Short Story Essays

This story focuses on the experience of a man, Chen Xin (pronounced “Chen Zin”) who is returning to the city of Shanghai after an absence of ten years. He has spent that time in a rural area and has looked forward to being reunited with his family, which consists of …

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s two stories, “The Birthmark” and “The Scarlet Letter”, have very similar themes and plots. The two stories were written in the 1800’s when Europeans, that practised the Puritan religion, started to move to America. The two stories share similar themes of sin and desire with underlying Puritan values. …

Minor Characters such as Loretta Bird and Mrs. Peebles in the story “How I Met My Husband” may seem to have insignificant parts; but actually play important roles that advance the plot of the story. We see in the beginning that Mrs. Peebles is Edie’s employer. This shows us how …

Lord of the Flies By examining the last four paragraphs of chapter nine, “A view to a death”, in Lord of the Flies, Golding makes clear the use of light imagery to suggest the lost of Simon’s logic and goodness through the images of Simon’s body, water, sky, and sea …

In the Kitchen In the story In the Kitchen, Henry Louis Gates Jr. makes the point that there are some things that you just cannot take away from people, such as character traits and people’s ways of life. Those are things that you cannot get rid of no matter how …

People often have a desire or need for power and control, the way people go about to achieve this determines if they are successful. In the short story “Butcher Bird” written by Wallace Stegner, Mr. Garfield won the respect of his peers by engaging in the conversation and acting polite …

Martha Brooks’ short story called “What I Want To Be When I Grow Up” is about a 14-year-old junior high student, Andrew, who has to take the public bus to his orthodontic appointment every third Thursday of the month. After this particular appointment, for which he was late, he got …

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is a fairy tale in which realistic, earthy diction is used to relate a mystical event. The author’s flair for describing the fantastic in a casual, understated way creates an atmosphere of credibility in which anything is possible and believable. …

Lord of the Flies is a modern classic by William Golding set during WWII. The book is about a group of 12-year-old boys who have been evacuated onto an island as their aeroplane is shot down near Spain. Nobody knows where they are, and their only hope of getting off …

When comparing and contrasting two works of literature, there seems to be characters that seem to embody what the other is about, personality wise. Yet, characters also have some things which distinguishes them in an individual manner, therefore making them unique. In The Crucible by Arthur Miller and The Scarlet …