Author: HannahG

Everyone gets nervous when met with an important event. In the story “The Moustache” by Robert Cormier, when Mike is going to visit his grandmother who is currently sick in a hospital, he is first nervous that she won’t recognize him. He has heard from his mother that she sometimes forgets who people are.

During his talk with his grandmother, he is relieved that she recognizes him. However, more worries quickly arise when she then mistakes him for her late husband. She begs him to forgive her and that makes Mike start thinking if everyone has something to forgive someone else for.

Mike is nervous about this meeting so when things start going downhill instead of focusing on his grandmother, his mind goes to the worries that could happen or could not happen. Therefore, after he leaves the hospital, he turns the radio up and speeds across the road. He does this because he is trying to escape from his thoughts.

Naturally, Mike should be nervous when meeting his sick grandmother who might have forgotten who he was. He should still try to focus on more positive things than the negative possibilities. At the end of the story when he looks at his parents, he becomes unsure of what people are carrying, guilt or love? Instead of worrying about bad things like guilt, embrace more positive things like love.

In the story Uncle Willy by William Faulkner, Uncle Willy is a man in the town of Jefferson. People gossip about him behind his back and they think he is crazy. He has a drug addiction that everybody knows about. Uncle Willy gets sick and disappears with Job, another subject of the town’s gossip. When he comes back, he dies.

Do I blame him for this? Maybe not because it can’t be comfortable to be made fun of and be spoken about behind their backs. But I think that he should have at least tried to reach out to people, show them another side of him, and maybe they would start to accept that. There are already people that care about Uncle Willy so if they can, then others can too.

Uncle Willy is trying to escape the society of Jefferson by disappearing and later dying. What he probably doesn’t realize is that there are still people that care about him. In the end, Uncle Willy dies after quite an adventure with the people of Jefferson.

If you could, would you go back in time? In the story “Sound of Thunder,” people actually have a chance to do it. What happens back in time could drastically change the future though.

There is a group of men going back in time to kill a dinosaur. However, they cannot ruin anything else or the future could change dramatically. In the group, there is a man called Eckels who when he sees the dinosaur, wants to return to real time. He strays off the path which makes Travis, another man of the group, very angry. When they get back, Eckels realizes that he stepped on a butterfly when in the past. Now, the alphabet has changed, the Earth’s atmosphere has changed, and most importantly, the presidential election’s results have changed.

The lesson is that going back in time has its risks. Even stepping on a simple, small butterfly can make something so big like an election change. In this case, Eckels has to carry the burden and is killed for his actions. Should he have been more careful? Yes he should have. If he did, no harm would have been done. Should he have been killed? Possibly not because he is allowed to back out of a mission and he can make his own choices. Even though he should be punished for doing something so big, he shouldn’t just be killed.

Although going back in time could sound exciting and appealing, there are risks that could be possibly fatal. Sometimes, nothing will happen and sometimes everything will be affected. Eckels just had to learn this the hard way.

In the story Hearts and Hands by, Easton is getting arrested for counterfeiting and he is handcuffed to the marshal when he sees Ms. Fairchild. The marshal tells Ms. Fairchild that Easton is the marshal and not him. She believes him and they leave soon.

Easton is a good liar and is able to trick Ms. Fairchild (along with the marshal’s help). He probably lied because he doesn’t want her to think that he is a bad person or that he is a liar. If she finds out that he lied and that he was actually the one going to prison, Ms. Fairchild would think that he is untrustworthy and Easton would be embarrassed and would have lost her respect.

The marshal is very kind and understands how Easton might be feeling. He doesn’t want to embarrass him in front of someone he knows. He makes her think that he committed the crime because he doesn’t have anything to lose but Easton does.

Ms. Fairchild is very naive and gullible. She doesn’t notice that Easton’s right hand is cuffed nor does she really seem bothered by the fact that “his butterfly days are over and that he can’t travel anymore.”

Although Easton had tricked her, he and the marshal still go to the smoke shop because actually, the two people watching them had already noticed what was actually going on. In the end, no harm was done unless in the future Ms. Fairchild found out and happened to meet Easton again.

A long time ago, in a city rules by a barbaric king, there was a princess. In the kingdom, when someone goes to trial, they are presented two doors, one with a tiger, and one with a lady. Depending on which door the accused chooses, it determines if he is guilty or not. If it is the tiger, he will be killed. If it is the lady, the man will marry her as a reward.

The princess had fallen in love and everything was going fine. However, the king found out about the affair and he made the man go to trial. The princess managed to find out which door had which person/animal and the man was depending on her to tell him.

The princess also knew the woman behind the safe door. She knew that she liked the man and would happily marry him if he chose the right door.

The princess needs to think if she loves the man enough to save him or if she will get so jealous that she should lead him to his doom. She probably thinks that if the man opens the door with the woman, she will not be able to handle it and will be sad forever. However, if she leads the man to the door with the tiger, she will never see him again and she will feel guilty.

