Gaia Chandler, M.A.

Summary What happens The poem is presented as an eulogy – an address of praise to someone recently dead - for a citizen listed as “JS/07 M 378” in the epigraph. Though a marble monument is erected...

According to John Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” art is the only way for humans to grapple with suffering and mortality. In the poem’s last stanza, the poet spells out this relationship...

One interesting theme common to the stories in your question is the role music plays in the narratives. Both stories announce the centrality of music in their plots at the get go. In fact, Joyce...

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” explores many complex and important ideas, but I think it would be especially interesting to discuss the theme of love, given the poem’s title. Additionally,...

Dorothea Dix is mentioned in chapter ten, “Mitigation,” in Bryan Stevenson’s memoir Just Mercy (2014). The chapter discusses the continuing unfair internment of people suffering from mental health...

One of the most pertinent critiques against Mahatma Gandhi’s pamphlet “Indian Home Rule” (Hind Swaraj, 1908) is its condemnation of all things Western and its lionization of Indian culture....

In “Two Kinds,” the narrator Jing-mei’s character is dynamic, evolving as she goes through life. It is particularly interesting to view the evolution of Jing-mei’s characteristics in the context of...

With his works spanning the decades between the mid-1880s to the end of the 1930s, Yeats’ poetic sensibility, like that of many other great poets, was constantly evolving. Therefore, his definition...

Two interesting ways symbolism illustrates the themes of Karen Russell’s “The Prospectors" (2015) is through the motifs of color and of flight and descent. Russell’s imagery in the story is rich...

I think an interesting approach to understanding H.G. Wells’s short story “The Star” (1897) is by paying particularly close attention to its beginning and end. After launching us straight into the...

A couple of distinctive features in Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” give us a clue about its tone. One of these features is Frost’s twisted but rich syntax, as we can see in the poem’s opening...

On first reading “White Lies,” without knowing much about its context or its poet’s identity, my instinctive reaction would be that the poem’s speaker is a child who pretends to be someone other...

Interesting question. For something to make us afraid, it doesn’t have to be very gory-looking, though that certainly helps! However, what makes something especially scary is when it speaks to our...

One of the key reasons Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) is considered a milestone in the history of Indian literature in English is its bold use of an English adopted to India. In Kanthapura, Rao does...

Folklore plays a very important part in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004). Legends are not separate or merely fantastical elements in the novel; rather, they operate as part of the day-to-day...

The lines in your question are especially significant in John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (first published in 1667) because they belong in a passage that introduces firsthand the epic’s villain,...

At seeming to be about marriage, Bobbie Ann Mason’s "Shiloh" (1982) is also a story about the death of the American Dream as well as the cost of modernization. Mason uses irony and paradox to...

It would be interesting to summarize A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise on aesthetics, in the context of the growth of...

In “A Surgeon’s Life” (1992), Oliver Sacks describes his observations of a surgeon with Tourette Syndrome to make a larger point about atypical neurological conditions and skills. While some may...

Ambrose Bierce’s short story “Owl Creek Bridge” draws much of its eerie power from the way it uses universal symbols. Bierce takes deeply evocative symbols—such as the bridge, the water, the...

In Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, grown-up Amir’s overwhelming sense of guilt can be traced back to his treatment of his childhood friend, Hassan. Amir was a silent bystander to Hassan’s rape...

Mississippi writer Borden Deal’s “The Taste of Watermelon” (1979) can be critically analyzed as a meditation on ideas about manhood, guilt, and the power of empathy. The sixteen-year-old narrator,...

I think in every era, marriage represents the ideal values to which societies and individuals aspire. Very broadly speaking, in a contemporary context, marriage can be said to represent ideals of...

Katniss Everdeen, Peeta Mellark, Gale Hawthorne, and the other protagonists of The Hunger Games trilogy embody Marxist ideals, even if they may not do so with conscious knowledge of Marxist theory,...

Phallic symbols refer to objects inferred to resemble the phallus or penis. I say "inferred" because what constitutes a phallic object is subjective. For example, some people might think a tall...

