The Study of Existents in Sandpiper Essays -- Ahdaf Soueif Sandpiper I

The Study of Existents in Sandpiper In a short story like "Sandpiper", where the protagonist does little except move around in her beach-house in an uneventful afternoon, thinking her thoughts, readers must look for an attraction alternative to the plot. Indeed, the writer, Ahdaf Soueif, has chosen to offer to us an interesting array of existents, in place of the story line, as the main focus of this narrative. In the following essay, I shall discuss how existents--the collection of characters and setting--are used to invoke feelings of dispossession and displacement in the story "Sandpiper", which are essential in raising the main issue of the story, which is the question of one's identity. Having agreed that the event itself, a summer afternoon spent at a beach-house, is rather inconsequential, we go on to deduce that the actions of our characters, since they do not contribute to the plot, are actually reflections of their personality. This is what French structuralist, Tzvetan Todorov proposed as a characteristic of psychological narratives, narratives which place their main focus on the development of their characters (Chatman 114). We can therefore, identify distinctive traits belonging to the characters by observing their actions. The characters in this narrative are few: namely the protagonist, "I"; her estranged husband (she refers to him as "her lover"); her daughter, Lucy and her husband's old nanny, Um Sabir. Since it is only the protagonist that appears most often and to whom the readers interact directly, I shall focus most of my discussion based on her development . Our protagonist, "I," can be further differentiated into the narrator, I-now and the character, I-then. I-now is the present figure that has ... ...his narrative is such that we follow the chain of thoughts of our protagonist "I" as she considers the repercussions of her broken marriage. Since we only interact directly with her, we become persuaded to take her point of view, thus her problem becomes our problem too. In its effective use of character, by focusing the essay on one specific character and endowing her with specific traits relevant to bring out the issues concerned and by setting up the story in an environment that can both draw responses from the protagonist as well as clearly portray her feelings to us, "Sandpiper" has successfully raised the question on one's identity. Works Cited Soueif, Ahdaf. "Sandpiper". Sandpiper. London: Bloomsbury, 1997: 23 - 36. Chatman, Seymour. "Existents". Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1978: 107 - 145.

