prueba
Tyres
Context :This story occurs in rural France at the time of the second world war when the germans occupied and dominated France. The setting is in the tyre garage of Raoul’s family.
Title From the title we know that Raoul’s world is tyres and he compare all with it from the very beginning.
Themes – Guilt: we talk about the guilt that Raoul feels when he fixed bad the tyre of the germans killing Cecile, the person he wants to protect the most. – Determination/pride for your work and its potential to consume lives: Raoul’s job makes a difference with life and death
– Love/human relationships and the danger of: Cecile clearly causes distraction is Raoul’s work, this makes he to fix bad the tyres that are the only thing that is good in his life. He is doom (condenado), if he do something he doesn’t has to, he get his consequences (as he fix bad the germans tyre, he get the consequence of losing Cecile).
– Rebellion against oppression (resistance)/price paid for freedom: Through
Raoul’s act of rebellion, he kills what he wished to protect in the first place,
this means that rebellion brings death.
– The death and its consequences Narrative viewpoint and language techniques The narrator of this short story is Raoul that is telling us a story that had already happen before, that’s why all what he say is a flashback. Also he gives us a lot of foreshadows anticipating the reader what is going to happen.
Raoul is self-conscious and the reader is in Raoul’s mind, we feel what he feels. The tone of the narrator is always angry or sad, he is depressed and all he said is related to death (tyres = death). We can see a change of tone when Cecile die because he didn’t enjoy life anymore. Important quotes with its explanation Don’t ask me why.” – This shows how tyres are important in Raoul’s life and that his life will be marked by tyres.
“Life would go by us, and now and again stop. We were proud that M. Michelin was a Frenchman: for once we had invented something useful, instead of making a lot of noise about nothing. No, really, I am proud of our business.” – In the first sentence it says that the life from one day to another can go, he is foreshadowing Cecile’s death.
“I learnt to see a tyre as sad, when its chin lay flat on the ground, melting away – and when it was fat and full it bounced, it was so happy.” – this is a personification of the tyres, Raoul puts human characteristics like being happy or sad to the tyre.
“The blessed Trinity, my father called it: the check, the double-check, and the
Holy-Ghost-check. Who was a protestant through and through.” – The father is saying that he always have to check three times if the tyres is well fixed, all has to be right because if not, it takes the man to his death.
“When old Mme Renouvin slid off the road in her little blue Peugeot, in 1938, and was found dead as a log in a wild rose bush, where she’d been thrown, and the report in the local paper blamed it on a ‘blow-out’, my poor father did not eat for days, like a fast of repentance” – That blame is in the family, as the father don’t eat for days because of guilt, Raoul didn’t fall in love anymore after the car accident. cecile was in the recistance group (petit ours) and are the one that hates the nazis, concentration camp, this is why raouls father dont want to be envolved him.
“For myself, though, it was the beginning of winter, not the end. I leave fresh flowers every year, on the anniversary.” – This is a metaphor that compares death, as winter is cold, sasd and kills flowers, winter = death.
The clod and the pebble
This poem explores the nature of love through the views of an optimistic clod and a pessimistic pebble. To start we have 3 stanzas with 4 verses in each one.
Analyzing the first stanza: the selfless love, when you care and give yourself to the other, that the love means total delivery. If you don’t receive nothing from the other side, you suffer a lot, that’s why we consider it pessimistic. It builds a heaven in hell’s despair because you build and heaven for the other but a hell for you (giving everything and don’t receiving nothing from the other).
Analyzing the third stanza: the selfish love, when you receive all from the other side but you don’t give anything back. You built a hell in heaven’s despite, a heaven for you but a hell for the other. The selfish love is optimistic for the one that is selfish and pessimistic for the selfless.
Analyzing the second stanza: This is the balance between the two other opposite stanzas, this stanza is the onlyone that didn’t rime because it makes the separation so the reader can decide on their view. he is letting us we to decide one of the two types of lovers. Also is this stanza he makes a personification of a clod and a pebble: