Write a comparison for one of the characters using a metaphor for the story To Kill a Mockingbird.

A metaphor is a literary device called a figure of speech that compares two things that are not alike but may have common characteristics between them.  It is a way for a writer to get across an idea or impression of a person or thing by implying a similarity between the two.

Here are some ideas for the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird:

• Boo Radley is a cat nervously sneaking through the streets of Maycomb.


• Atticus is a battle-worn general courageously fighting injustice.  


• Scout is a chameleon changing with her environment.


• Mayella Ewell is a spider weaving a web to catch prey.


• Bob Ewell is a carnivore devouring the hopes and dreams of his children.


• Tom Robinson is a broken willow tree trying to survive his environment.


• Dill is a timid puppy seeking love and affection.

If you think of some dominant characteristics for each character, you can usually come up with something else to compare them to.  For example, Boo could also be a bear hibernating; Scout a finely wrapped present; Atticus another Yoda! 

In the story written by Jamaica Kincaid, "Girl," what is the relationship between the individual and society?

In this story, the mother is giving her daughter a litany of advice and commands on how to be a proper lady. The daughter is presumably an adolescent, a young girl moving into adulthood. The mother wants her daughter to follow this list of rules which adhere to a traditional female role and this includes becoming a wife who is subservient to her husband. 

The mother gives advice on cooking, cleaning, and ironing. She tells her daughter how to smile in certain situations. She warns her not to become a slut. She tells her how to love a man. She gives advice that reflects her Caribbean culture but gives more that reflects her Christian beliefs. She goes on and on. In the end, even though the daughter protests twice, the mother just keeps spewing out this advice. The run-one sentence, stream of consciousness style of this story emphasizes how the daughter is bombarded by these strict rules of how to be a lady.

Kincaid is showing how young girls are brainwashed by society but in this story, the brainwashing is coming from the mother. And the role she prescribes for her daughter is very traditional and leaves little room for her (daughter) to be free and experimental. The daughter, in her struggle to grow and develop as a free individual, is faced with this onslaught of directions from her mother.

The reader can see how the daughter, and any young woman, will face similar directions and brainwashing from all parts of society: media, magazines, television, and so on. And if these institutions are still largely patriarchal (run by traditional, reactionary men), they will perpetuate the idea that women have this limited, subservient role. The story gives a verbal display of how young women are encouraged and/or forced into limited roles, censoring the way they should think, move, act, look, etc. 

How does Dickinson powerfully convey ideas about death in her poem "Because I could not stop for Death"?

Emily Dickinson's poem "Because I could not stop for Death" uses a series of poetic devices that emphasize the themes and content of the piece. For each, I'll display an example, define the device, and analyze its presence: 

1. 
   Personification: "Because I could not stop for Death- / He kindly stopped for me-"
   the practice of giving human qualities and characteristics to non-human beings or objects
   In Dickinson's poem, death is not a fearsome, alien idea, but a polite gentleman who has "civility" and knows "no haste". As a result, Dickinson transforms a concept that many people fear and actively avoid into a familiar and personable figure who is not to be feared but to be interacted with. 


2. 
   Metaphor: "We paused before a House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground- / The Roof was scarcely visible- / the Cornice- in the Ground-"
   a comparison between two unlike things
   Rather than refer to the place where death stops and stays as a tomb or a grave, Dickinson calls it a house, passingly describing it in a manner that implies it is non-descript rather than haunting. By doing so, she normalizes death, comparing the final resting place of a corpse to the commonplace resting place of a living person. Again, she works to normalize death and remove the fear with which it is normally associated. 

In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus suffered from a lack of knowledge; in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hamlet suffered from a surfeit or surplus of knowledge. Oedipus...

In Shakespeare's Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, the action and/or inaction of the characters is not based upon their knowledge as much as the circumstances surrounding the death of each man's father.

Hamlet is struggling with his father's death from the start. He has not yet been called to action at the start of the play, but still he is suffering from a deep and overwhelming grief at his father's passing. His reaction to his mother's remarriage so soon after Old Hamlet's death to a man he finds disgusting (I.ii.132-162), as well as his repugnance with the manner in which the members at court and the new king drunkenly celebrate, are things about which Hamlet feels strongly (I.vi.9-13). However, there is nothing to be done, and he is left for a time to attempt to come to terms with his father's passing. The audience understands his depression. His feelings are fueled by the greatness of his dead father and the baseness of his uncle. It is this very difference that he throws in Gertrude's face in Act Three.

It is not until Hamlet learns that his father was murdered that he is called upon by the Ghost to avenge his sire's slaying. It is not his father's death that requires Hamlet to act, but the manner in which Old Hamlet died.

