Ernest Hemingway "Clean, Well- Lighted Place"

"With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."

Since darkness is accompanied with death and bad thoughts, it is not too far stretched to say that the young waiter seems to not comprehend the idea of a well lighted and clean place as an escape for the old from the loneliness they feel. The young waiter mentions money and does not understand why the old man tried to kill himself since he isn’t poor. He says a wife and therefore says that he is not lonely and should not need to cater to an old, lonely man’s needs by staying late and working at the bar serving more drinks to the old man. His lack of adaptation of the old man’s unfortunate nature hinders the development of his character and sets him apart from the reader’s feelings and his own.
The idea of a well lighted place at night that someone can go to and spend time at has to deal with the feeling of security. Light prevents terrible thoughts by keeping companion to the lonely. It casts shadows on leaves, as mentioned in the story, which one could view as people in the middle of the night; motionless and quiet. A bodega, or a bar, will only increase the loneliness one feels due to its dreary, dark, and gloomy feel, which is at its worst at night. The music which most bars play at night brings in thoughts of seclusion and creates a very melancholy feeling which may tempt someone to commit suicide if things are not going well for them. In contrast, spending time at a café, with no music and no negative mental distractions, such as the fear of darkness, illuminates a lonely mind.
It is not uncommon for people to feel protected in a well lighted area. Not going to bed at night, which we find out is the case with the older waiter, allows the lonely person to never fear the darkness of the night any more. By spending time a local café during the night and sleeping during the day, there is light forever savored within the individual’s mind, keeping them content and free of negative thoughts.

Ernest Hemingway "Hills Like White Elephants"

“We can have the whole world.”
“No, we can’t.”
“We can go anywhere we want.”
“No, we can’t. It isn’t ours anymore.”
“It’s ours.”
“No it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.” (554)

This part of the dialogue between the American and the girl, or Jig, as he calls her, is very significant and holds a lot of meaning to the story. The American is persuading his female companion to undergo a surgery, which is understood to be an abortion. But the irony is that althought he is now trying to convince her that they will be able to have the whole word no matter what she chooses to do, she denies his proposition. She contradicts him and says that the world is not theirs anymore, meaning that she is now pregnant and someone else is soon to be included into the equation. However, the American’s attitude is very much so focused mainly on status quo and he seems to enjoy living a carefree life. Despite the girl’s efforts to settle down and stop going from one hotel to the next, the American overpowers her decisions and they aimlessly stroll along the path of life. Both of these characters are confused and lost, making them absolutely inadequate in making a well rounded decision about the pregnancy.
In the above passage, the girl says, “..And once they take it away, you never get it back anymore.” To me, this sounds like a cry for allowing her to keep the child. Once the surgery is done, she will never again be able to bring that child back to life. What’s done is done but she does not want to choose that option any longer. To her, the world was now blossoming and she was ready to explore it from a different perspective. She even compares the hills in front of her to white elephants, which correlates with her pregnancy and the uselessness of the gift she was being blessed with. White elephants are more of a liability than an asset due to its value. She draws this simile to explain how she feels about what the American thinks, without actually saying it. But the again, the irony comes up and to the woman the child is a liability and puts her in a disadvantage to the world. What she fails to recognize are her own exact words; the world is not theirs any more. Both of them, instead of focusing on what they had in front of them, the American and the woman kept looking around at others and wanted to try out more drinks, or explore new options in life, which in the long run will leave them with nothing to show for their years of living.

Nathaniel Hawthorne "Young Goodman Brown"

“We have been a race of honest men and good Christians since the days of the martyrs; and shall I be the first of the name Brown that ever took this path and kept” (540).

It was very difficult for Young Goodman Brown to believe that people who were so close to him, did in fact have evil in them. This quote is referencing Young Goodman Brown’s father and grandfather. His false sense of honesty and good will in the world made him into a naïve and later on in the story, a very depressed man who lived his life in absolute gloom.
Although this story is only a dream of Young Goodman Brown’s, the way he dealt with his experience/dream is an important moral to the story. He cannot distinguish between the two and is not sure whether or not his encounter with this devil really did take place or whether he dreamed the entire experience. Perhaps his reaction of such strong emotions following this event taking place came from his subconscious belief that not all Christians practiced what they said they believed. He says he will be “the first man of the name of Brown” who will not allow the evil into his life. In reality, he is the only one who does allow evil to take over him due to his actions of later turning on his family and those around him. He questions and observes them with disgust, which he even cannot do for too long before he turns away. Instead of dealing with his thoughts face to face, his misery made him into a lonely and sad old man.
The idea of the unconscious, which Young Goodman Brown was throughout the story, can be interpreted under the psychoanalytic theory. In this theory, development is described as a primarily unconscious, or beyond awareness, and is heavily portrayed by emotion. He goes through an immense amount of emotions and begins to look down upon those around him. He even believes that his father and grandfather were not pure Christians and contained evil tendencies in them. His life was spent by holding this notion of evilness against his family and every time “the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself” (547). Young Goodman Brown, whether he was sure of it or not, believed his dream/experience to be true and treated everyone around him as such.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman "The Yellow Wallpaper"

“At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it became bars!” (493)

This quote is very meaningful in Gilman’s story. The narrator says she sees a woman trapped behind the wallpaper in one of the rooms. She describes it as a horrendous yellow paper which strikes her each time she comes near it. The woman behind the paper that the narrator is able to see is actually her own self trapped behind the bars of John’s control.
The above quote means that there was never anything worse in her life than the condition, or rather the treatment of her husband, she was now affected with. The treatment she received from John was very strange and questionable. John treated the narrator like a child, without having any say about what she wanted to do or felt was right for her. No wonder she thought there was something wrong with her. If a person is told that they are not well and is not allowed to spend time with family, other than her husband and his sister, then sooner or later that person will begin to believe it, too. Moreover, her husband and his sister were more of outsiders to her than family. They did not treat the woman as a human being but rather, almost as a rat under a microscope in some kind of laboratory. The narrator was controlled and abused by John’s unexplainable nature and she suffered tremendously due to his false sense of care giving.
In the quote above, the concept of night and light means that the narrator felt the most trapped when John was home from work at night. Her predator, as I would like to call him, was now present and fully overpowered her every move. This poor woman was critically lessened and her existence made almost no difference at all. As John returned home at night, her bars were put back up and she no longer could feel like it was possible for her to write or just sit in the room by herself. She now had to listen to the orders of her insensitive husband.
I am lead to believe that there was never anything wrong with the woman but it was instilled in her that she was not well. After some time, after being secluded from the rest of the world, any person would start to act like this woman did. She feels trapped, isolated, and alone. She begins to hallucinate and thinks she sees a woman behind bars inside the hideous yellow wallpaper. What does the yellow wallpaper represent? To me it represents the masking of John’s true intentions. She desperately tries to tear it down, which stands for taking down that wall John had built against her and the rest of the world. She did not have freedom, under any circumstances. Her life was taken into the hands of someone who had completely lost his mind, but was made to believe that the problem laid in her.

