Download Sample Introductions with Theme In Katherine Mansfield`s "Miss Brill

Sample Introductions with Theme AP Literature In Katherine Mansfield's "Miss Brill," a woman does her usual ritual of sitting in a park on a Sunday afternoon. With the use of characterization, Miss Brill is easily portrayed through her stream of consciousness while she sits in the park, analyzing and listening to the lives of the other people in the park. While living in her own imaginary world, she becomes disillusioned with the environment surrounding her and ends up coping with her loneliness. Most importantly, this story illustrates that sometimes a person's sense of self can be completely different from what other people think. Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is a blunt story that uses irony and dry wit to show a deeper meaning. O'Connor uses conversations and responses to situations to build irony, contrasting opinions before and after the confrontation with The Misfit. With this she unravels her story ultimately to the death of the family. However, it is here, when the reader feels that all things good have left that dirt road in Georgia that O'Connor reaches her purpose in the story. This theme that required the death of the whole family to be revealed was actually stated in the title during the entire story: a good man really is hard to find. Though good men exist throughout the world, unearthing their merit takes dire events. In "Interpreters of Maladies," by Jhumpa Lahiri, the main character Mr. Kapasi is a tour guide for a seemingly functional, albeit odd family. But as the story progresses, so do the family dynamics, and so does the reader's insight into the mind of Mr. Kapasi. The reader learns that Mr. Kapasi is an interpreter for a doctor's office. The fact that he is an interpreter makes the plot more and more ironic as he begins to have thoughts of Mrs. Das and how he wishes he could tell her so many things that, if needing to be translated from another person, would be so easy to say. In life, there is a huge dilemma, difficulty, and often impossibility in communicating with another person. For some people, the difficulty is that they do not speak the same language. For others, it is that they cannot form the words correctly. And still, for others, they have the correct rhetoric and speak the same language but do not have the courage to say how they feel. Mr. Kapasi falls under this category. He is perfectly able to describe the ailments of other people, but when it comes to his own heart, he cannot summon the bravery to say what he has been longing to say all his life. In "Miss Brill," Katherine Mansfield craftily uses characterization to aid in her suggestion that lonely people who are isolated from others may develop skewed perceptions of who they are or what their situation is, and that his perception can be devastatingly shattered by excessive connection to reality. Miss Brill's personality is presented indirectly, allowing the reader to decide what Miss Brill's character is as the story progresses, in a sense doing so simultaneously with Miss Brill. Miss Brill is a very complex, or round, character; Mansfield requires the reader to wait most of the story to discover who Miss Brill really is because there are many ambiguities and complex elements of her situation. Miss Brill is very much a developing character although much of her development takes place at the end of the story, right as she has her epiphany, which is very depressing, an epiphany she likely would have been better off without. Sample Introductions with Theme AP Literature Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" often uses irony in order to temper the grim tone. The actions, emotions, descriptions, and dialogue are ambiguous, leading to a mysterious atmosphere and creating both humor and tension. The irony also adds to a sense of foreshadowing to seemingly innocent and comic events. Through irony, O'Connor manages to explain that one individual has the power to change the lives of multiple others, without presenting her theme as a dull moral lesson. Irony has many definitions that stretch much farther than simple sarcasm. Irony can refer to situations with unexpected results and, more commonly, used by Flannery O'Connor, the incongruities among characters in order to convey a truth about human experience. O'Connor illuminates the story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" with irony and emphasizes the theme that a person's greatest dread and greatest moment can occur at the same time. "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, "by Katherine Anne Porter, is a short story written in the 1930's about an old lady relating the last sixty years of her life while on her death bed to her surrounding family members. The story's point of view is written in third-­‐person limited with a stream of consciousness the helps the reader become more familiar with Granny Weatherall's background and to form an image of her past memories. Once the reader has a clear view of Granny Weatherall's past and the memories she is dealing with, the reader can then understand the theme of the story: even though one may be nearing death surrounded by loved ones, what happened in the past may be hard to forget.