Short Story Essays

            Puzzles, codes, crypts, symbols…these never fail to make a good mysterious thriller. However, Ron Howard’s 2006 movie depiction of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code was less than entertaining and left expectant movie critics puzzled as to how it failed to keep everyone’s adrenalin up.  It focused on too many …

“The Color of Purple” by Alice Walker tells the story based on personal experiences and filled with ethnical and racial discrimination, slavery issues and women oppression and subordination. Alice Walker even received the Pulitzer for her story. Nevertheless, the story is considered rather controversial and many were even offended by …

Summary             This story is about an undertaker who lives in the Australian bush with his dog, Five Bob.  He was interested in collecting bones from graves and goes to black fellow’s graves and digs the mounds.             The story starts with the old man calling Five Bob on a …

Due to his experience and accomplishments as a poet, Stephen Crane’s prose style often demonstrates an attenuated sense of word connotation and symbolism, as well as a complex interrelationship between occurrences in plot and linguistic expression. This control of language is used in his famous story “The Bride Comes to …

The brilliant tapestry in The Blind Assassin is classic Margaret Atwood.  It is a story-within-a-story, a novel-within-a-novel interwoven in one beautifully crafted literary piece. The story, set in fictional Ontario and Toronto towns in the 1930s and 1940s, is told in the perspective of the narrator as well as perspective …

Caleb Carr’s The Alienist set in turn-of-the-century New York bases upon the links between present and past by opening with a description of a burial. The burial is that of Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth president of the United States of America, on 8 January 1919. The presence of historical event points …

“Archetypal stories occur in many cultures making the long journey home, contemplating the impossible” task or outwitting the formidable enemy are all archetypal plots (Willhelm R2). One of the most universal archetypal patterns in every human beings life experiences is the adolescent struggle for adulthood. In literature, this struggle for …

A&P is one of John Updike’s short stories. It was written way back in 1961. It is a short story of a teenage boy who took a stand for what he thinks is right but was faced with disappointment. The young narrator in A&P is Sammy and he narrates the …

The body of a black teenager, Eric McGinnis, was found in the St. Joseph River, drowned. The only question everybody asks is: How did he get there? People wonder whther this was an accident or a suicide? The two towns, Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, divided by both race and …

“Salvation” was written by Langston Hughes. This story is about when Hughes going on thirteen, he was saved from sin. However, his not really saved. Church had had a special meeting for children. The meeting was about to bring the young sinner who had not yet been brought to Jesus. …