Essay 1

Stories

Death is a significant part of life, although this is so, many try to cover the emotions felt when a close friend or a relative has passed away, while others will mourn for weeks on end. Death is painful, happy, sad, any words a person could say. Some take lives, others save lives. To some people death is just another word in the dictionary. Some become immortal for the stories they write.

Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried, describes death as, "When someone died, it wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy and because they called it brother names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself" (O'Brien 20). O'Brien uses these terms for the following reasons: a soldier had to do this to keep his sanity to save himself from emotional let downs and having to cope for someone's death.

In Capote's In Cold Blood, Perry says to Dick, "I think there must be something wrong with us. To do what we did" (Capote 108). Dick shows a little more difference of an opinion on the subject, "Well, what's there to say about capital punishment? I am not against it. Revenge is all it is, but what's wrong with revenge? It's very important. If I was kin to the Clutters, or any of the parties York and Latham dispensed with, I couldn't rest in peace till the ones responsible has taken that ride on the Big Swing" (Capote 335).

Dick tells us that he doesn't think of it as much of a big deal, partly to hide his cowardice (in fear of his own death), and partly because he does not really care about the value of human life.

In Cold Blood introduces Alfred Stoeklein, the hired hand of the Clutters, who puts a different spin on death. "I started walking home, and on the way, about halfway down the lane...And seeing the dog- somehow that made me feel again. I'd been too dazed, too numb, to feel the full viciousness, of it. The suffering. The horror. They were dead. A whole family. Gentle, kindly people, people I knew -murdered. You had to believe it, because it was really true" (Capote 65-66). His emotion is a little more natural to the standards of our thoughts. He went deep with this statement; he is the standard of our thoughts.

Alfred Stoeklein's thoughts differ greatly from Dick's perception, which Addie, from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, is able to explain the reason for that difference, "I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel..." (Faulkner 173). Words are just containers for