GHOST:

I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. (I.v.13-17)

And...

List, list, O, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love— (27-28)

…Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. (29)

[…] The serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown. (44-45)

Hamlet struggles for the remainder of the play to act, for several reasons; and with these reasons, perhaps he knows "too much," because having all the facts forces the young prince to face the greatest dilemma of his untried life. The Elizabethan audience (for whom the Bard wrote) believed that it was a mortal sin to kill a king. In this case, Hamlet must know for certain that the Ghost is speaking the truth. People of the time also believed in all kinds of supernatural beings, such as ghosts, witches, etc. In this case, Hamlet cannot be sure that the Ghost is truly his father and not an evil spirit trying to damn his eternal soul by convincing him to commit regicide. It is for this reason that Hamlet arranges for the "play-within-a-play," re-enacting his father's murder in the orchard. When Claudius reacts so violently to the murder scene, Hamlet has his proof.

Even now, however, Hamlet is not free to act. The Ghost told Hamlet that he had to suffer a period of torment because he was not able to confess his sins before he died. When Hamlet has his chance to kill Claudius, the man is in a pose of prayer, and Hamlet refuses to send him to the next world free from his sins—because Claudius' murder had sent Old Hamlet to suffer in purgatory.

And so, with all this information, Hamlet (truly his father's son) weighs the wisdom of his actions—for losing one's soul to the devil for all eternity was the worst price a man could pay for his misdeeds on earth.

On the other hand, Oedipus is a man of action not because he does not know that his father is dead, but because he does not know that he murdered his father. It is this knowledge that freezes him in his tracks. If that were not enough, he discovers that in marrying Jocasta, he has committed incest by sleeping with his own mother.

As the story goes, a plague has befallen Thebes, and Creon, Oedipus' brother-in-law, has traveled to the temple of Apollo to discover what they must do to end the sickness and death. When he returns, Creon speaks of the previous king, Laius, who was murdered by an unknown hand, and the man responsible has never been brought to justice.

CREON:

He died, and the god now orders us clearly
to take violent vengeance on the murderers. (117-118)

Oedipus promises that he will not stop until he has discovered who the murderer is because he loves the people of Thebes and suffers himself because they suffer.

OEDIPUS:

Then I shall reveal these things anew,
for justly did Phoebus, and justly did you
assign me this case on behalf of the dead,
so that you will rightly see me as an ally,
avenging both this land and the god together. (143-147)

Tiresias, the blind prophet, tells Oedipus the truth he seeks:

That man, whom you have long sought,
threatening him and naming as the murderer
of Laius, that man is here.
An immigrant in theory, soon he will be
revealed a native Theban, though he will not be
happy to learn it; for blind instead of seeing,
a beggar instead of rich he will travel
foreign earth, tapping it with his staff.
He will be revealed to live with his children
as brother and father both; and to his parents
he is both his wife’s son and lord and his father’s
fellow-sower and slayer. (472-483)

Oedipus at first cannot believe what he has heard, and suspects a plot on Creon's part. Upon speaking to Jocasta about a prophecy Laius (her murdered husband) had once heard about his death, and the circumstances surrounding it, Oedipus finally suspects that Tiresias' words may be true. However, he has Jocasta send for the servant that survived the attack on Laius to have him confirm Oedipus' new suspicions. 

When all things are confirmed, Jocasta, realizing that she has married her son, kills herself. Oedipus blinds himself with the pins from the broaches (jewelry) his wife wears. His last wishes are to be led out of the city so that no one will ever see him again, and that the children of his incestuous relationship with Jocasta not suffer because of his sins.

Oedipus' lack of knowledge supports the old cliché, "Ignorance is bliss." As long as Oedipus is unaware of what he has done, he acts for the good of Thebes. He loves his wife and the people of the city and tries to be a worthy leader. With the news of the murder of a man (Laius) that he never knew, he feels required to act to spare the citizens of Thebes the suffering they are experiencing because Laius' murder has gone unpunished.

Not having enough information drives Oedipus because he believes that he must put right the wrong that has been committed. It is not the knowledge of knowing that his father is dead that causes the dilemma for Oedipus. (He is adopted and does not know this.) He has left his father's house so he never kills him, as was prophesied about him. Oedipus is proactive. When he hears that his [adoptive] father is dead, he believes the accusations of Tiresias are false. However, it is the knowledge of how his true father died (at Oedipus' hands) that is the turning point in Oedipus' life.

So with both of these men, Hamlet and Oedipus, it is not the knowledge of the death of their father that drives them, but the knowledge of how each father died that controls each son's behavior.

