Award winning Australian author Tim Winton’s book ‘The Turning’ published in 2004, provides an engaging and relative reading experience through a collection of seventeen short stories that follow the lives of the same characters at different critical moments in their lives. Winton utilises a variety of writing techniques most inclusive of key features and his style of writing. His use of character development and descriptive language throughout the chapters help to unravel different overlapping themes, settings and characters to effectively engage a young, teenage audience within each of his short stories. Winton develops clear and connected themes represented in the following story examples of ‘On Her Knees’, ‘Abbreviation’ and ‘Damaged Goods’. …show more content…
In the sixth short story. ‘On Her Knees’, Winton explores the relationship between a mother and son and focuses on the key issue of Sacrifice. The mother has taken a job below her standing to pay off debt from a now distant husband and to allow her son to go to university so they can experience a better life. Winton invites the audience to consider the mother’s sacrifice by utilising the son’s point of view of how he feels about his responsibilities into account of his mother’s new job. The son often helps his mother at her new job and when he isn’t helping he is ‘stewed with guilt’ (pg 101). Consequently, the guilt of his mum’s sacrifice has put an enormous amount of pressure on him, as if he might fail her if he doesn’t proceed to do well at university. Winton’s use of character development to present the theme of sacrifice, invites the audience to consider the value behind the sacrifices we make for the people we love and care for. Unlike this short story, ‘On Her Knees’, ‘Abbreviation’ and ‘Damaged Goods’ can be seen as
His mother treats him like a slave, giving him daily chores and unbelievably ruthless punishments. He has become inhuman to her as she refers to him as “It.” The only hope of survival relies on his dad, in God, or in a miracle. His story promotes the courageous human spirit and the determinate to survive.
The purpose of Big World is to present to his responders a relatable and recognisable character and setting and a familiar situation. Winton’s purpose is to allow his readers to reflect on the choices they made after school and how their lives may have been different had they been more active in exploring their hopes and dreams.
In “The Author to Her Book,” Bradstreet is inundated in indecision and internal struggles over the virtues and shortfalls of her abilities and the book that she produced. As human beings we associate and sympathize with each other through similar experiences. It is difficult to sympathize with someone when you don’t know where they are coming from and don’t know what they are dealing with. Similar experiences and common bonds are what allow us to extend our sincere appreciation and understanding for another human being’s situation. In this poem an elaborate struggle between pride and shame manifests itself through an extended metaphor in which she equates her book to her own child.
Sullivan’s essay includes many rhetorical devices; the first one that stands out is the anecdote device because of the experience that she went through. She uses her personal life as a short story to catch the reader’s attention. This is an example of a great device that can be used for all essays, because every paper needs a “hook” that will keep the reader interested from the moment they start reading. Although, sometimes it is difficult for dual credit students to find something that can catch a reader’s attention, this essay can make it less difficult to understand. Another thing that can help the students is the analyzation in Sullivan’s
Smith-Yackel’s essay illustrates the grieving process while on a phone call with the Social Security Office to collect potential benefits from her mother's passing. While placed on hold, she reflects the life her mother had lived. During this period of reflection, this is when Smith-Yackel exemplifies the use of imagery within a narrative. She creates vivid images about the hardships her mother once faced. For instance, when her mother and father first got married, they began farming. Farming created a wide variety of new tasks, “She carried water nearly a quarter of a mile from the well to fill her wash boilers in order to do her laundry on a scrub board” (Smith-Yackel 115). Her mother had to not only become physically fit but mentally fit in order to take on the challenges their farm created. Her mother was relentless in making sure her children were well taken care of. In another section of the narrative, imagery is used once again to show the sacrifices her mother made. Smith-Yackel states, “In the winter, she sewed night after night, endlessly, begging cast-off clothing from relatives, ripping apart coats, dresses, blouses, and trousers to remake them to fit her four daughters son” (Smith-Yackel 116). On top of all the other chores their mother did during the day, she also worked through the night to ensure her family’s comfort. Also, another rhetorical strategy within
The first passage reveals the parallel suffering occurring in the lives of different members of the family, which emphasizes the echoes between the sufferings of the father and the narrator. The narrator’s father’s despair over having watched
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” one of O’Connor’s best works, describes a family on a trip to Florida and their encounter with an escaped prisoner, The Misfit. Although “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is an early work in O’Connor’s career, it contains many of the elements which are used in the majority of her short stories. The grandmother, a selfish and deceitful woman, is a recipient of a moment of grace, despite her many flaws and sins. A moment of grace is a revelation of truth. When the grandmother calls The Misfit her child and reaches out to touch him, the grandmother has a moment of grace that enabled her to see The Misfit as a suffering human being who she is obligated to love. The grandmother realizes that nothing will stop The Misfit from killing her but she reaches out to him despite this. The Misfit rejects her love and kills her anyway. This moment of grace is very important
“Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice”, focuses on the relationship between the protagonist, who is referred to as ‘Child’, and his father, referred to as ‘Ba’. The opening story follows the protagonist as he is struggling to overcome writers block, whilst dealing with his estranged Vietnamese father who is visiting. A number of flashbacks are used as a literary device to divulge into the protagonists past with his father as well as the fathers past. This reveals, not only an abusive past with his father, but also his father’s memories of the Vietnam war. It becomes clear that the son makes excuses for his father, with his girlfriend Linda also noting this, “I think you’re making excuses for him…You’re romanticising his past to make sense of the things you said he did to you” (pp.20). The protagonist reflects this himself, making the excuse that “he was a soldier” (pp.13), and that is why his father treated him as he did. The protagonist, despite once being able to admit to Linda that his father abused him, can no longer admit this, as his relationship with his father grows, and it can be argued that he is willing to overlook his past in an attempt to reconcile with his father. “It was too much these words, and what connected to them” (pp.13).
