Monday, December 20, 2010
THEME #7: Writer's Central Message
Enriched by our reading experiences, sharing specific examples from the novel and the short stories provides the chance to internalize key themes. Dig deep. Provide an example from one work that reflects the theme listed. Establish the context of your example. Quotes are ecouraged. Be sure to read through the entire post; do not use the same examples as classmates.
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If you ask me........the central message of Barn Burning is that the situation could very easily be real in then today's society........a man that has become obsessed with destroying neighbors things, especially with arson, is a creepy and scary string of events......i think the author was trying to say that something needs to be done or this could very well happen for real soon.........that is what my judgment of Barn BUrning's central message may be. The scary thing is is that several people did go insane during the Depression and may have done such actions......this was an eerily odd message that the author sent out.
ReplyDeleteRather than focus on just one story, I'm going to focus on the reading selections as a whole. I think that all of the stories and poems have a similar central message. To me, this message seems to be one that talks of sadness, despair, and a hope for a better life. For example, characters in GOW, Gilded Six-Bits, and Barn Burning all look to have a better life, one where they have all that they need and are happy. This message relates powerfully to the Great Depression. All that the poor people wished for was a better life, one where they had the things that kept them alive. I think the message left by these writers was one that spoke with the voice of the American people.
ReplyDeleteThere is an old saying that things aren’t always as they seem. This is the central theme of my personal favorite short story, “The Gilded Six Bits.” It is truly a compelling story with this as the central theme of the story. People can dress nice and have nice things however the only thing that matters when it comes to the real wealth of a person is what qualities he possesses on the inside and the relationships he has formed and developed in his life. In the story one of the main characters Joe has a golden coin and it makes him look wealthy however throughout the story we as the readers find out that really wealth does not and should not matter to him and that at the end of the day the only thing that matters is his relationship with his wife Missie. This story I feel has one of the strongest most profound central message.
ReplyDeleteDeparting from the limitations that rhyme, meter, phonetic patterns, and other poetic structures impose, the excerpt from "The People, Yes" is Sandburg's testament to the tenacity of the American people. "You can't laugh off their capacity to take it" claims Sandburg. Carl Sandburg hints at the impressive nature of the tendency for people to resolve to not lose their spirit. Describing people as a sort of sentient commodity in saying "The buy me and sell me...it's a game...sometime I'll break lose." this poem gives voice to the mindset of the downtrodden people yet introduces an idea of hope by claiming they will "break lose" while hinting at a sense of cyclical continuity with statements like "The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas" or his final voicing of the collective people "Where to? what next?" Carl Sandburg describe a prismatically diverse and yet collectively resolute American people in the excerpt of "The People, Yes".
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