Patrick McDonald
eNotes Educator
Achievements
2
Educator Level
31
Answers Posted
12
Answers Bonused
About
Earned Badges
-
eNotes Educator
This badge is awarded to all eNotes Educators. Only official Educators can answer students' questions on our site. Educators are teachers, professional researchers, and scholars who apply to our... -
Literature Whiz
Bonuses are awarded when an Educator has gone above and beyond and impressed the editorial team by offering an especially lengthy, nuanced, or insightful answer. This badge is given to an Educator...
Recent Activity
-
Answered a Question in As I Lay Dying
Through Cash's description of making his mother's coffin, the reader can tell that he is very meticulous and also has a difficult time dealing with her death. Instead of engaging directly with his... -
Answered a Question in History
As evidenced by the title of his March 1992 Atlantic article, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” Benjamin R. Barber begins by charting two contradictory and simultaneous tendencies of neoliberal... -
Answered a Question in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
From the scene in which Douglass learns how to read and encounters the printed word for the first time, we find that Douglass' attitude toward slavery is one of profound hatred. Furthermore,... -
Answered a Question in Rip Van Winkle
At the beginning of his sketch "Rip Van Winkle," Washington Irving's narrator lets the reader know that Rip is a rather lazy person who is not interested in working hard. Furthermore, we see... -
Answered a Question in Hannah Arendt
Though not grounded in a careful reading of any particular text or set of texts, Arendt convincingly argues in "What Is Freedom?" that political liberty has become—in modern philosophical and... -
Answered a Question in Civil Disobedience
Among other rhetorical devices, Henry David Thoreau makes extensive use of rhetorical questions to further his argument in "Civil Disobedience." For example, in the second paragraph of the... -
Answered a Question in Life in the Iron Mills
Rebecca Harding Davis' novella "Life in the Iron Mills" presents a moral dilemma plaguing a working class family. Through detailed descriptions of both factory and home life for proletarian... -
Answered a Question in Thomas Hobbes
According to Thomas Hobbes, human nature is fundamentally competitive because everybody desires to accumulate possessions in the form of property. Hobbes begins this chain of reasoning in his... -
Answered a Question in Rip Van Winkle
"Rip Van Winkle" indicates that its protagonist was asleep during the American Revolution mainly through implication, as it is never directly stated, and the reader must infer from details of the... -
Answered a Question in Rip Van Winkle
Irving first establishes a deep connection between his sketch's eponymous protagonist and his dog, Wolf, in order to set the stage for his eventual apprehension: Rip’s sole domestic adherent was... -
Answered a Question in Rip Van Winkle
At the beginning of Washington Irving's tale "Rip Van Winkle" the narrator offers a description of the story's setting by detailing geographical features WHOEVER has made a voyage up the... -
Answered a Question in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
In Washington Irving's sketch "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," he characterizes the protagonist Ichabod Crane as particularly feminine because of his close relationship with the old Dutch wives of... -
Answered a Question in Notes on the State of Virginia
It is difficult to summarize Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia because it does not unfold in traditionally narrative fashion. Rather than offering a story, or sequence of... -
Answered a Question in The Pit and the Pendulum
Poe's short story "The Pit and the Pendulum" begins with a rather ambiguous account of the narrator being sentenced to some form of punishment and losing consciousness. Upon first regaining... -
Answered a Question in The Scarlet Letter
Throughout the several chapters in which Hawthorne narrates Hester's encounter with Dimmesdale in the forest, he emphasizes that the forest is a place beyond the reach of law and the Puritan... -
Answered a Question in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Before his escape from slavery, Frederick Douglass recounts several major turning points in his life. One of the more famous scenes in the text occurs in Chapter 1 when he witnesses this Aunt... -
Answered a Question in As I Lay Dying
In Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Cora indicates that Darl has a different relationship to his mother Addie than his brothers and sisters do that she, for some reason, can sense: It was like he... -
Answered a Question in The Fall of the House of Usher
Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" recounts the story of its narrator's visit to the secluded estate of his boyhood friend Roderick Usher. While describing his initial knowledge of the... -
Answered a Question in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
From the beginning of Part One of Franklin's Autobiography, he makes his purpose quite explicit. Opening with a letter addressed "Dear Son," Franklin pontificates: were it offer'd to my... -
Answered a Question in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Frederick Douglass uses all three modes of appeal in the first several paragraphs of Chapter XI of his Narrative. He first appeals to logos--or logic--in the first paragraph when giving... -
Answered a Question in The Tempest
According to Caliban himself in Act I, Scene 2, he is the only inhabitant of the island that Prospero and Miranda land on: This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, Which thou takest from... -
Answered a Question in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
While Douglass' relation to slave songs and his encounter with the white carpenters stand as important moments in his Narrative, they do not necessarily directly bear on his desire for and... -
Answered a Question in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
In Chapter VII of his Narrative, Frederick Douglass enlists the children of Baltimore to teach him how to read. As he recounts, The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most... -
Answered a Question in Karl Marx
For Karl Marx, everything is determined by what he calls the mode of production, or the social relationships by which goods are produced for society. This mode of thinking is sometimes called... -
Answered a Question in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
While many events happen in Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life, three of them stand out as formative events both biographically and rhetorically. First, he recounts how his... -
Answered a Question in Moby-Dick
The largest conflict is between Ahab (and, to some extent, his crew) and the whale Moby-Dick. While this is the central conflict that drives the novel, there is also a persistent conflict... -
Answered a Question in Moby-Dick
Your question refers to Ahab's first mate on the Pequod and the goal of their voyage, capturing the white whale Moby-Dick. It seems as though you mean to ask what Starbuck thinks about this...