The Stranger: Paper Outline

Thesis: Every death in The Stranger serves to demonstrate the same ultimate absurd point: that even death is meaningless and unimportant in the grand scheme of the world.

• The first death, Maman's, illustrates how Meursault reacts to death: very impersonally, as though he were merely an acquaintance of Maman.
• Lack of info p. 1
• "Not my fault" instinct p. 1
•  Does not express emotion towards death of mother
•  Meursault's reaction in this case illustrates how society in general reacts to death.
• Continuing of life shows symbolism - ch. 2 in general compares Meursault to society through juxtaposition of interactions w/ Marie and observation of other lives
• Specifically: "really, nothing had changed" (24).
• Absurdist philosophy: World continues on, even after death that jars one world
• Salamano's dog, although a disappearance rather than an absolute death, serves a very similar purpose to Maman in that Meursault acts pragmatically, stating facts rather than helping Salamano; even after Salamano finds out that his dog is most likely dead, Meursault still only offers condolences.
• Meursault's response to Salamano's distress, showing up at his doorstep: "I told him that the pound ... as they saw fit" (39).
• No compassion in response, merely informing of facts as losing of dog is routine, insignificant occurrance, even though Salamano is shocked by it
• Offers condolences when "I told him [...] that I was sorry about what had happened to his dog" but still "yawned," indicating boredom, immediately before (45)
• In the murder of the Arab, Meursault is an agent of the world, illustrating how random the world is in the people whom it harms and helps.
• Happened to choose to return to beach (57)
• No agency in crime - "the trigger gave" (59) and whole passage
• Illustrates pointlessness of world in action
•  Meursault's preponderance of his own death and his own conclusions illustrates the ultimate point of absurdism - the philosophical if not the narrative climax of the book.
• Paragraph from last blog for points

Analysis of "I never saw a Moor" and "'Faith' is a fine invention"

Thesis: Whereas "I never saw a Moor" discusses the existence of God directly, "'Faith' is a fine invention" is a commentary on human views of God and science rather than on the subject itself. The two poems connect in that the opinions that Dickenson analyzes in the latter poem are presented in the former.

• "I never saw a Moor" argues directly for the existence of God.
• There is parallel structure between the first and fifth lines, "I never saw a Moor" (1) and "I never spoke with God" (5) as well as with "yet" in lines 3 and 7. 
• This structure serves to illustrate Dickenson's argument that God exists.
• Dickenson claims that she can be as sure that God exists as she can be that any place she has not seen can be, because she is taking both purely on faith, yet it would be ludicrous to deny the existence of the sea.
• "'Faith' is a fine invention", on the other hand, refers to people's viewpoints on God.
• Rather than making direct claims with "I" as she does in the former poem, Dickenson refers to "Gentlemen"; the different pronoun indicates that she is not considering her own feelings, but general human emotion.
• This poem states that people tend to consider God relevant to their day-to-day lives, but irrelevant to science and its "emergencies."
• "When Gentlemen can see" (2) is contrasted with "In an Emergency" (4) by means of the conjunction "But" (3). Thus, the things that people can see, where faith is acceptable, is different than the world people cannot directly observe, in which faith is thrown to the wayside in favor of science.
• This opinion is often how people reconcile science and religion, and Dickenson references this reconciliation in this poem, but does not refer to her own feelings on the matter.
• While Dickenson is critical of the reconciliation of God and science in "'Faith' is a fine invention", she illustrates this opinion herself in "I never saw a Moor".
• Her first poem argues for God on the basis that there are things that science takes for granted (despite a lack of personal experience).
• Thus, she believes in scientific principles, because she will take evidence of photographs as data that illustrates the existence of foreign places.
• However, she also argues for God; therefore, she is arguing both for God and for science, and is therefore expressing an opinion that God can exist in a world with scientific principles - and is therefore displaying a reconciliation of God and science, of faith and empiricism, despite so criticizing this approach in her latter poem.

Analysis of "Out, Out-"

Thesis: The allusion to Macbeth in the title of Robert Frost's "'Out, out-'" is a fitting comparison for the theme of the poem of the fickleness of life represented in Frost's use of dashes, exclamations and an anticlimactic conclusion.