In the end, she points to the door on the right. The author tells us to think about what she would have chosen: for her lover to die or to be married with another woman. I think that she would choose the door with the tiger. The author already tells us that she and her father are semi-barbaric. She will MOST LIKELY be selfish in this case rather than to be jealous and miserable. We do not know what she chose to lead the man to but this is what I think that she is thinking.

Emily is a Negro woman who people like to gossip about. She does many things that are out of usual like not paying taxes, furiously denying that her father is dead even though he clearly is, and more.

When the officials tell Emily to pay the taxes, she ignores all the letters that were sent to her. When she finally replied, she said that she doesn’t have to pay the taxes because one of her ancestors contributed and that makes her an exception.

Then, when her father died, for days she would insist that he was still alive. At the end of the story, the curious villagers looked in her room and found out that she had been sleeping with his corpse.

When she was with Homer, people thought that she was too good for him. Emily then poisoned him with rat poison.

The villager’s overall view of her is that she thinks she is better than everyone else and that she is superior to the normal people. When her father dies and she kills Homer, the villagers think, “Finally she can live like a normal person now.”

Emily is anything but a normal person and the story explains her life before her death.

The author of the story says that many people don’t have enough food. He then goes to propose an idea that is morally incorrect, very hypocritical, and very illogical.

He proposes that to cure the mass hunger, people should eat the infants. Infants are another mouth to feed and another body to clothe. He says that it is better to eat them instead so it can benefit the adults.

This is incorrect just because it is wrong for humans to eat other humans. They are their own kind and if they eat each other, soon they will be extinct. This is hypocritical because if the author himself was an infant, he definitely would not have proposed this idea. He only suggested it because it would benefit him. This is illogical simply because if nobody is willing to follow through with this idea, it will not happen.

Of course, the author is being sarcastic sometimes during the story. However, the idea of eating other humans that are innocent and are newly born is just not the way to cure hunger.

Maggie and Momma have a different personality from Dee. Dee is very self-centered whereas Maggie and Momma have a different way of thinking.

Dee is different from Maggie and Momma in many ways. She is prettier looking and is used to getting what she wants. She is ashamed of her family and her heritage and therefore changed many things about her life like her name and her hair. Dee also thinks she is better than Maggie and Momma because they live in poverty and aren’t as pretty. Dee acts like a “bully” to Maggie which normally, Maggie will give in to Dee.

Maggie and Dee also have a different view on the quilts. Dee wants to hang them as decoration while Maggie wants to treat them like actual quilts. Dee complains about this when Momma wants to give them to Maggie. Momma still stands up for Maggie and because of this, the latter is very happy at the end of the story because for once, she could do what she actually wanted to do and didn’t have to cower to Dee.

Education also plays a role in this story because Dee went to school and Maggie and Momma didn’t. Because she went to school, Dee thinks that she is better than Maggie and Momma and deserves more than them. Education separates Dee from Maggie and Momma.

Because of education, looks, and her mindset, Dee is different from Maggie and Momma who are less self centered. They also care about different things, Dee cares about appearances while Maggie and Momma don’t really care about how they look.

Victor is a boy in seventh grade who likes a girl named Teresa. He is determined that this year will be the year that he will be brave enough to talk to Teresa.

He goes to math class but because he is probably too nervous, Teresa says hi and he just says hi back. He regrets not saying something nicer to her so he seeks her out during lunch. When he sees her, instead of actually talking to her and trying to “win her heart,” he just daydreams about her until the bell rings and she smiles at him. During French class, Victor pretends to know French to impress Teresa. This actually backfires on him because when the teacher asks him to speak some French, he doesn’t know any. He is lucky that the teacher didn’t call him out on it and that Teresa fell for his bluff and asked him to teach her French. He still shouldn’t have lied but at least this means that he can spend time with Teresa. However, if Teresa found out he lied, she would think that Victor was an untrustworthy person and always lies. To make sure that Teresa doesn’t find out, Victor now dug himself in a deeper hole and has to learn French faster.

To impress Teresa, Victor added to his seventh grade workload and could have potentially embarrassed himself. Some of the choices that Victor made for love are not very rational.

In the story “Rules of the Game,” Waverly lives with her two brothers. After one of her brothers brings home a chess set, Waverly starts learning how to play.

Waverly gets better and better at playing chess, but whenever she wins, her mother says that it is just luck. This is different from some parents because normally a parent would want to encourage their child. It almost seems like Waverly’s mom doesn’t want to give Waverly credit. This would make sense because their relationship is not the best. Waverly’s mother tries to boss Waverly around and shows her off to everyone. When Waverly learned to play chess, she found that she had control over every single piece, including the king and the queen. At the end of the story, Waverly ends up standing up to her mother and referring to her as a chess piece.

Chess is a unique game. It requires more of thinking and planning rather than strength. It is what Waverly’s mother refers to as “sometimes the strongest wind is invincible.” Sometimes if you are quiet but plan ahead you can get farther in life than those who don’t.

The author uses a lot of symbolism in the story using the game chess. It represents those who have “invisible strength.”