The Life of Pi by Yann Martel is part philosophical meditation, part "Survivor" story. It tells the tale of a young protagonist, a boy named Pi, who must survive on a raft with wild animals after a shipwreck. Martel's book poses the question-how can a religious person like Pi continue to be moral...

Lord of the Flies by William Golding portrays society giving into their savagery by lacking the restraints normal to civilized human beings. Without order and self-restraint, man changes into "man the destroyer", a shocking form from lacking moral sensibility. However, the animal in human nature doe...

Culture in ancient times was defined as "the sum total of the equipment of the human individual, which enables him to be attuned to his immediate environment on the historical past on the other". It reflects in effect what humans have added to nature. It comprises the spiritual, material, ...

What exactly is the American Dream? Does it mean to be happy, successful, famous and wealthy? For Jay Gatsby, the rich, young businessman from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby it meant all of these things. Set in the 1920s American society, The Great Gatsby explores various aspects of lif...

In the novel The Secret Sharer, by Joseph Conrad, a man at sea struggles with loneliness and moral dilemma. However, the narrator has saved himself on multiple levels by the end of the novel. His confidence grows as he learns about himself, as well as when he learns of Leggatt, a man much like him. ...

Anyone and everyone can become successful with enough hard work that was the "American Dream" as it was understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the beginning of the twentieth century, a time of great corruption was ushered in. The modern values that came along with the ma...

Naturalism in Jack London's "The Call of the Wild" Naturalism is a sect of literature that endeavors to apply the scientific principles of detachment and objectivity to the study of human nature. It is a subset of realism, but does not focus primarily on literary technique. Its mai...

HARVEY: The global march against child labor was born in a conversation that I had with Kailash Satyarthi-- the very charismatic leader of the move to bring children out of bonded labor in India-- the head of the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude. KAILASH: We have ample proof that t...

Is the war against terrorism in Iraq necessary and are we fighting for a true cause? For many years several people have argued about the moral reality of war and if it is right or wrong. One possible basis for this position is that war occurs between nations and morality is normally considere...