• The dashes in the poem have multiple means by which they illustrate the fickleness of life.
• The quotation "Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it" (31) shows several of these purposes.
• Firstly, the dashes sound like gasping, and in the poem, the boy is dying - thus, gasping is an appropriate phonetic choice.
• Secondly, the dashes show emotion, the grief and anxiety which would surely be present in such an event as an amputation.
• Thirdly, the visual shape of the dash, a long line, is indicative of a long, slow event that consumes time as the dash consumes space, which could be illustrative of a long, slow last breath - thus, even visually, the dashes illustrate the end of the boy's life.
• Finally, although this was certainly not the original intent of the author given the time in which the author lived, the dashes lead to sounds that are similar to that of a modern-day heart monitor, where words are beeping: the short words would be heartbeat beeps, and the flow of words at the end could be the long beep after the patient's death; although this was not Frost's intention, the poem takes on additional meaning today.
• The exclamation points serve a similar intent, but to a lesser extent.
• After the boy loses his hand, the narrator makes the exclamatory interjection, "But the hand!" (17).
• This shows the emotion in the poem, as it is expressed not only by the characters, but by the narrator through exclamation.
• The exclamation points also add to the phonetic gasping, as, in the way Frost uses them, they cut short a sentence in a crescendo up to that point.
•  Finally, the poem concludes anticlimactically, relating the quickness of death to the fickleness of life indicated in the title.
• The conclusion of the poem is that the death's observers "turned to their affairs" (33); in other words, they moved on.
• This illustrates the fickleness of humans, and therefore how not only is death unexpected, but life changes quickly as well.
• Thus, the image presented in the titular allusion to Macbeth of a candle flickering is an accurate one: a candle dies easily with the smallest of winds, and when it does so, one simply obtains another candle.

Analysis of "The Unknown Citizen"

Thesis: W. H. Auden used his poem "The Unknown Citizen" to criticize the shift of American ideals away from individualism, towards normality and standardization.

• The title of the poem, "The Unknown Citizen," is indicative of how the person's normality caused him to lose his distinction from everybody else.
• The source of all the information about this man was the "Bureau of Statistics" (1).
• This shows how people cease to be people when they are entirely typical; instead, they are simply another "statistic": if everyone is normal, no one sticks out.
• He is unknown because he is statistically normal, and so his lack of individuality, of self-expression, was ultimately, in the eyes of Auden, his downfall.
•  Auden contrasts that the person is "unknown" with how excellent he was a a citizen in order to criticize not only the viewpoint that conformism is good, but to criticize society for holding this viewpoint.
• About him, there was "no official complaint"; indeed, "he was a saint" (2, 4).
• This shows the ideals of the time: all of his viewpoints are perfect for what everyone believes is right.
• Therefore, when Auden criticizes the viewpoint of conformism, he is attacking the societal ideal of his time.
• Auden concludes his poem with a strongly ironic statement that punctuates his point.
• He ends with that "had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard" (29).
• The irony is the contrast of this with the title: if the person is "unknown" then the collective speaker would never have heard that anything was wrong because they never would have heard of him.
• Here Auden is stating that it if one is unsatisfied with conforming, one cannot complain and still be considered a conformist, because to complain would be to resist the ideal off conformism and thereby display a nonconformist viewpoint.

Analysis of "Cross"

Thesis: The multiple denotations behind the title of the poem "Cross" lead to progressively deeper interpretations of the poem that illustrate a more and more dangerous world for the speaker.

• One meaning behind the title is that the speaker is a cross-breed of different races.
• His father is "a white old man" whereas his "old mother's black" (1-2).
• This would imply at best a difficult life any time prior to or within the lifetime of Langston Hughes.
• This interpretation of "Cross," being the simplest interpretation, tells us the least about the nature of the poem, and similarly only illustrates the danger of being half white, half black to a minimal extent.
• A deeper  meaning would be that the speaker is cross at his parents for creating him as a biracial creature.
• The speaker discusses how "if [he] ever cursed" his mother and father, then he would redact his statements (3, 5).
• This illustrates the emotional strife associated with being biracial: he does not have an inherent internal association with either race, and so he does not know which race he should choose to live as.
• This is a deeper interpretation of "Cross," and gives us a deeper understanding of the speaker; it allows us to understand the internal struggle that the speaker must live with every day.
• Finally, "Cross" is an answer to the final rhetorical question in the poem.
• The final stanza asks, "I wonder where I'm gonna die / being neither white nor black?" (11-12).
• Under this interpretation, Hughes is implying that the speaker is going to end his life by being crucified - an understandable fear for blacks if the speaker lives in the time of the KKK, when the idea of the amalgamation of the races terrified many whites.
• This is both the deepest and darkest interpretation of the title, elaborating on how being a biracial person in a time when racial mixing was feared is physically dangerous and could easily lead to the speaker's painful death.

