“I am the executioner. When the crime is committed and the Lord God does not take vengeance nor does the exalted State move to declare and then to punish, I say when these bitter events happen, then comes the time for the executioner to declare himself or herself as the case may be. I have waited long enough. So the time has come, and I declare myself the executioner. The three criminals are hereby sentenced to death. By fire. By earth. By water.”
This is the direct and powerful quote taken from the novel, The Executioner. It explains the basic plot of the story of the one word that every man fears: Revenge. The Executioner was written by the Canadian born author, Jay Bennett. The strengths and weaknesses of this report will be discussed in detail, and the plot of this murder, suspense, and horror story are revealed. The plot will be discussed, for easier comprehension of the story.
This plot begins when Bruce , an 18 year old high school boy was at a
bar with his best friend Raymond, and a few other friends named Ed, and
Elaine. Unfortunately, Bruce got intoxicated, but still decided to drive
the others home from the bar. On the way home, Bruce began arguing with
Ray, (the only sober one), and the car was steered of the road into a tree.
Raymond was killed by the accident. However, everyone thought that Bruce
was not intoxcated at the time, and the car just accidentally swerved off
to the side.
Throughout the next chapters, Bruce keeps facing the guilt of killing
Ray, and tries to admit to everyone that he did. No one believes him
though, and think’s he’s just making up the story to cover the guilt up.
This carrries on for a while, and Bruce feels even more depressed. A few
days later, a mysterious man, (the executioner) comes into the bank, and
takes out a letter (The one at the introduction of the review) and says,
“The first shall die by fire.”
The next thing the story shows is a scene in a building, where Ed and
Bruce are walking. All of a sudden, Ed is trapped in a room, which is set
Free Essays: Adams’ The Education
The Education
The typist who appears next in the passage is a worker named metonymically for the machine she tends, so merged with it, in fact, that she is called a “typist” even at home. In The Education, Henry Adams proclaims his astonishment at the denizens of the new American cities: “new types, — or type-writers, — telephone and telegraph-girls, shop-clerks, factory hands, running into millions on millions …. ” Eliot’s point here seems very close to Adams’s. Eliot’s woman is also a “type,” identified with her type-writer so thoroughly she becomes it. She is a machine, acting as she does with “automatic hand.” The typist is horrifying both because she is reduced by the conditions of labor to a mere part and because she is infinitely multiple. In fact, her very status as a “type” is dependent on a prior reduction from whole to part. She can become one member of Adams’s faceless crowd only by being first reduced to a “hand.”
The typist is the very type of metonymy, of the social system that accumulates its members by mere aggregation. Yet this “type” is linked syntactically to Tiresias as well. In fact, the sentence surrenders its nominal subject, Tiresias, in favor of her. The evening hour “strives / Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, / The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights / Her stove, and lays out food in tins.” The typist shifts in mid-line from object to subject, from passive to active. Does the evening hour clear her breakfast, or should the reader search even farther back for an appropriate subject, to Tiresias himself. Though this would hardly clarify the syntax, Tiresias could function logically as both subject and object, seen and seer, because, as the notes tell us, he is the typist: “All the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias.” The confused syntax represents this process of identification, erasing ordinary boundaries between active and passive, subject and object.
On what basis can the typist merge with all other men and women to become part of Tiresias? In other words, what is the figurative relationship between the whole he represents and the part acted by the typist? The process of figurative identification seems similar to that in “Prufrock,” where women are also represented as mere “arms” and where all women are also one woman.