Where is the narrator?

In "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator is condemned to death in the Spanish Inquisition. After he is sentenced to die, he wakes up and struggles to find out where he is. Everything is black around him, and he fears that he has been placed in a tomb. He has been in dungeons before, but this is the first that has no light. 

To explore his surroundings, he reaches out with his hands: "My outstretched hands at length encountered some solid obstruction. It was a wall, seemingly of stone masonry— very smooth, slimy, and cold." Though he can feel the wall, he still cannot tell the dimensions of his cell. To do so, he counts the steps he takes pacing from a rag he finds on the floor: "Up to the period when I fell, I had counted fifty-two paces, and, upon resuming my walk, I had counted forty-eight more—when I arrived at the rag. There were in all, then, a hundred paces; and, admitting two paces to the yard, I presumed the dungeon to be fifty yards in circuit. I had met, however, with many angles in the wall, and thus I could form no guess at the shape of the vault, for vault I could not help supposing it to be." Though he knows the dimensions of his cell, he cannot figure out its shape. 

By mistakenly tearing loose some material from the side of the wall, the narrator realizes where he is: "I succeeded in dislodging a small fragment, and let it fall into the abyss. For many seconds I hearkened to its reverberations as it dashed against the sides of the chasm in its descent; at length, there was a sullen plunge into water, succeeded by loud echoes." The piece of the wall that has fallen loose crashes into the water below, and the narrator realizes that a large pit with water lies beneath him. 

When the narrator later wakes up, he is tied down, and he is able to glimpse, with the admission of a bit of light into his chamber, the figure of time on the ceiling far above him. Instead of holding a scythe, the figure holds a pendulum, which the narrator thinks is painted. He then realizes that the sharp pendulum is moving: "There was something, however, in the appearance of this machine which caused me to regard it more attentively. While I gazed directly upward at it (for its position was immediately over my own) I fancied that I saw it in motion. In an instant afterward the fancy was confirmed. Its sweep was brief, and of course slow." The narrator is now between the pit and the pendulum, with no apparent means of escape. 

What are some examples of compounds?

A chemical compound is a substance that is made of two or more elements that are chemically bonded together in a fixed ratio. The formula of a compound consists of the symbols of the elements it contains with subscripts representing their proportions. For example, water, which has the formula H2O, has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom per molecule.

Here are some examples of chemical compounds and their formulas:

`CO_2` , carbon dioxide

`C_6H_12O_6` , glucose

`C_12H_22O_11` , sucrose (white sugar)

`NaCl` , sodium chloride (table salt)

`CH_3COOH`, acetic acid (vinegar)

`C_2H_5OH` , ethanol

`C_8H_18` , octane (gasoline)

`CaCO_3` , calcium carbonate (limestone)

`NaClO` , sodium hypochlorite (bleach)

`NaHCO_3` , sodium hydrogen carbonate (baking soda)

`MgSO_4` , magnesium sulfate (Epsom salt)

`NaOH` , sodium hydroxide (lye)

A compound can exist as individual particles called molecules or as a crystal lattice of repeating formula units. For example, carbon dioxide, a molecular compound, consists of molecules that each contain one carbon and two oxygen atoms. Alternatively, sodium chloride, an ionic compound, exists as a crystal lattice of many sodium and chloride ions in a 1:1 ratio.

Is Daisy in The Great Gatsby really a Catholic?

The narrator, Nick Carraway, who is also Daisy Buchanan's cousin, states, "Daisy was not a Catholic" and is surprised when he hears Myrtle's sister, Catherine, tell this lie to him. 

In Chapter Two at the New York apartment where Tom has taken Nick along with his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, to escape the heat and to have a small party, Nick observes that Mrytle has changed into an "elaborate afternoon dress" and, with the "influence of the dress, her personality has also undergone a change." For instance, when Tom orders her to get ice for the McKees, she raises her eyebrows "in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders, "These people! You have to keep after them all the time." Then, she looks at Nick and laughs "pointlessly" in her imagined role as hostess.
When Mr. McKee, the photographer expresses a desire to work on Long Island, but he needs "the entry" from someone of position, mockingly, Tom laughs, and as Myrtle enters with a tray, he tells McKee,

"She'll give you a letter of introduction, won't you Mrytle?...'George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump' or something like that."
"Do what?" she asked, startled.

At this point, Mrytle's sister leans over to Nick, "Neither of them can stand the person they're married to." But, she explains, "She's a Catholic and they don't believe in divorce." 
Nick narrates, "Daisy was not a Catholic and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie."