Connection to Beginning of Great Expectations to Dickens's life

During the 1850's was the time that Great Expectations was first published. During that time, Dickens lost both his father and a daughter within two weeks of each other. It is no surprise then that the novel should start out in a graveyard with an orphan by the name of Pip sitting on his parents' tombstone. Dickens was known to get deeply involved with his characters to the point where he would get on top of his furniture and shout the lines of a character in the character's voice. What really draws readers however is the fact that all of Dickens's characters talk with the colloquialisms of that social class and era so that anyone could connect to the story. Pip and the convict he encounters don't talk in the high and mighty imitations of a wealthy writer attempting to guess how the lower classes talked, but rather the true vernacular of the time because Dickens himself lead his childhood in extreme poverty.

AP Literary Terms List

AP LITERARY TERMS -

1st Semester Vocabulary Lists

Fall Vocabulary All Lists -

Big Question Introduction

Big Question Intro -

Brave New World Literature Analysis

Brave New World Literature Analysis -

Book Title: Great Expectations

Great Expectations is nothing short of its name. The book is about a poor boy named Pip who being raised by his sister and her husband. He falls in love with a girl of the upper class and hopes to become a gentleman so he can wed her. The only thing the book title does not imply is how these expectations are realized and then tragically lost.

Samurai Song by Robert Pinsky

When I had no roof I made

Audacity my roof. When I had

No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.

When I had no ears I thought.

When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made

Care my father. When I had

No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made

Quiet my friend. When I had no

Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made

My voice my temple. I have

No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune

Is my means. When I have

Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment

Is my strategy. When I had

No lover I courted my sleep.

I like this poem because it truly shows the bare minimum that one truly needs to survive and great control over ones desires and wants. It truly reflects the most powerful and potentially dangerous people in the world which are those people who know their mind and body, know how to use and control it.

Open Question Essay

Frankenstein’s Monster is considered to be one of archetypes for villainy and evil. With his grotesque appearance and his desire to kill off everyone that Dr. Frankenstein holds dear there seems no saving grace to his character. What of the monster itself? Mary Shelley wrote the monster to have feelings, human intellect and a sense of morality. The monster could be a victim of a cruel fate to some even though his hatred runs deep. So how can any reader even begin to like or respect this monster of foul deeds?

            In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster is brought into being by Dr. Victor Frankenstein of which the creature was named after. This creature soon vanished for a couple months soon after Victor fled his lab in horror only to re-appear later demanding that Dr. Frankenstein create a female being for him or else he would kill all he loved. When Dr. Frankenstein refused, the monster started to throttle all his loved ones starting with his newly wed wife. Slowly the monster picked off every conceivable member of his family and all of his friends until Victor Frankenstein was only a bitter and vengeful husk of what he once was. Only when Victor was crushed by his sorrow and hate and thus died did the monster abate his killing spree.

           Despite the monster having to kill everyone, the monster could have lead a very different and less bloody life. While Dr. Frankenstein fled from the lab, the monster was up to his own devices for a couple of months in the book. In that time he learned who and what he was and tried to befriend some local villagers to take him in. Everywhere he went people were terrified and hated him because of his looks. Only a blind old grandfather showed him the slightest form of compassion. The monster is human in all ways but physically and so wants to be accepted and cared for just like other living sentient being. Later he turns to Dr. Frankenstein in hopes that if he cannot be accepted by mankind that he would be accepted by another of his. This is where he makes his earlier demand. He is so desperate for kindness and so jaded by outright rage against him that he hopes that his creator of all people could understand the value of love when ones own love is threatened or non-existent. It does seem a little over the top in how he goes killing everyone though; but in the end of the book, he tells the person at Victor’s deathbed that he is going to the north to destroy the creation that Victor made so that no man will ever be able to perform such an atrocity again and the secret of life would be lost again.

            Yes, the monster is truly a villain to be remembered. If however anyone would have shown him the least bit of kindness, this so called monster’s actions would have been quite human. Who knows? Maybe even a human hated since birth could do the crimes the monster committed and therefore make the monster seem not so monstrous after all.

The Big Question Abstract

Throughout the ages people have always been lost and confused with life and unable to find any sort of lasting internal peace and tranquility. Many people turned to religion and other forms of faith that preached about the unknown to seek solitude and find that peace within themselves while others in more recent times have contented themselves with the fact that life is meaningless and that anything they say and do essentially will not matter. Yet there are scientists in the fields of psychology and neurology that explores the brain and its natural processes in hopes to find the chemical produced that creates this feeling of almost divine peace. My purpose in studying the state of mind called enlightenment is to understand how people can reach the conditions under which they achieve a state of mind that enables them to perform at high levels in circumstances others might consider stressful and what those key conditions are to begin with. I intend to do my research mainly based in the scientific fields of psychology and brain study as well as looking into the religious/faith aspect of it so that I may get the whole picture about this elusive state of mind. In addition to studying in these branches, I will be using some personal experience from myself and some of my peers to give a little bit of personal touch to this assignment.