A little boy scavenges in a dumpster in an alley, desperate for food. Separated from his family, he is lost on the streets of Calcutta. After weeks of barely surviving on the treacherous streets, he is taken to an adoption agency and adopted by an Australian couple. Although it seems like fiction, it is fact. This remarkable story is Saroo Brierley’s, and his memoir A Long Way Home, tells this miraculous story of his childhood and how he came to find his birth family. Throughout the memoir, Brierley weaves a tale of his hardships and developing his identity. In his memoir A Long Way Home, Saroo Brierley uses the literary devices of pacing, imagery, and external conflict to illustrate how the hardships one must endure shape one’s identity,
‘The Turning’ by Australian author Tim Winton is a collection of seventeen short stories. All stories are connected and he does this in a way so that no matter what order you read the stories in they will all make sense in the end. The way Winton has linked the stories together is he has included a character that the audience all-ready knows in more than one story, to widen the range of characters e.g. the first story ‘Big World’ mentions a character, “Vic Lang, the coppers kid” that will later show up in numerus other stories. He also connects the book by having the main setting as the town a majority of characters live in, Angelus, which then brings a familiar location to the reader. Winton’s stories share the theme or morale’s which group together and make sense when the audience reads the whole book. Three stories that have a strong theme are Big world, Abbreviation, and On her knees. The themes represented in the book are self-discovery, coming of age, overcoming the odds, and the theme of sticking with Family manages to squeeze in as well.
While James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” depicts the connection between two brothers, Tillie Olsen’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing” represents the bond between a mother and her daughter. Both Baldwin and Olsen focus on family relationships and how emotional support vs neglect have an effect on family members. Also, each author conveys a message of finding self-identity even amidst adversity, while including the symbolism of everyday objects. Furthermore, Baldwin compares light and darkness throughout his story, and Olsen has the mother scrutinize her actions in an interior monologue.
Masculinity, the attributes applied to the male gender, has continuously manifested itself within the matrices of literature, with many writers using narrative fiction as a vehicle to explore ideas of the historical underpinnings of manhood, and more generally, alternative constructions of the male ontology and modality. Transcendental notions of masculinity have inevitably constrained the contemporary man within set ideologies and values — those which often enforce unrealistic and toxic expectations. This conundrum is especially relevant in Australian society given the stereotypical and diffused archetype of the ‘Aussie Man’; which characteristics such as apathy, nobility and strength forming the bedrock of the national identity. Tim Winton, a prominent Australian author, has recognised and highlighted this issue in his collection of short stories The Turning, effectively challenging timeless stereotypes and portraying distinctive
Tim Winton’s novel “the turning” has 17 short stories throughout it. Some of these stories connect through the character and theme in many ways. Two of Winton’s stories that connect well through character and theme are ‘long clear view’ and ‘damaged goods’. This text will be analysing these two short stories and showing how they connect by finding out what characters are the same or similar and how the themes connect.
By applying narration in her essay, she encourages the audience to reconsider what compassion means to them. Ascher outlines the woman as full of fear when she states, “The mother grows impatient and pushes he stroller before her . . . Finally, a black had rises and closes around green” As the homeless man takes the money from the woman, a beacon of relief is embraced within’ her, she was no longer frightened.
In western Australian author Tim Winton’s book, The Turning, the large collection of short stories are aimed towards teenagers and other people who have been teenagers. This is so, because each story uses a similar theme to do with finishing high school, how people decide what they want to do for the rest of their lives and the character’s journeys along the way.