Over this past semester, I have been able to read many interesting stories in this English class. From the beginning of the semester, I thought all of the stories that we were going to read were going to be about Native Americans. As the semester went on, I was very excited to read some of the works that we have read. My favorite author this semester was Edgar Allan Poe. "Ligeia" was a very strange short story. One of Poe's famous qualities in his writings is to leave the reader questioning what he has just read. In both stories, "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "Ligeia", the narrators are not the most reliable. The reader can come up with a variety of explanations for the ending of the story in "Ligeia". I feel that because the narrator was on opium, the ending of the story can only be explained by his confused and altered state of mind. I suppose that this quality in Poe's works is what makes him such an admired author to this very day. All of these stories this past semester have mostly dealt with religion. I found it interesting to read about different religions and how they portray their morals and values through stories. The most obvious was the Native American tales. All of the stories ended with a moral. These stories were what the members of the religions lived by. It was very important to the Native Americans to express their religious beliefs through stories. I have enjoyed learning about different types of stories and the reasons for these authors to write these stories.
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