Tara Gilstrap

At the beginning of Fitzgerald's short story "Winter Dreams," Dexter, the main character, is a teenager who works as a caddie at the local country club golf course. He sees Judy Jones, then a...

In Poem 88 of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, we hear the voice of Mrs. Charles Bliss, a woman who wants to divorce her husband but who is advised against it by her preacher and a...

In the poem "Jacob Goodpasture" by Edgar Lee Masters, we hear the voice of an old father mourning the loss of his soldier son. At the opening of the poem, Goodpasture mentions Fort Sumter and "the...

In the novel Half of a Yellow Sun, one of the main characters is Odenigbo, a mathematics professor at the University of Nskukka in Nigeria. Odenigbo is highly intelligent, forceful, and passionate...

"He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people—he wanted the glittering things themselves." This line from the second section of Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" describes what...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" has few key characters. They are listed and described below: Pelayo and Elisenda: the couple at whose house the Old Man...

A simile makes a comparison between two things using the words "like" or "as." The purpose of a simile is to help the reader better understand an idea by making a comparison to something she...

In Frost's poem "Mending Wall," the speaker says that nature does not love a stone wall and will gradually tear it down. Ice creates gaps in the stones and the unfreezing topples them from the...

In Ambrose Bierce's short story "Chickamauga," a little boy wanders into a Civil War battle while he is pretending to be a soldier. The little boy feels terrified as he wanders through the woods;...

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's story "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," a mysterious dead man shows up on the beach of a small town. No one in the town recognizes this man and the town is so...

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's tale "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," the story centers upon the strange and magical appearance of an old man who has huge vulture-like wings. Early in the story,...

In this very short story by Kate Chopin, there are several examples of how the setting reinforces the way Mrs. Mallard feels after she learns about her husband's death. At the opening of the story,...

A metaphor is a comparison between two things that focuses on their similarities. A metaphor does not use the words "like" or "as" in the way a simile, which also compares two things, does. A...

In William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily," the town watches for years for a sign of Miss Emily while she remains closed up in her house with only a servant to tend to her. Finally, she...