Here we see Richard is learning the importance of priorities. He is learning what it means to sacrifice. These choices, however, help him reach an ideal he has in his mind of who he wants to be. He wants to understand things because he feels he has something worth saying. At the end of the day, Richard wants to write. To write anything meaningful, one must know his world

people of different social classes are viewed in each novel, how they treat one another, what assumptions they make about their worth, how they view themselves, and how Dickens's view changed between one novel and the other Both stories, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, are one of escape for their characters. For Oliver, it is escape form his starvation and bondage. For Pip is it escape from his poverty and

Slave Narrative and Black Autobiography - Richard Wright's "Black Boy" and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography The slave narrative maintains a unique station in modern literature. Unlike any other body of literature, it provides us with a first-hand account of institutional racially-motivated human bondage in an ostensibly democratic society. As a reflection on the author, these narratives were the first expression of humanity by a group of people in a society where

This stream-of-consciousness writing is in a secret journal, for the writer will get into trouble if what she writes is found by Sister Theo, who "checks our letters home. We're not allowed to say anything about the school" (Sterling 12). If the journal is discovered, the girl may suffer abuse at the hands of the teachers. Writing is an act of defiance that the girl sees to be worth

representation of Death and the impermanence in the short story "A Father's Story" by Andre Dubus, and the poem "Because I could not stop for Death" by Emily Dickinson. These two works were chosen because both speak of Death and impermanence, yet these authors employ different literary forms, characters, settings and plots. "A Father's Story" follows the format of a short story, being prose written in concise paragraphs with

Tom Sawyer, the 'good' rapscallion who only plays at the dark life of a wild boy torments Jim before revealing the fact that Jim is free. Tom does not understand the true meaning of freedom, and so he engages in a kind of sick adolescent joke when Jim is being held captive by Tom's relatives the Phelps. Over and over again the novel mocks hypocrisy and ignorance: for example, the