Analysis Of Black Eyed Women

Readers, especially those reading historical fiction, always crave to find believable stories and realistic characters. Tim O’Brien gives them this in “The Things They Carried.” Like war, people and their stories are often complex. This novel is a collection stories that include these complex characters and their in depth stories, both of which are essential when telling stories of the Vietnam War. Using techniques common to postmodern writers, literary techniques, and a collection of emotional truths, O’Brien helps readers understand a wide perspective from the war, which ultimately makes the fictional stories he tells more believable.

Regret is a powerful emotion that has the ability to scar someone for the rest of their life. Moments of regret can come from relationships, self-made decisions and life changing events. The idea of regret also applies to “A Marker on the Side of the Boat” by Bao Ninh and “On the Rainy River” by Tim O’Brien. Although these two literary pieces are very different in many ways, both authors describe the experience of the Vietnam War as a time of regretful decisions that negatively impacted people of both the American side and the Vietnamese side. Both authors tell a story about a character that recalls of flashbacks of the war, where they grieve over the past decisions that have affected them for the rest of their life.

Furthermore, in order to cope with the ill-effects of the war Engelmann used the method of returning to Vietnam and photographing the places he had been. He describes how he felt once he left Vietnam for the final time after his last trip to take photographs by saying, “There was a quiet and empty space inside me where there once had been the nagging torment of my own war in Viet Nam. It was with me no more” (Engelmann 171). Once he had visited all the places he had once been and faced his old demons, he was able to walk away from the torment of the war. This is similar to the narrator’s method of telling and retelling, it is through facing the demons of his past that he is able to pass through the suffering and cope with it.

This chapter “The Ghost Soldiers”, showed us how Tim O’Brien and the other soldiers were dealing with the war both physically and psychologically. It also shows us how the Tim O'Brien behaved and felt when he was shot, wounded and had a bacteria infection on his butt and how the war changed the way he thought, and viewed the other soldiers around him. This chapter also contain a lot of psychological lens. From the way Tim O’Brien felt when he was shot and separated from his unit to a new unit to when he wanted revenge on Bobby Jorgenson for almost “killing” him.

The short story, “Haunting Olivia,” by Karen Russell, portrays two boys looking for their sister, Olivia, who died at sea. The boys stay with their grandmother on an island for the summer, and each night they sneak away to a boat graveyard to search for the girl. Guilt and grief consume the narrator, Timothy, and his brother, Wallow, as they search for a way to rescue their dead sister. Tim holds onto the idea that Olivia can continue to exist as a spirit. The narrator uses echo to create the effect of Olivia’s ghost.

As characters are exposed to different situations, their feelings and opinions change and develop. 'The Woman in Black', written by Susan Hill, is a gothic novel set in Victorian England. Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is sent to an isolated town in the country to recover papers that belonged to newly deceased Alice Drablow. What he thought would be a relaxing time away from the noisy London turns into a nightmare as he is haunted by the Woman in Black. Being alone becomes a fear instead of a luxury.

"I carry the memories of the ghosts of a place called Vietnam — the people of Vietnam, my fellow soldiers," quotes O’Brien. "More importantly," he continues, "I carry the weight of responsibility, and a sense of abiding guilt." (npr.org). His intended audience for the book was adults,

Besides that, Lipsha really regrets and feels so sorry because he blessed the turkey heart by himself with holy water. When they come back to home after Grandpa’s funeral, they think Grandpa is always by their side and he stays at home with them. James Ruppert said “The return of Nector Kashpaw’s ghost is even more mediational. Nector’s sudden death leaves him without a chance to say good-bye to the two women he loves. Lipsha and Marie know that when ghosts return they have a “certain uneasy reason to come back”.”

Author Joyce Carol Oates ' discovery of the stories of Edgar Allen Poe and Ann Radcliff “sparked her interest in Gothic fiction”. These Gothic elements typically include gruesome or violent incidents, characters in psychological or physical torment, and strong language full of dangerous meanings. Oates herself is citied as saying that "Horror is a fact of life. As a writer, I’m fascinated by all facets of life". “Where is Here?" This story is sort of eerie and tells the tale of a grown-up man who goes back to visit his childhood home.

The novel focuses on coping with the death and horror of war. It also speaks volumes about the true nature of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the never-ending struggle of dealing with it. In the

Susan Hill’s Woman in Black is about Arthur Kipps, a lawyer in London, who has been given the task of filing the papers of the dead Mrs. Drablow. While on his journey and at Eel Marsh House he experiences some interesting and eerie happenings. In Chapter 10; “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” Hill uses a variety of literary techniques to create an atmosphere of fear and foreboding. Hill uses sensory imagery to create fear and foreboding.

In “The Ghostly Voice of Gossip in Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily”” author Thomas Klein argues that William Faulkner’s use of an unconventional narrator enhances the story’s complicated timeline and uses examples throughout the text to propose a model as to who the narrator really is. Doing so, Klein focuses in on the reasoning to Faulkner’s claim of “A Rose For Emily” was written as a ghost story. Klein focuses on how the narrator does not claim what gender he or she is. He states that the narrator keeps the main tone of the entire text as either “we” or “our”, never identifying who they are. He expresses that the narrator never declares from what generation he

The purpose of a ghost story is to leave the reader feeling frightened and unaware of what the truth of reality is. Nguyen's Black-Eyed Women flips all our perceptions of what a ghost is and why they visit the living. The ghost stories told in this story affect the narrator by forcing her to confront the discomfort of her reality. The narrator realizes she has been ignoring discomfort about her brother dying for her, and s the guilt and that she lived. She loses her identify, and sense of security, however her brother's ghost arrives to mend this disconnect.

The London fog, the town of Crythin Gifford, and the park scene all gives the novella a very gothic atmosphere. The novella, especially gives a feeling of dread and mystery with the atmosphere. “The Woman in Black” by Susan Hill is a haunting story that leaves the reader searching for more answers, maybe even more than

The story, set in Norway, was published by the Copenhagen newspaper Politiker in 1885. In the story, another tragedy like Ghosts, a woman is living in an abandoned shack with her baby and is asked by a policeman to leave. After convincing the policeman to let her stay in the shack for a few days, she is so grateful. In the following days, the policeman returns to the shack and finds both the child and mother dead, frozen to death. There are plenty of reasons why society has failed in this story.