Therefore, the theme in "The Piano Lesson" shows the complexity of African-American attitudes toward the past and black heritage compared to plans for the future. ... The setting of this drama took place in the 1940s in the home of Doaker Charles, Berniece's and Boy Willie's uncle. ... "The Piano Lesson" had such writing elements as symbols. For instance, throughout the whole play, the piano played an important and central symbol. ... Some family members, especially Boy Willie, challenged the use of the ghost returning to haunt the family. ...

• Word Count: 1379
• Approx Pages: 6

When he masturbates, he is told it is ok, when she, at six, is caught under the bed with one of her boy friends, the column in the paper says it is just a stage. ... Rock and Roll was an outlet, a symbol of the change. Alongside the starched, flattened, white-boy blues came the first inklings of racial integration. The same year Rebel without a Cause came out, Rosa Parks was dragged from the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama and three black students were let into UC Chapel Hill, by the rulings of a federal court judge, by nineteen fifty six, the pop song "My Prayer" sung by the black ba...

• Word Count: 1332
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

His father then brought the boy to Louisiana. ... Madame is surprised at how the child, a boy, has grown. ... A quadroon boy is fanning him. ... She dismisses the boy. ... Women are subordinate to men, he believes, and persons with a black in their family tree are little more than subhuman. ...

• Word Count: 2905
• Approx Pages: 12
• Grade Level: High School

Faulkner places heavy emphasis on the sensational details that the boy feels. ... His immediate reaction to the sight of the house is to compare it to a symbol of justice, the courthouse. ... He forces his boy to submit to the pull of blood by making him his accomplice. ... The terrifying images of rigidity and blackness are gone. The boy listens to his father telling a story and we see him divide the food with his two sons. ...

• Word Count: 1422
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

Throughout the book, Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison, the image of flight is a major symbol. ... Before his death, he was one of the Seven Days, the small group of men devoted to keeping the balance of blacks and whites equal, which is one of the causes of his desire for an escape from life. As he says in his note, he had become one of the Seven Days for love of black people, not for any hate of whites. While the first image does not seem consistent with the images following it, this first use of flight opens the rest of the story to the symbol. ... Instead, the boy had been dropped at a hou...

• Word Count: 1472
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

Symbols have more than one meaning than what appears to be the what is going on.. Symbols in this story are contradictory. ... This represented how everyone can look at him and tell that he is a black person and that is all they will see. The message read, "Keep This Nigger Boy Running" (324). This means that his whole life people would look at him as a black person. ...

• Word Count: 1010
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: High School

I think O"Connor uses Joy-Hulga's heart trouble and wooden leg as a symbol. ... For example, she still thinks of black people as slave, so he goes and sits next to them on the bus. ... When the mother offered a little black boy a penny the mother of the boy took offence and shoved Julian's mother to the ground. ...

• Word Count: 1004
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: High School

The opening scenes of the film Billy Elliot, directed by Stephen Daldry, helped introduce me to one of the main themes of the movie; that the realization of one boy's dream will be barred by three different hurdles on the way to achieving his goals. ... This is shown through the symbol of Billy's boxing gloves, which belonged to his grandfather. ... The camera tracks him as he dances around the ring, and the screen cuts to black when he is knocked out with one punch. ... In this world of miners who do physical, rough work, a boy doing ballet is a ridiculous idea. ...

• Word Count: 1374
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

At the conclusion of the novel, Luster gives Benjy a narcissus, a traditional symbol of Christ in order to quieten him. ... Benjy is a constant reminder and symbol for his mother of their fallen family, a once-loved last son turned into a measure by which the outside world can see the family's doom. ... Benjy spends his days being attended to by Dilsey, the Compson family's black maid and her son, Luster. ... Rather it is the act of a boy so in love with his sister and so obsessed with maintaining the closeness of their relationship that he would rather be condemned by the town and ...

• Word Count: 2419
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" is pregnant with religious symbols and metaphors, and fearing that leaving out such violence to protect the squeamish would alter the message of grace and redemption that she was trying to convey, she opted to gradually set the reader up for it by placing clues of the family's demise throughout the work. ... The grandmother, Bailey, his wife, June Star (the little girl), John Wesley (the little boy), and the baby make up five or six people, depending on how you view the baby. ... At the very instant one learns of the car headed toward the family, "a big blac...

• Word Count: 2114
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: High School

" As Loretta looks at Johnny's plane on the tarmac through the airport window, an old gray haired woman dressed in black tells Loretta she put a curse on Johnny's plane. ... The next morning Loretta is walking home obviously in love in the meantime Johnny has returned from Sicily, his mother did not give her blessing and Johnny, a mama's boy, will ask for his engagement ring back. ...

• Word Count: 2080
• Approx Pages: 8
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

What is the American family? This question was answered by John de Crevecoeur, in "what is the American?" (1782), when he said: "I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have four wives of different nations."1 In fact, Crevecoeur summarized the history of the American family, in particular, and the American man, in general. There are many kinds of family systems in the world; the English family is but one of them. ...

• Word Count: 9352
• Approx Pages: 37
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School