World Glitterature

It's often hard to really know someone. You might know people who seem cheerful and energetic all the time. Now and then you also see organized and hardworking people. When you describe them to someone else, you'd probably try to shove the whole person into a few adjectives and wedge them into a sentence. It might not be wrong to do so, but it gets people quite often misunderstood and misrepresented. The process is simple. We repeatedly get a certain impression from a group of people and expect someone from that group to be that way. Intended or not, we get used to fitting certain people into the supposed frames. Welcome to the world of prejudice! For those who are seen through the biased lens, prejudice is oppression. Simply being who you are becomes a painful task. In The Rug  by Edna O'Brien and Prue by Alice Munro, we meet two main characters. The narrator's mother in The Rug  is a hardworking person; visitors are often surprised by how the interior of her house

Araby is a pretty dark short story. It starts with a street with a dead end, whose inhabitants seem to stare blankly out the windows. Even the part that describes the children playing on the streets has a gloomy feel to it, containing a sentence that uses the word "dark" three times. The ending mercilessly stamps on the readers' faint hopes that the story might turn out to be at least romantic. Why is  Araby so dark, so pessimistic? Is it because the narrator of the story is a particularly grim child? Or does it show the reality of Dublin and even, the adult world in general? The narrator seems to have quite a negative view of the world of adults. He is first, frustrated with his uncle's attitude of not taking him seriously and breaking the promise to give him money. If it were an important meeting that his uncle had missed, would he still have been so careless and unapologetic? The boy does not think so. When getting to the bazaar late at night, he finds nothing b

At first glance, Anton Chekhov's two short stories — The Student and  The Lady with the Dog — do not seem to share some significant similarity. One is about a young student who talks with two widows and realizes hope; the other is about an affair between a married man and a separately married woman. While there are easily spotted differences between these two stories, there also exists a prominent similarity in the way they are illustrated: a notable shift of attitude in the main characters. In The Student, Ivan Velikopolsky does not tell the anecdote of Peter to the widows by mere chance. Although his act of spontaneously bringing up the biblical matter just after exchanging greetings could seem only like another element of realism, it plays a critical role in the plot that later sparks an epiphany. After watching the widows' emotional reaction to the story of Peter, Ivan's attitude towards the world changes from gloom and misery to fervent hope. The sharply contrasting