters are bombarding Pony with...

Katniss experiences a number of life-altering changes after winning The Hunger Games, as well as trauma from the Games themselves. It is unsurprising that she would have many internal conflicts as...

Wendell Bolden takes the stand in chapter 4 of Walter Dean Myers' book Monster. Immediately from his responses to the lawyers, readers can see that he is a tough guy and not unfamiliar with the...

Like many of Shakespeare's plays, Macbeth was based on existing material. In this case, the source materials included a few historical documents, primarily Holinshed's "Histoirie of Scotland"...

Most of the symbols in "The Landlady" are acting as foreshadowing. These build dramatic irony, as the reader slowly realizes that the landlady is up to something sinister and, eventually, that...

The historical setting of The Crucible is 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. As a Puritan community, God and religion were the center of people's lives, as well as the center of the government in...

Gatsby does this in Chapter 7, just two chapters after Nick has set up a clandestine meeting for Gatsby and Daisy to rekindle the romance of their youth. After a rough start, the two seem very...

The story "Speaking of Courage" in The Things They Carried is about the difficulty of both speaking and courage. In it, we follow Norman Bowker as he drives around and around the lake in his...

Inside the world of the play, Lodovico has come to Cyprus in order to bring news from the Duke of Venice. He says that the Duke wants Othello to return to Venice and Cassio to take over command in...

This idea of war stories not being moral, or having a moral, is centered around O'Brien's theme regarding war throughout the novel. O'Brien tells the readers many times and through many different...

Though Friar Lawrence makes some poor decisions, it is clear that his intentions are good throughout the play. For one, he seems to be a regular mentor for Romeo, as shown when Romeo arrives to his...

There is one clear moment of change, and that is at the end of the novel, when Tom urges Huck to stay with the widow Douglass and submit to proper clothes, Sunday school, and other conventions of...

As far as book to film adaptions go, Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 film version of S.E. Hinton's 1967 novel is pretty faithful. Ponyboy's "dreamer in the hood" character comes through very well. The...

The primary genre that the story would fit into is crime fiction. Mary commits the murder of her husband and the ensuing conflict and plot revolve around the detectives trying to figure out the...

As the youngest member of the Younger family, Travis represents the future. Lena and Walter Sr. wanted a better life for Walter Jr. and Beneatha, but they are still crammed into a too-small...

A primary theme of Espaillat's poem "Bilingual/Bilingüe" is straddling two cultures creates conflicts. This is certainly the case for the speaker's father, who wants the speaker to be able to...

On the surface, the relationship between adults and kids is primarily adversarial. Tom is constantly trying to outmaneuver Aunt Polly so he can play all day without consequences, the school...

The general setting of the novel is in New Hampshire, but that doesn't say much about the story. It would be better to focus on a couple specific settings that were more relevant to Lia's character...

In the novel, Max Vandenburg is a 22-year-old Jewish man who hides in the Hubermann household. Max is a fighter, through and through, and when we first meet him in the story, he is fighting to...

To me, the most interesting thing about Portia is how thoroughly she works around her limitations as a woman, wife, and daughter. Society has some pretty strict standards for her to maintain, but...

John and Nick have a lot of similarities. They are both narrators and major characters in their respective stories, for one. Interestingly, though, they are also both a bit on the periphery of the...

One of the ways The Great Depression upsets the traditions and expectations of the Joad family — and many other families — is through gender roles. Pa says this line as a bit of a joke about...

To look at the other side of the above argument, one could say Friar Laurence approached the situation of Romeo and Juliet with a logical frame of mind, but things outside of his control...

Sheriff Heck Tate is working to protect Boo Radley, who is the real murderer of Bob Ewell, after Bob attacks Scout and Jem as retaliation for Atticus's defense of Tom Robinson. Tate and Atticus's...

The theme of change in the South after the Civil War is one of the strongest themes in the story. As such, there are numerous symbols of the old South and its fall from glory. First is Miss Emily...

This quote comes from scene five of the second act of Macbeth, when Macbeth sends a letter to his wife to tell her about the prophesy the witches have made about his rise to power. The speech Lady...

This is a big question, but I'll try to give a few of the major actions that characters take in the story. Many of the family's actions are taken as an attempt to better their lives, so I'll start...

The quote at the beginning of chapter 43 of Chains is this: "That even in Failure cannot be more fatal than to remain in our present Situation in short some Enterprize must be undertaken in our...

Making Nick the narrator is an interesting decision on Fitzgerald's part. If he wanted a truly objective narrator, he could have easily written the novel in third person omniscient point of view,...

Ferdinand appears in several scenes and is a big part of the story. He is also definitely not a dynamic or a round character in the way that, say, Prospero is. A dynamic character is a character...

Alliteration is a literary device that can be used to make a text sound more poetic. Unlike rhymes that modern audiences are more familiar with, where the sounds at the ends of the words are the...

Impulsiveness is one of Othello's major flaws in the play, as well as the one that gets him in the most trouble. Despite his insistence for a fair trial in the accusation that he tricked Desdemona...

Mr. Underwood's editorial is surprising because it suggests a change of opinion, even a major character change on his part. Mr. Braxton Bragg Underwood runs Maycomb's only newspaper, The Maycomb...

The simile "snug as a gun" is startling when it appears in the poem "Digging." After just a line and a half, Heaney has already created an image of a writer sitting down to quietly reflect and...

Steve Harmon and James King are both charged with the felony murder of Alguinaldo Nesbitt. "Felony murder" is a murder committed during the course of another felony crime, in their case, the...

The poem "To His Coy Mistress" is full of hyperbole (or extreme exaggeration for poetic effect). The first lines that show this are: I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if...

The best adjective I can think of to describe Jin Wang is insecure. He certainly isn't alone in this description; as adolescents, most of us are/were insecure at least some of the time. Jin has...

Pi is extraordinary in both his childhood experiences and his own personality. First, just the name of his childhood home, Pondicherry, is whimsical. His childhood seems almost magical, growing up...

One example of a literary device is hyperbole, which is an extreme exaggeration in order to make a point. Holden does this frequently (about a billion times, ha ha), such as in the first...

Different scholars on literature and mythology have different steps and stages in the hero's journey, so this can be done a few different ways. I will use Joseph Campbell's hero's journey to review...

Since the central conflict of the story is Isabel and Ruth working against the society they live in (which sanctions their enslavement) and fighting against the various specific people who keep...