"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner

“A Rose for Emily” could be interpreted under the psychological aspect of the story considering that Miss Emily’s behavior was not of the usual or typical form. But one must ask themselves why Miss Emily’s behavior took such a toll and what the reason behind her isolation was. The story tells that the house Miss Emily lives in once was a beautiful place, and “white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies” (404). But now, it is nothing but a huge mess, decaying and rotting away. It is important to come to a conclusion about what went wrong and why Miss Emily all of a sudden stopped caring about her belongings and herself.
We are informed that “her sweetheart – the one [people] believed would marry her – had deserted her” (405). This implies that Miss Emily was once in love but sadly, the man she loved had left her for whatever reason he had. This leads me to believe that the reason for Miss Emily’s sudden isolation and depressive state she was in, came from the lack of love in her life. She lost something that was significant to her; she lost a part of her heart. With the losing of her heart, she lost all desire to carry on after her father died. It must have been very difficult to deal with two loses. Could she have found someone else to spend the rest of her life with? I’m sure she could but when something or someone one loves leaves forever, it is hard to get back on two feet. The narrator says that “none of the young man were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such” which makes perfect sense because no one but her sweetheart would ever truly complete her (407).
I am also lead to believe that the reason for Miss Emily’s strange behavior of keeping Homer Barron’s body in a room at her house who no one was allowed to enter, was to for once in her life keep someone close forever. She did not want to let him leave her, like her sweetheart and father did. It was difficult for her to let go of her father after his death but she was forced to give up his body when she was threatened by law. Keeping Homer’s body, although it’s fanatical to do so, was Miss Emily’s way of for once not letting go of someone who played a vital role in her life. Whether or not Miss Emily was mad, her intentions were nothing but a loud cry for love.

"We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick

“We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” is a futuristic story which talks about Douglas Quail, a man whose dream is to go to Mars. The irony is that Quail has already gone to Mars but his memory was erased due to his position of a soldier missionary assassin. This is a very interesting point because to think that someone’s memory can be simply and easily erased within a blink of an eye by someone else, is not only immoral but almost impossible to imagine. What is fascinating is that Quail dreams about doing something he had already done. But why was it that he dreamed of going to Mars and not something more of a realistic nature? Subconsciously, I feel that Quail always had a certain memory or reminiscence of Mars in his mind and that is why he wished to go there so badly.
It is said that people dream of places they have been to already at some point in their lives. For example, most dreams, but not all, capture a setting of something experienced by the person. However, Quail thinks that his wish is unattainable. “I will go, he said to himself. Before I die I’ll see Mars. It was, of course, impossible, and he knew that even as he dreamed” (355). For some reason, Quail, himself, crushed his own wishes stating they are impossible. Everything can be achieved if the individual believes in it. But his dreams are about a place where he has in reality been to. His memory did not need to be brought back by Rekal, Inc but rather it was something he needed to truly believe in himself, in order to remember of his visit to Mars. If he had not been to Mars before, how would he be able to dream of it? One could say it was his imagination but an imagination which goes as far as Quail’s could sometimes be misinterpreted as only that. It was in fact a true memory coming back to mind which Quail was not able to label as such. Fantasy and his true vision of reality were actually the same thing for Quail. He fantasized about the one thing he thought he would never get to see with his eyes; however he had already visited that place which was the reason for his constant desire of going.

"The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane

I want to take a different approach about Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” and focus on a passage that really struck me the most out of the entire story. It’s a passage about transcendence and going beyond what one felt or thought was possible. It is a passage when Crane describes a beautiful change of relationships between the four characters. “It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him” (342). I immediately thought back to instances when I, myself, was found in such situations. I met people and treated them nicely but did not feel close to them just yet. It was almost difficult to imagine ever being close with those people. In Crane’s story, the four men on the boat have found ever lasting friendships. Despite the fact that they are lost at sea and the dangers that surround them, they are at the same time beaming with happiness to have achieved brotherhood.
Their voyage is shared and their experiences are together embraced. They were faced with struggles of survival against the forces of nature and even came to a close call with death. That alone, is a very powerful occurrence to share with someone. One’s life is a precious and magnificent “thing”. But when the lives of other people we care about are also at hand, we begin to realize the importance of those people to us, which I believe is what happened with these men in “The Open Boat”. “…the correspondent, for instance, who had been taught to be cynical of men, knew even at the time was the best experience of his life. But no one said that it was so. No one mentioned it.” It did not need to be mentioned. All of them respected each other and felt gratitude for all the help each of the men were able to provide. This is seen in the story when the only name mentioned is Billy’s; the oiler who drowned while attempting to swim to shore. The mention of Billy’s name is to show respect for the deceased and to remember the brotherhood and courage of Billy’s last days of life.