Why "What is Poverty?" Makes the Reader Uncomfortable What does it mean to be poor? Jo Goodwin Parker's article, "What is Poverty?", summarizes her ideas of the true definition of poverty. The article is harsh and direct and can actually make the reader uncomfortable while...

Emotions No matter how hard you try, you cannot control your emotions, only attempt to hide them. Emotions influence every aspect of our lives, what we do, what we say, and et cetera. All of our emotions, from anger to insecurity, are influenced by several factors, just as our lives are infl...

FEELINGS In contrast to the times, when people like to open up, and share their feelings with others, there are times when people prefer to hide their feelings and keep others from knowing how they really feel, for rather moral or personal reasons, such as: not wanting to hurt others, being unco...

Child Sexual Abuse Sexual assault on children is one of the most serious and fastest growing crimes that face the world today. Sexual abuse plagues children of all shapes, sizes, ethnicities, and backgrounds. Sexual abuse is one type of abuse that occurs millions of times every year across Ame...

Chris Offutt's Broken Style In his memoir No Heroes, Chris Offutt attempts to integrate the story of his return to his birthplace of Kentucky with the story of his in-law's time in Nazi concentration camps. At first glance this looks like a highly difficult task to follow through on, ...

Anne Lamott's book Operating Instructions gives an outlook of a mildly disadvantaged woman. This journal is a chronicle of her son Sam's first year. She is fiercely self-deprived, funny and unafraid to talk about the dark side of parenting an infant: the fear, exhaustion, anger, emotional swin...

To see a scorned, beaten, and crucified man lying dead in the arms of his mother is an image, which can inspire overwhelming emotions within the heart of an observer. Yet, for the longest time, I've had such difficulty looking at Michelangelo's Pieta or any piece of art in this way. To me, art has...

Essay #1: "Metaphors" by Sylvia Plath In Sylvia Plath's poem, "Metaphors," the speaker describes a negative event in which she is experiencing pregnancy. Her choice of words and phrases express her feelings about the pregnancy as well as the structure of the poem. I...

If we want to discuss about being safe and taking risks in the story of ¡§Sonny¡s Blues¡ by James Baldwin, we should know what is the meaning of ¡§being safe and taking risks¡ by itself. I think all people agree that if we are driving on a road, and we can see that there is a big ho...

Loneliness drives people to live a miserable life. A lot of them don't know that they suffer from depression. People who are usually depressed don't even know why they are sad or what their main problem is. They just feel sad, worthless and they just don't care about anything in life....

With the development of society, the rhythm of modern life is becoming faster and faster. Many people have suffered from the stress and strain of life. So stress has become a normal part of life. Psychologically speaking, stress is a kind of disease of modern society. There are many causes of stre...

One image that can best sum up the sentiment of the heroine in ¡°Theft¡± occurs in the last paragraph, that is, ¡°the cup of chilled coffee¡±. Chilled coffee tastes bitter and cold, and has a strong aftertaste for you to to think about what you have drunk, just like the psycholog...

"Sonny's Blues," a short story by James Baldwin, illustrates a strained relationship between two brothers trying to survive in the mean streets of New York City. Told from the first person point-of-view of Sonny 's brother (a hard-working conservative schoolteacher whose name is ne...

There are many theories on the significance of dreams and there is no definitive encyclopedia on their meanings. The ability to have one dream that is so bizarre and fantasy like and the next seem so real that it is hard to tell if it really happened or not, is quite amazing. One theory i...

Luc Besson's movie "The Big Blue" plays like a love letter to the Sea. In beautiful images, this movie follows the life of two friends who grew up together in Greece - although one of them is Italian (Enzo) and the other French (Jacques). Both have a fascination with the ocean and free-diving. En...

THE MAN IN THE BOX Once upon a time there was a man who lived in a box. It was a nice box, with a nice size, and it was nice inside the box. Everything worked in the box, all the systems supported each other, and everyone supported (or was supposed to support) the system of the box. The box was n...

Zen Do you have any idea what Zen is or what it is about? "Zen is a religious division of Buddhism, that teaches an approach to life, incorporating harmony between ultimate reality and the world of daily life, cultivating awareness of reality, and finding answers in this life and beyond"...

Personalities are very diverse throughout this novel, but there's always some characters in the novel that catch us more, and that's why I decided to highlight Jake's personality more than any other characters in this novel. Jake's personality has inspired me since I started read...

Although they are physically united in an erotic partnership, Tomas and Tereza possess very different attitudes about love and relationships. Their differing perspectives are summed up in the subtitle of Section 2 of Kundera's novel, "Body and Soul." Tereza wants to possess Tomas, bo...

J A N I E In Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God", Janie, a southern black woman, finds herself in several bad relationships before finding true love. Throughout the novel, being a dynamic character, Janie changes her ways in between ...