Reaction paper on the book Lucky by Alice Sebold Essay

Reaction paper on the book Lucky by Alice Sebold - Essay Example ed the course of her life when she was 18 and a freshman at Syracuse University in 1981, Sebold invites her readers into the lifelong effects of that one event. From the intricate description of police action following her report, through the days and weeks following both in facing other students back at her dorm room and in returning to her parents home for the summer break, to the recognition and trial of the man who raped her, Sebold gives a real life account of the various ways in which rape can hurt a woman, physically, psychologically, socially. By including the stories of several of her friends and acquaintances that she meets along the way, Sebold also sheds light on the ways in which others reacted to similar experience or to herself as a victim. Told with her characteristic forthright style, Sebold paints a picture of the reality of rape as she has experienced it over the course of the approximately 18 years since it happened. I especially liked the way in which Sebold approaches the subject with a frank, tell-it-like-it-is approach that typifies her writing style. As she described the way in which her attacker painfully manipulated her breasts, she narrates the way in which she dissociated herself from the experience. â€Å"’Nice white titties,’ he said. And the words made me give them up, lobbing off each part of my body as he claimed ownership – the mouth, the tongue, my breasts† (Sebold, 1999, p. 16). By painting the picture in such straightforward language, without appeals to sympathy or apology, Sebold immediately drew me in to her story, allowing me to sympathize with the experience in a way that has not often been presented. â€Å"’I was raped’ I said. †¦ I felt I had to say it. But I felt also that saying it was akin to an act of vandalism. As if I had thrown a bucket of blood out across the living room at the blue couch, Myra, the winged chair, my mother. / The three of us sat there and watched it drip† (Sebold, 1999, p. 76).

THE AMERICAN JOURNEY IS ALWAYS A QUEST FOR IDENTITY AND AN ESCAPE FROM Essay

THE AMERICAN JOURNEY IS ALWAYS A QUEST FOR IDENTITY AND AN ESCAPE FROM REALITY. WITH REFERENCE TO TWO TEXT, THE GREAT GATSBY BY - Essay Example The tragedy of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the twin towers has just happened and the shock to the main characters is still palpable. Both books comment little on the political and economic events surrounding the story, but focus instead on how these matters affect a small selection of main characters. Material prosperity is an accepted norm in the two books: â€Å"Situated at the heart of Gatsby's story is the metanarrative central to American culture--the deeply conservative ideology of capitalism, the story of rags to riches, of power, love and fame achieved through personal wealth.† (Giltrow and Stouck: 1997, p. 477) The shady main character Jay Gatsby reflects on all that the city offers: â€Å"For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing. (Scott Fitzgerald, 1990, pp. 95-96) Descriptions of the furnishings and clothi ng of the main characters show a lingering fascination with the glitter and wealth: â€Å"I (= Nick) bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets †¦Ã¢â‚¬  (Scott Fitzgerald, 1990, p. 10) â€Å"Her (= Daisy’s) porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine† (Scott Fitzgerald, 1990, p. 142); â€Å"and Gatsby, in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-coloured tie, hurried in.† (Scott Fitzgerlald, 1990, p. 81) This brightness contrasts sharply with the atmosphere at the end of the novel when Myrtle has been killed and Gatsby also is dead: â€Å"Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small grey clouds took on fantastic shapes and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.† (Scott Fitzgerals, 1990, p. 152-153). The events in the book depict a journey from a glitzy American dr eamworld to a nightmare of death and destruction. The falling grey dust of the twin towers is where Delillo’s characters begin their particular journeys. In the broken, fragmented environment of post 9/11 New York, successful lawyer Keith is disoriented. He is lost, and his life’s journey has been savagely interrupted. He needs to re-orient himself and embark on a new and very different kind of journey. Critics point out the post-modern irony of this, as centre of world trade and finance shifts from being the last century’s American dream, where streets are paved with gold, to the nightmare of death and destruction in the new century. The journey that people now undertake is not from rural poverty to urban wealth and sophistication, but something far deeper. The focus now is on characters who â€Å"struggle to embark on an introspective process to recover their traumatized selves.† (Schmeck and Schweighauser: 2010, p. 49). It has been noted also that whil e Delillo’s view of New York society has a certain bias: â€Å"the dominant narrative focus is on the white upper-middle class† (Pohlmann, 2010, p. 53), there is also at least some attempt to portray alternative views of the world, in the depiction of Hammad and his religious zeal against empty materialism. Though the contexts of the two novels are different, and they start at different points, their