Sylvia Plath Many who admire Sylvia Plath look with considerable astonishment at the normalcy of her childhood and life. To most Plath always seemed to be a motivated, brilliant and energetic individual who seemed to have had everything going for her as a middle class girl living in the 1950's...

The short story can be one of the trickiest forms of literature around. Because the author is faced with the challenge of concluding the story quickly, he or she must be selective in their choice of words in order to convey the point that they are trying to make. In order to do this, the talent...

Themes across Genres To every story, poem, or play we can always find a central idea or meaning. This theme provides a unifying point around which the plot, characters, setting, point of view, symbols and other elements are organized. In some works the theme is explicitly stated and in others it...

When reading A Good Man Is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor most recreational readers believe the short story to be gothic and even grotesque. However, when the story is read from the view point of O'Connor it takes on a different tone and meaning all together. Much of what at first g...

O'Connor vs. Dickinson By comparing Flannery O'Connor and Emily Dickinson, we can see profound differences in their themes, ironies and settings. O'Connor thinks that in order to create a theme the story must not be about the theme itself but about things relating to it. For e...

Irony in O'Connor Flannery O'Connor uses irony in "Good Country People" to give the reader a better sense of what she is trying to communicate to the reader, and show the meaning of her characters and their actions. There are several ironies in the story that the reader c...

In the short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find", the main character is the grandmother. Flannery O'Connor, the author, lets the reader find out who the grandmother is by her conversations and reactions to the other characters in the story. The grandmother is the most important charac...