Post by Xinnai on Sept 30, 2008 19:33:02 GMT -8
Here's the dreaded, puke paper. For all of you to see. My teacher considers this to be a "good paper."
The main characters contained within The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, and Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton show the authors’ purpose for creating them through the writers’ portrayals of their characters. For example, in The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien exemplifies the theme of a will to survive in his character, Frodo Baggins. Frodo is a young hobbit who is undertaken in a mission to save all of Middle Earth. The mission is one that Frodo joins all but inadvertently. At first, the quest seems to be a game to Frodo and his other friends, but as time progresses, Frodo comes to learn the dangers that accompany his mission. Frodo starts to become despondent, but struggles through the dark mood that swirls around him. He carries out his mission to destroy the ring and defeat Middle Earth’s enemy. Frodo is considered to be an Average Joe who rises up to take on the role of a hero, despite many of the shortcomings that bar his way. In Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea, Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Wharton’s Ethan Frome, the authors demonstrate their determination to survive through Huck Finn, Santiago and Ethan with the following three traits: description, actions and reactions, and speech.
Edith Wharton creates a very striking image of her main character within the first few pages of her novel. The image is a haunting one, a picture that stays in the mind: an old man crippled by accident and persevering through it nonetheless.:
Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but a ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the “natives” were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two. (Wharton 8)
Wharton also reveals how very deep Ethan’s affection for his wife’s cousin, Mattie, goes when he sees her with another man: “…and Frome’s heart, which had swung out over a black void, trembled back to safety” (Wharton 29). When he sees Mattie with another man from the village, he becomes jealous, as well as paranoid, fearing that her fondness for him is not what he thought it to be. Wharton shows just how very enthralled of the girl Ethan is as well as the kind of man Ethan is. Most of the occupants within Starkfield village think of Frome as solid and stoic, while the passage demonstrates him to be a creature with feeling and emotion. Ethan’s resignation with his lot in life is shown when Wharton writes: “I guess we’ll never let you go, Matt. We’ll always go on living here together, and some day she’ll lie there beside me” (Wharton 32). Ethan is walking with Mattie in a graveyard at the time he says this; the scene is poignant with his own thoughts and desires. He loves Mattie and wants her to stay, but knows, inevitably, someday he will lie beside Zenobia in the graveyard, remembered as her husband and the last of the Frome line. Wharton’s writing of Ethan in Ethan Frome demonstrates her purpose for creating Ethan using actions and reactions, speech and description. It reveals the vivid emotions and desires that permeate human life, only invoked in a fictional character.
In Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway describes the main character depicted in the pages with the three parts of the characterization criteria as well. Hemingway first reveals Santiago’s character as the man comes in from a day of fruitless fishing. Hemingway uses the following passage to show Santiago’s immense age and wear in addition to his experience. It also makes it clear these factors do not stop Santiago from pursuing his only means of survival:
The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert. (Hemingway 13)
Hemingway also displays his character’s personality when Santiago’s hand cramps up after hours of holding line: “How do you feel hand?’ He asked the cramped hand that was almost as stiff as rigor mortis. ‘I’ll eat some more for you’” (Hemingway 49). This exhibits Santiago’s impressive perseverance, as he does not give up on his hand when it seems to have given up on him. Instead, Santiago, nauseated, eats the fish in order to help his hand redeem its strength. When Santiago finally catches the fish, he then has to fight off sharks, facing hardship again and again in his quest for survival: “‘But man is not made for defeat,’ he said. ‘A man can be destroyed but not defeated’” (Hemingway 78). This quote perfectly encompasses Santiago’s attitude; he endures challenge after challenge and is beaten down physically, but mentally he does not believe in such a defeat. Santiago demonstrates the most common theme of human nature: non-defeat. Although he faces many troubles, he triumphs in the end simply by living. This is exhibited by his actions and reactions, speech, and description.
Mark Twain describes the main character, Huck Finn, of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by showing examples of Huck’s speech, actions and reactions, and a description of his attitude. Huck’s personality is clearly revealed whenever he speaks: “What’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same” (Twain 94). Twain describes Huck by showing his use of speech and vocabulary in his own personal dialect. This is extremely important because it emphasizes Huck’s beginnings, as well as the thoughts and phrases that were common during the time period that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn takes place in. It also shows Huck to be exactly what he is: an uneducated, backwoods, Southern boy. Huck is not wealthy, and does not education particularly seriously. Instead, he cares about what he wants to be seen done and does whatever it takes, whether right or wrong, to accomplish those ends. An example of such an occurrence is when Huck, about to turn Jim in, instead decides to save the former slave. Twain describes Huck through his profound actions as well: “Well next I pulled out some of my hair, and bloodied the ax good, and stuck it on the back side, and slung the axe in the corner” (Twain 35). In order for him to escape the domination of his father and society, Huck goes to extreme lengths, such as faking his own death, to break away from a situation he finds distasteful. Another way Twain describes his main character is by his attitude. For example, Twain uses Huck’s feelings toward his new clothes to define his distinctive personality: “She [the widow] put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn’t do nothing but sweat and sweat, and felt all cramped up” (Twain 4).
In Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Ethan, Huck, and Santiago are archetypes of real people reflected within a fictional novel. Santiago, Ethan, and Huck demonstrate their authors’ purpose in creating them through their speech, description, and actions and reactions. For example, Ethan is a demonstration of a man caught in a hopeless situation. The love he aches for cannot be. Instead of putting it aside, Ethan—in a warning against rash thinking—decides to destroy himself along with his would-be love, Mattie. Ethan becomes the model then of a failed attempt to cure one’s life in adverse ways, because he does not accomplish the ends he sets out to achieve. Santiago, however, reflects the opposite end of the spectrum. He is a noble, heroic man who, despite such difficulties as pain, starvation, dehydration, and fatigue, battles his way to achieve the only means for his survival. He catches the fish and triumphs, no matter that the fish is consumed by sharks. Santiago triumphs because he persevered throughout his hardships and lives through it to fish another day. Huck reflects that even young men can have morals and ethics that cannot be broken down or beaten. An example of this is, of course, when Huck goes against everything he’s learned in his small Southern village and saves the life and freedom of Jim, a former slave who becomes one of Huck’s friends. Ethan, Santiago, and Huck portray Wharton, Hemingway and Twain’s purposes in creating them through such examples. Wharton created Ethan to be a warning against thinking without consequences. Rather than shoulder the circumstances that have been handed to him, Ethan chooses to crumble beneath them. He decides to take his own life and Mattie’s so they never have to separate from one another. Hemingway uses Santiago to display that through great hardship, determination and a dogged perseverance can eventually lead to a greater enlightenment of oneself. Santiago learns through his experience with the marlin that he cannot always win, and must sometimes lose to a force greater than himself. Santiago catches the massive fish he’s been waiting out after several days, but the fish is too big to be taken into the boat. It is because of the fish’s giant size that it is eventually eaten by sharks, which Santiago attempts to fend off, but eventually cannot defeat. Twain formed Huck as a model that even against great opposition, what is right can always triumph against what is wrong. Huck grew up in a society where African Americans were patronized and considered to be inferior. They were slaves. Huck, however, comes to a new, enlightened way of thinking when he befriends the former slave, Jim, and the two share many adventures. Huck begins to realize that the world is not all a game and gains ownership of his actions and thoughts. He, essentially, becomes a young man, proving that at some point, everyone must grow up. Through Huck, Santiago, and Ethan, readers of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Old Man and the Sea, and Ethan Frome, a reader can learn to be just as strong of character and will as the main characters are.
A Portrayal of Characters
The main characters contained within The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, and Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton show the authors’ purpose for creating them through the writers’ portrayals of their characters. For example, in The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien exemplifies the theme of a will to survive in his character, Frodo Baggins. Frodo is a young hobbit who is undertaken in a mission to save all of Middle Earth. The mission is one that Frodo joins all but inadvertently. At first, the quest seems to be a game to Frodo and his other friends, but as time progresses, Frodo comes to learn the dangers that accompany his mission. Frodo starts to become despondent, but struggles through the dark mood that swirls around him. He carries out his mission to destroy the ring and defeat Middle Earth’s enemy. Frodo is considered to be an Average Joe who rises up to take on the role of a hero, despite many of the shortcomings that bar his way. In Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea, Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Wharton’s Ethan Frome, the authors demonstrate their determination to survive through Huck Finn, Santiago and Ethan with the following three traits: description, actions and reactions, and speech.
Edith Wharton creates a very striking image of her main character within the first few pages of her novel. The image is a haunting one, a picture that stays in the mind: an old man crippled by accident and persevering through it nonetheless.:
Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but a ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the “natives” were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two. (Wharton 8)
Wharton also reveals how very deep Ethan’s affection for his wife’s cousin, Mattie, goes when he sees her with another man: “…and Frome’s heart, which had swung out over a black void, trembled back to safety” (Wharton 29). When he sees Mattie with another man from the village, he becomes jealous, as well as paranoid, fearing that her fondness for him is not what he thought it to be. Wharton shows just how very enthralled of the girl Ethan is as well as the kind of man Ethan is. Most of the occupants within Starkfield village think of Frome as solid and stoic, while the passage demonstrates him to be a creature with feeling and emotion. Ethan’s resignation with his lot in life is shown when Wharton writes: “I guess we’ll never let you go, Matt. We’ll always go on living here together, and some day she’ll lie there beside me” (Wharton 32). Ethan is walking with Mattie in a graveyard at the time he says this; the scene is poignant with his own thoughts and desires. He loves Mattie and wants her to stay, but knows, inevitably, someday he will lie beside Zenobia in the graveyard, remembered as her husband and the last of the Frome line. Wharton’s writing of Ethan in Ethan Frome demonstrates her purpose for creating Ethan using actions and reactions, speech and description. It reveals the vivid emotions and desires that permeate human life, only invoked in a fictional character.
In Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway describes the main character depicted in the pages with the three parts of the characterization criteria as well. Hemingway first reveals Santiago’s character as the man comes in from a day of fruitless fishing. Hemingway uses the following passage to show Santiago’s immense age and wear in addition to his experience. It also makes it clear these factors do not stop Santiago from pursuing his only means of survival:
The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert. (Hemingway 13)
Hemingway also displays his character’s personality when Santiago’s hand cramps up after hours of holding line: “How do you feel hand?’ He asked the cramped hand that was almost as stiff as rigor mortis. ‘I’ll eat some more for you’” (Hemingway 49). This exhibits Santiago’s impressive perseverance, as he does not give up on his hand when it seems to have given up on him. Instead, Santiago, nauseated, eats the fish in order to help his hand redeem its strength. When Santiago finally catches the fish, he then has to fight off sharks, facing hardship again and again in his quest for survival: “‘But man is not made for defeat,’ he said. ‘A man can be destroyed but not defeated’” (Hemingway 78). This quote perfectly encompasses Santiago’s attitude; he endures challenge after challenge and is beaten down physically, but mentally he does not believe in such a defeat. Santiago demonstrates the most common theme of human nature: non-defeat. Although he faces many troubles, he triumphs in the end simply by living. This is exhibited by his actions and reactions, speech, and description.
Mark Twain describes the main character, Huck Finn, of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by showing examples of Huck’s speech, actions and reactions, and a description of his attitude. Huck’s personality is clearly revealed whenever he speaks: “What’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same” (Twain 94). Twain describes Huck by showing his use of speech and vocabulary in his own personal dialect. This is extremely important because it emphasizes Huck’s beginnings, as well as the thoughts and phrases that were common during the time period that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn takes place in. It also shows Huck to be exactly what he is: an uneducated, backwoods, Southern boy. Huck is not wealthy, and does not education particularly seriously. Instead, he cares about what he wants to be seen done and does whatever it takes, whether right or wrong, to accomplish those ends. An example of such an occurrence is when Huck, about to turn Jim in, instead decides to save the former slave. Twain describes Huck through his profound actions as well: “Well next I pulled out some of my hair, and bloodied the ax good, and stuck it on the back side, and slung the axe in the corner” (Twain 35). In order for him to escape the domination of his father and society, Huck goes to extreme lengths, such as faking his own death, to break away from a situation he finds distasteful. Another way Twain describes his main character is by his attitude. For example, Twain uses Huck’s feelings toward his new clothes to define his distinctive personality: “She [the widow] put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn’t do nothing but sweat and sweat, and felt all cramped up” (Twain 4).
In Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Ethan, Huck, and Santiago are archetypes of real people reflected within a fictional novel. Santiago, Ethan, and Huck demonstrate their authors’ purpose in creating them through their speech, description, and actions and reactions. For example, Ethan is a demonstration of a man caught in a hopeless situation. The love he aches for cannot be. Instead of putting it aside, Ethan—in a warning against rash thinking—decides to destroy himself along with his would-be love, Mattie. Ethan becomes the model then of a failed attempt to cure one’s life in adverse ways, because he does not accomplish the ends he sets out to achieve. Santiago, however, reflects the opposite end of the spectrum. He is a noble, heroic man who, despite such difficulties as pain, starvation, dehydration, and fatigue, battles his way to achieve the only means for his survival. He catches the fish and triumphs, no matter that the fish is consumed by sharks. Santiago triumphs because he persevered throughout his hardships and lives through it to fish another day. Huck reflects that even young men can have morals and ethics that cannot be broken down or beaten. An example of this is, of course, when Huck goes against everything he’s learned in his small Southern village and saves the life and freedom of Jim, a former slave who becomes one of Huck’s friends. Ethan, Santiago, and Huck portray Wharton, Hemingway and Twain’s purposes in creating them through such examples. Wharton created Ethan to be a warning against thinking without consequences. Rather than shoulder the circumstances that have been handed to him, Ethan chooses to crumble beneath them. He decides to take his own life and Mattie’s so they never have to separate from one another. Hemingway uses Santiago to display that through great hardship, determination and a dogged perseverance can eventually lead to a greater enlightenment of oneself. Santiago learns through his experience with the marlin that he cannot always win, and must sometimes lose to a force greater than himself. Santiago catches the massive fish he’s been waiting out after several days, but the fish is too big to be taken into the boat. It is because of the fish’s giant size that it is eventually eaten by sharks, which Santiago attempts to fend off, but eventually cannot defeat. Twain formed Huck as a model that even against great opposition, what is right can always triumph against what is wrong. Huck grew up in a society where African Americans were patronized and considered to be inferior. They were slaves. Huck, however, comes to a new, enlightened way of thinking when he befriends the former slave, Jim, and the two share many adventures. Huck begins to realize that the world is not all a game and gains ownership of his actions and thoughts. He, essentially, becomes a young man, proving that at some point, everyone must grow up. Through Huck, Santiago, and Ethan, readers of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Old Man and the Sea, and Ethan Frome, a reader can learn to be just as strong of character and will as the main characters are.