In James Joyce's "Araby," why are some characters unnamed?

The most obvious character who is not named in James Joyce's "Araby" is Mangan's sister. Throughout the story, she is known as "Mangan's sister," not as a named character despite the fact that the entire story is really about the unnamed narrator conducting a quest to win her affection. The narrator knows her name, as he admits that "her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood" and "[h]er name sprang to my lips at moment in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand."

So what causes him to not name her in the story? The simple answer is anger. At the end of "Araby," the adult narrator, who is recounting this story from a seminal moment in his childhood, explains he felt bamboozled by Mangan's sister. In his quest to buy her something from the Araby marketplace, he comes to realize she just asked him to buy her something because she was playing with him. He mentions this idea a few times in the story ("my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires").

At the end of the story, the narrator realizes he is not special in the eyes of Mangan's sister; rather, he's just another guy who was played by a woman. This epiphany occurs when he sees a young lady at one of the stands in the bazaar flirting with two British men. After this event, the narrator leaves the bazaar dejected, saying, "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."

What is a character summary of Mullet Fingers from Hoot by Carl Hiaasen?

Here is some information about Mullet Fingers--which will contain spoilers about the end of the story. A runaway who lives in the woods and the junkyard, he is Beatrice Leep's step-brother, and his real name is Napoleon Bridger, but readers don't find that out until the last chapter. As a younger child, he wanted to spend all his time outdoors. When his mother, Lonna, married Beatrice's father, she nagged at Napoleon constantly and eventually sent him away to boarding school when Napoleon brought a baby raccoon into the house. Napoleon kept running away from the schools, and the last time he ran away, Lonna didn't even bother to tell her husband, report it to the police, or try to find her son. Mullet Fingers received his nickname because he is able to catch swimming mullet fish in his bare hands.

Mullet Fingers is passionate about nature and wildlife, which is why he tries to interfere with the pancake house being constructed on the site where the burrowing owls live. In the end, he is even willing to risk revealing his own identity and whereabouts to stop the company from burying the owls. At the end of the novel, he goes back to live with Lonna, who pretends for a time to want him, but he runs away. She falsely accuses him of stealing, and he gets sent to juvenile detention, from which he escapes using Dana Matherson as a decoy. In the Epilogue, he lets Roy know he's still in the area, perhaps living in the woods again, but doesn't let Roy see him.

Can you help me write 10 questions about the Boxer Rebellion?

Historians often concern themselves with what are called the "five w's" of journalism"—who, what, when, where, and why. If you can ask these five questions about the Boxer Rebellion—who were the Boxers, when did the rebellion take place, where did the rebellion take place, why did the rebellion take place—that should be a nice start to your assignment.  

Since that's only four questions, you need to ask six more in order to complete your assignment. Historians often look at how a certain act of history is perceived by those who lived through it—this will also give you an incentive to find primary source materials, such as newspaper clippings from the time period. Look at how the Rebellion and the military response to it was perceived by both China and one Western power, the United States.  

You could also look at how both the Boxers justified their actions and how the US-led coalition justified their reaction—this could be your next two questions.  

Finally, for the most important question of all—look at the impact of the Boxer Rebellion. The rebellion started when young Chinese men, afraid of losing their culture to European powers gaining spheres of influence which were colonies in everything but name only, started killing Westerners. The US intervened to protect foreign consulates, and the US State Department created the Open Door Policy, which gave all nations a free hand to trade in China and protected Chinese sovereignty. Ask the question, "What makes the Boxer Rebellion important today?" Its diplomatic ramifications affected WWII, which is why the Japanese army committed a war crime by invading China.  

Is irony ever used to comic effect in The Great Gatsby?

The Great Gatsby doesn't strike this reader as particularly comical, but I can think of one part where Nick's ironic commentary on Myrtle Wilson might produce some comedy.  Myrtle, Tom's mistress, is of a much lower class than either Tom or Nick.  She lives in the valley of ashes (rather than either of the "Eggs") with her mechanic husband, George.  One would, therefore, likely not expect her to behave in a snotty way -- as we might expect of Tom or Daisy.  We would more likely expect Myrtle to behave humbly, as a person who is used to less and receiving more might. 

However, once she is ensconced in her apartment with Tom and Nick, Myrtle changes her dress, and "With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change."  She begins to behave with "impressive hauteur.  Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air."  Such an image, of Myrtle swelling like a balloon in an ever-shrinking room, spinning around and around noisily as she tries to impress everyone around her, is a pretty comical one, and it is ironic because her behavior is so different from what we would expect of a woman in her position.

Why do you think that in "Dusk," the young man made up his story on the spur of the moment at the park?

If you want to take the position that the young stranger who sat down beside Norman Gortsby had just made up his hard-luck story on the spur of the moment, there are several clues you can offer. For one thing, there is the soap. If he had rehearsed his story and prepared himself to tell it to a likely- looking stranger, it should have occurred to him that he ought to invest a little money in a cake of soap just in case he was asked to produce it. Norman easily catches him off guard and embarrasses him when he asks about the soap which the young stranger had supposedly just gone out to buy. Then there is the young con-man's awkward and guilty behavior when he can't produce the vital evidence.

