In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Celie has many misconceptions of herself and her world. Due to her upbringing of pain and mistreatment, and her ignorance of a better world, Celie’s image of herself and her own potential is very different from reality. The Color Purple, above all else, is the story of Celie’s growth and self-discovery, which she achieves through her own commitment to herself and through the help of Nettie and Shug.
Celie sees herself as ugly and stupid because she was told this by her father and her husband. In her young life, the only person who took the time to care for and encourage Celie was her younger sister Nettie. She took the time to teach Celie from her own schoolwork, after Celie had to leave school because her father had raped her and gotten her pregnant. As Celie says of her home education, as inadequate as it may have been, ” Us both be hitting Nettie’s schoolbooks pretty hard, cause us know we got to be smart to git away. I know I’m not as smart or as pre…
Essay on Tom in The Glass Menagerie
The Character of Tom in The Glass Menagerie
Tom Wingfield has a dual role in The Glass Menagerie. The first Tom is the narrator, who introduces his second self, the character. In his fifth soliloquy, Tom the narrator indicates that time has detached him from the drama, “for time is the longest distance between two places” (Williams 1568). In the closing soliloquy Tom recounts how he lives and re-lives the story in his memory, though he is detached from the participants in the original affair. Like his father, “a telephone man who fell in love with long distances,” (Williams 1523), Tom has fallen in love with the long distance that is time.
Tom is a sensitive, artistic man who is forced by circumstances into a phenomenological situation. He is compelled to live and re-live the situation of the play, in which he sought for and found what he believed to be freedom. Although he escapes the situation, he does not find freedom; his consciousness forces him to dwell upon the situation until he finds meaning in it. Because Mr. Wingfield, Laura, Amanda, and Jim are parts of …