Night Essay: Examples of Night

â€Å"I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name. † (42) Elie Wiesel’s Night is about a young Jewish boy and his experiences through the Holocaust in the 1940’s. Any human being should never experience the hell-like terror that Elie had to go through. He is separated from his mother and his sister and is deported to Auschwitz, one of Hitler’s most depressing concentration camps. Wiesel uses night not only as the title but also as a symbol of time, a world without God, and man’s inhumanity to man. Night is defined as a time of day when the sun is dormant, but for Elie Wiesel, night is eternal.While stuck inside the camp, hope is quickly diminished in Elie’s mind, overtaken by the deep darkness that night brings. This can be clearly seen when Ellie explains his last night in Buna. â€Å"Yet another last night. The last night at home, the last night in the ghetto, the last night in the train, and, now the last night in Buna. How much lo nger were our lives to be dragged out from one ‘last night’ to another? †(79) The question that Elie repeats shows that light in the camp can be seen as sign of hope, but sadly no light shines in the gloomy, depressing place.Elie explains how he encounters a complete darkness, no matter what time of day it is, when he enters Auschwitz. â€Å"Never shall I forget the night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night. †(32) The horrid sights he has to live through in the camp can be seen as the scary, evil, eerie feeling that you get when nightfall arrives, almost like a time of day were there is no presence of God. When forced to evacuate the camp, Elie explains how the darkness swallowed people’s lives as they were marched to death. â€Å"Pitch darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night.They had orders to fire on any who could not keep up. †(81) With the sound of gunshots and people dying, night hove red over every single one of them marching for their own lives. The gloomy, dark, fright-filled nighttime can be closely related to the horrid journey of Elie Wiesel in Auschwitz were no light can be seen, even in the daytime. If God could be seen as light, then the loss of faith is his darkness. On page 60, Elie experiences a young boy being hanged as a punishment inside the camp. From witnessing the awful sight it reminds Elie of the harsh reality of the Nazi’s and how they have deteriorated his faith, a vital omponent for staying alive in the camp. Elie then hears a question come from behind him. â€Å"Where is god now? And I heard a voice within me answer him: Where is he? Here he is- He is hanging here on his gallows . . . † (62) Elie felt as though God no longer had his support and that he had lost faith within him. He explains the young, innocent boy dying in front of him as his faith slowly slipping away. Elie began to doubt the support from God. â€Å"I did n ot deny God’s existence, but I doubted His absolute justice. †(42) God was no longer meaningful and helpful towards Wiesel’s struggles; he had nothing to turn to when deeply in need.Nighttime can be seen as a time when God is no longer there, when the evil emerges from their dwellings in which they hid from the light in. Auschwitz is an eternal night, where evil doesn’t need to hide because no light is visible. The horror and inhumanity of the Nazi’s left million of innocent people trapped in a place of darkness without the slightest sign of light or hope. This can be seen numerous times throughout the whole book. Disturbing sights that Ellie experienced will remain with him and haunt him forever because of how brutal they are.The Nazi just threw out the dead corpses. They undressed him, the survivors avidly sharing out his clothes, then two ‘gravediggers’ took him, one by the head and one by the feet, and threw him out of the wagon lik e a sack of flour. † The way they just threw around the dead as though they were useless, inanimate objects was something no normal minded person could do. As they made their evacuation, the SS screamed and yelled at the poor people saying things like, â€Å"Faster, you swine, you filthy sons of bitches! †(81) The Nazi’s showed little to no sympathy towards the people that were different from them.They felt superior to all and dehumanized those who weren’t. When finally being released from imprisonment, Ellie wanted to see what he had looked like. â€Å"I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse glazed back at me. †(109) The fact that Ellie had not seen himself since he had entered the ghetto is unreal. He barely recognized his standing ‘corpse’. Dehumanization does extremely awful things to people and the Nazis did a textbook job of doing so. Leaving people suffering under the wrath of the horror an d inhumanity with a result of innocent people dying.Man’s inhumanity to man, a world without God, ad night as a symbol of the time of day, symbolizes night in Ellie Wiesel’s novel. In additions to the time of day, night can be seen as an everlasting darkness Elie has to endure while stuck inside the camp with no sign of light or hope in sight. Elie Wiesel shares his story to educate the world of the harsh reality of dehumanization. Sadly this is still active in our world today. They say that knowledge is power; ignorance is bliss, so hopefully Elie’s story will reach the souls of humanity and potentially keep history from repeating itself in the near future.

Animal Testing Should Be Banned - 1094 Words

The most significant finding was the amount of animals that are being tested on every year. There are thousands of animals ranging from farm animals to the most commonly used, guinea pigs that have to suffer through animal testing. Even though animal testing has decreased in some parts of the world there is still a lot to improve on to be cruelty free. The issue of animal testing has been going on for years now and through those years a lot of data has been obtained. A simple way to quantify the results is by the use of charts where it is a lot easier to get a visual of the types of animals that are being tested and the percentage for each one. Before and after comparisons are simple the product is still able to be properly tested for consumer safety with the use of animal testing or the use of an alternative. Which option to use is up to the companies and what they believe will be the safes procedure. The same amount of safety precautions are being met with the use of alternatives, like in vitro. Customers and companies will not have to worry about products being harmful because they will still tested to make sure they are safe. The only difference is that now they won’t have to harm or kill any animals at the cost of having a safe product. Once consumers know that the products are cruelty free they will be more inclined to purchase more hence increasing productivity. For example, companies that do test on animals are losing customers that are against animal cruelty asShow MoreRelatedShould Animal Testing Be Banned?844 Words   |  3 PagesShould animal testing be banned? Nowadays, a lot of animals has been tested on a range of experiments over the world. You could be supporting animal teasing cruelty without knowing it. Have you ever check if there’s animal testing on the cosmetics before you buy it? 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