"To lose an hotel and a cake of soap on one afternoon suggests wilful carelessness," said Gortsby, but the young man scarcely waited to hear the end of the remark. He flitted away down the path, his head held high, with an air of somewhat jaded jauntiness.

It would have been hard for this young man to make up such a complex story on the spur of the moment, but he might have already been using some of the elements to make an impression on strangers. There are some people who are congenital liars. They do it just for the pleasure of making an impression of strangers. The young con-man may have told many strangers that he was a country gentleman, that he had traveled in foreign countries and stayed at the best hotels, and even that he had been to Eton and Oxford. It might have occurred to him on the spur of the moment to put his various lies together to see if he could make money from his creative imagination.

There is something about this young man's story that seems experimental. When he rushes off after having been outed by Gortsby, one feels that this will not be the last time the con-man tries his story. He is a little bit unsure of himself, but he is also bold, aggressive, and ambitious. If he could pick up a sovereign every day just for telling a little story, he would have a better income than most men his age in London. A sovereign was equivalent to a pound. Most clerks were earning one pound a week in those days, but this enterprising youth could be earning six or seven pounds a week if only he could perfect his story. No doubt when he flees from the bench where he met his first setback, he is already thinking of how he can improve his story. It is a case of trial and error--and there are millions of people on whom he can try the hard-luck story, as long as he doesn't get discouraged and lose his cool. For one thing he would certainly be planning to buy a cake of soap, and he might even be thinking of actually showing the soap to his next potential victim.

The would-be confidence trickster may have been toying with his story for a long time before he actually got up the nerve to try it out. Unfortunately for him, Norman Gortsby was quite familiar with hard-luck stories. He was not just sitting there for a rest. He was in the habit of sitting there every evening for an hour or two before going home. He was familiar with all the types of people to be seen in that vicinity, and he was an exceptionally hard prospect for this novice con-man who was not experienced in choosing "marks," or suckers, either. Gortsby enjoys hearing these stories. They interest and amuse him. After the other man leaves, Gortsby even considers the story's faults and merits.

"It was a pity," mused Gortsby; "the going out to get one's own soap was the one convincing touch in the whole story, and yet it was just that little detail that brought him to grief. If he had had the brilliant forethought to provide himself with a cake of soap, wrapped and sealed with all the solicitude of the chemist's counter, he would have been a genius in his particular line. In his particular line genius certainly consists of an infinite capacity for taking precautions."

By the sheerest coincidence, Gortsby finds a cake of soap and goes rushing after the young stranger, thinking it must be his. The way the other man reacts shows he is a novice and must have invented his hard-luck story quite recently, if not on the spur of the moment.

"Lucky thing your finding it," said the youth, and then, with a catch in his voice, he blurted out a word or two of thanks and fled headlong in the direction of Knightsbridge.

In The Things They Carried, what are four examples of how the theme of burdens is conveyed?

In the novel The Things They Carried, the theme of burden is conveyed through O'Brien's use of symbolism.

When an author uses symbolism, he uses an object or an action to represent something more than its literal meaning. In this case, O'Brien uses what each individual soldier carries not only to represent the physical turmoil they are under, but also their mental turmoil. 

For example, the novel opens by saying "First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey." Physically, these letters do not weigh much; however, Jimmy Cross's love for Martha and his obsession with her letters becomes much more of issue, especially following Lavender's death. 

Lieutenant Jimmy Cross was not the only character who carried photographs. In fact, O'Brien referred to the practice of carrying photographs as "humping," another word for lifting or carrying. These photographs could represent the burden of being away from home, and it shows the soldiers' efforts to remain attached to their loved ones in the United States. 

In the same chapter, O'Brien tells readers that soldiers carry things out of necessity—in other words, they will need these items at one point or another. According to O'Brien, "Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April." This shows that the war became such a burden on Lavender that he needed to rely on drugs to cope.

In A People’s History of the United States, what is the main idea of chapter 1?

The main idea of the first chapter in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is that history should be examined from the viewpoints of individual people, rather than of governments or people in power.  He describes his approach to historical research, which is to look at the experiences of ordinary people.  He examines how decisions by governments and leaders had an impact on them.

In the first chapter, Zinn goes into great detail about how the Arawak people in the Bahamas were treated by Christopher Columbus and other Spaniards.  Columbus was sent on a mission by the monarchs of Spain to find gold and spices.  When he explored the Bahamas and other nearby islands, he found very little gold.  Desiring power, influence, wealth, and recognition, Columbus decided to take slaves back to Spain.  He wanted to distract from the fact that he did not find the vast amounts of gold he had expected to discover.  He and his men captured many Arawak people.  Some were sent to Spain as slaves, and others were enslaved in their own homeland.  Many tried to resist, but they were overpowered by the Spaniards.  The greed of the Spaniards completely changed Arawak society.  It altered their history until their culture died off.

Zinn's approach to historical study also focuses on the accomplishments and moments of victory for ordinary people.  In chapter one, he describes how history should reveal "episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win" (page 11).