Archive | September 2020

Maggie Tells the Theme of Miss Marple’s Story

Sep30

Maggie Tells the Theme of Miss Marple’s Story

 

“The danger with such people is that when anything at all extraordinary really does happen to them, nobody believes they are speaking the truth.” (Christie 5).

 

Miss Marple Tells a Story is a story told in Miss Marple’s perspective of solving a case. Miss Marple learns of a recent murder in Crown Hotel where Mr. Rhode’s wife is murdered. She solves the case by asking Mr. Petherick, a shrewd friend of hers, and Mr. Rhode details about the suspects, considers all the possibilities and proves Mr. Rhode innocent by finding the culprit, Mrs. Carruthers. In the story Miss Marple Tells a Story, by Agatha Christie, the author believes that a person who makes their life sound like a fantasy frequently cultivates disbelief from other people. Mr. Rhode never taken any notice of Mrs. Rhode’s distress of the threatening letters: “’Frankly,’ he said, ‘I never believed it. I thought [Mrs. Rhode] had made most of it up.’” (4). Mr. Rhode knows that Mrs. Rhode likes to exaggerate a lot. From what Miss Marple gathered, Mrs. Rhode would describe her life as almost deaths and whimsical tales. So, it was possible that Mr. Rhode wasn’t aware that she could be telling the truth because it was a habit for Mr. Rhode to discount her statements. When Mr. Rhode attempted to tell the police about the threatening letters that Mrs. Rhode received, the police never believed Mr. Rhode. However, further along in the story, the claims of threatening letters were true.  Mrs. Rhode’s impractical and reckless way of living is why Mrs. Carruthers retaliated against her: “Mrs. Rhode, who was a most reckless and dangerous driver, had run over her little girl, and it had driven the poor woman off her head.” (7). Before Mrs. Rhode married Mr. Rhode, she used to drive without the regard of consequences and killed Mrs. Carruthers daughter. To seek revenge, Mrs. Carruthers hid her madness secretly and sent threatening letters which nobody believed that existed. At the end, Mrs. Carruthers killed Mrs. Rhode. Mrs. Carruthers used Mrs. Rhode’s way of romanticizing life as an advantage, because nobody will truly believe Mrs. Rhode. This is why a person who makes their life sound like a fantasy frequently cultivates disbelief from other people, and all the more dangerous when another character has a grudge against this person.

 

The Last Kiss Found Poem

Sep14

In Humanities/Social Studies/Language Art class, we read 3 short stories as a class. The stories were “The Last Kiss” by Ralph Fletcher, “Fish Cheeks” by Amy Tan, and “Thank you, Ma’am” by Langston Hughes. As the assignment, we had to do a found poem, a poem created by taking words or passages from other sources and reframing them as a poem by making changes in spacing and/or lines (and by consequently meaning), or by altering the text by additions of deletions. I chose “The Last Kiss” as my found poem. My poem explains the external conflict of the main character, the author Ralph Fletcher, as a little boy wanting a kiss from his father. However, the little boy is now older and can’t receive a kiss from his father. The conflict is a man vs. nature conflict because the main character is now clashing with how old he is. Him growing up is a natural process, and it conflicts the character himself, thus it is man vs. nature.

 

The poem goes:

My childhood had symmetry

That passed much too quickly

First

Night,

I was stunned

Next night,

I murmured

For clarification of quiet expectancy

With sinking heart

I

Formulate

Loss

This grim truth

Sunk in

I was too old

Not powerful, much more fragile

 

 

The first lines “my childhood had symmetry that passed much too quickly,” explains the theme of cherishing childhood before it is too late. Then the poem explains the two nights of the main character’s reaction getting rejected by his father. He slowly realizes “with a sinking heart,” that he was too old and not feeling “powerful” anymore. The color scheme goes first to dark green, expressing the normality of the routine of getting kissed both by the father and mother. Then the second paragraph turns into dark blue because the main character is sad and stunned that his father didn’t kiss him good night. Then it goes to blue grey, cool grey, and then black, to show the hopelessness of him realizing he will never be getting a kiss from his dad and worries when he won’t get a kiss from his mom.