In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror,” the reflecting surface is also a metaphor for a reflective or contemplative state. By itself, the mirror, which Plath describes as the “four-cornered” eye of a god,...

One of the most interesting aspects of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) is the convergence of folklore, nature, and the complex realities of environmental conservation. The novel’s setting is...

“God’s Grandeur” (1877) is packed to the seams with literary and poetic devices, but there are two kinds of techniques into which I’ll delve in particular. The first of these has to do with...

Like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats is often identified as a romantic poet. One of the most distinctive aspects about romantic poetry is, of course, its treatment of...

Good question! It is always interesting to explore how gender plays a role in stories that are not ostensibly about gender, such as Flannery O’ Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1953). While...

The ending of “The Last Leaf” (1907) reveals the truth about central character Johnsy's false belief and illustrates a typical O. Henry twist, the hallmark way in which its author used...

Tobias Wolff’s first published short story “Smokers” (1976) explores the way social aspiration and class conflicts shape the personality of its unnamed narrator. It also presents the world of an...

In Elizabeth George Speare’s novel The Sign of the Beaver (1983), Native American village leader Saknis makes a treaty with Matt that he will bring the white boy food in exchange for English...

Webster’s dictionary defines dharma as "a. an individual's duty fulfilled by observance of custom or law; b. the basic principles of cosmic or individual existence or the divine law; and c....

O. Henry’s language in “The Last Leaf” (1907) is rich with figures of speech, as we can see in the following lines: In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked...

Although you'll find several distinctions between parts 1 and 2 in Alfred Moyes’ narrative poem "The Highwayman" (1906), I'll try to explore three in greater detail. The first is the change in...

Ever since his first children’s book, The Gremlins, was published in 1943, Roald Dahl has been a smash hit with children the world over. Surviving the test of time, Dahl's works continue to...

The moral of Guy de Maupassant’s “The False Gems” (“Les Bijoux” in French, 1883) sharply questions the hypocrisy of its male protagonist, Monsieur Lantin. Lantin is passionately in love with his...

All God’s Chillen Had Wings is an African-American tale belonging to the larger “Flying African Folklore” of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Since most of these narratives were first...

A bit of dialogue from a daydream towards the end of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1939) gives us a clue about the story’s focus. Mitty imagines himself as an army captain, courageous under...

The setting of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea is meaningful: moving from warm Jamaica to Dominica to, finally, cold England, it mimics the fate of its heroine, Antoinette. Although the novel...

Joy Harjo uses color imagery in her poem to illustrate the complex race relationships in New Orleans in particular and America, in general. The use of color imagery has the effect of making history...

If we look at the "7 pm" section in Margaret Atwood’s poem “Half-Hanged Mary” (1995), we find several few clues about the narrator’s identity. From the poem’s title, we already know the speaker is...

Literary classicism refers to a style of writing that consciously follows the classical texts—specifically ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy. Literary classicism in Europe was part...

To understand how the garden in Paul Fleischman's Seedfolks (1997) becomes a metaphor for the changing relationship between its gardeners, let's take a close look at Sam’s story. Moved by its...

Though the dystopia shown in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) wants to destroy all written words, paradoxically, the firemen assigned to this job often use metaphors and allusions in their...

“Dharma,” a Pali and Sanskrit word used both in Buddhist and Hindu traditions, has a few different meanings. In one sense, dharma refers to one’s religion, but in the more traditional and...

The climax marks the "highest point" of a story, the place where the tension in the plot is at its thickest. In Neil Gaiman's Coraline (2002), the thrilling sequence leading to Coraline’s escape...

In the “Tiger in the Tunnel,” Ruskin Bond captures many complex relationships in just a few pages: between father and son, man and wild, and boyhood and duty. I’ll discuss how all these...

Madness can be a useful device in literature: by abandoning the constraints of sanity and rationality, a character can explore grey areas which are not available to the sane. Elizabethan and...