Analysis of "Break of Day"

Thesis: The sudden use of a break at the end of each stanza illustrates with sound the wrongness of a lover leaving his or her companion immediately at the crest of dawn.

• The change in the meter from the first two rhyming couplets to the last couplet in each stanza causes the reader to stumble somewhat, emphasizing the wrongness and immorality of the conclusion of the stanza and thereby the night.
• In each stanza, the first four lines use iambic tetrameter, as in "Must business thee from hence remove?" whereas the last two lines use iambic pentameter, as in "He which hath business and makes makes love, doth do" (, 17).
• The change in meter towards the end of the stanza sounds improper compared in its abrupt shift, just as the abrupt shift from lover to a person with business is wrong.
• Furthermore, both of them take place towards the end of the event, but not when the event should end: the shift takes place near the end of the stanza, but not quite at the end, and the leaving takes place towards the end of the night, but not quite at the end.
• Similarly, the first stanza shifts from four lines of rhetorical questions to a statement, a shift that similarly emphasizes the contrast between the smooth beginning of the night and its rough ending.
• The rhetorical questions of "'Tis true, 'tis day; what though it be?" last the first four lines, providing a smooth, almost seductive tone to the beginning of the stanza that is interrupted by the implied command behind "Love [...] should [...] keep us together" (1, 5-6). 
• The seductive tone is best illustrated by "why should we rise because 'tis light? / Did we lie down because 'twas night?," because the speaker is arguing persuasively without seeming like arguing, just as seduction is persuasion without seeming to be; this contrasts harshly with the significantly less soft-spoken command-like conclusion
• The difference between the beginning of the night and the end is fully illustrated by the difference between the seductive question and the businesslike command.
• This line of questioning's end follows the same pattern as the metric shift, thus emphasizing the difference between the beginning of the stanza and the end, and thereby beginnings and endings in general.

Analysis of "Ballad of Birmingham"

Thesis: In “Ballad of Birmingham,” the greatest purpose of author Dudley Randall is to make the reader associate himself or herself with the mother in the poem, allowing the reader to gain a sense of empathy for the mother and by extension for the cause of civil rights.

• The use of direct quotations and the repetition within these quotations makes the mother and child relationship known to the reader, invoking feelings that are inherent to such a relationship.
• The child’s use of “mother dear” in the first line instantly allows the reader to understand the child as a child, and to feel the caring emotions that are inherent with children; this is reinforced with the later repetition of “mother” (1, 9).
• The specific repeated use of “baby,” a term of endearment that all mothers use, would allow any parent to understand instantly the worry the mother feels for the child (5, 13).
• The repetition of both of these terms in each quote, including the use of “baby” at the conclusion of the poem, reinforces the feelings that such a relationship creates by consistently referring to the relationships (31).
• The description in the fifth stanza either serves to enhance childlike innocence, causing the loss to seem even greater, or to emphasize the mother’s love for the child, depending on the interpretation of “she,” which refers ambiguously to either the mother or the child.
• If “she” is interpreted as the child, then an image appears of a child dressing up for church, enhancing the feelings of innocence that come inherently with children with the purity that comes with church, amplified by the use of “white” to describe her gloves and shoes (19-20).
• If “she” is interpreted as the mother, then the image becomes one of a mother carefully brushing her daughter’s hair, then dressing her up, kneeling down to the child’s height to do so; this image of a mother kneeling in front of her child to tenderly put on her gloves is a scene that could characterize the love between the mother and the child and thus act as an almost holy image that is shattered by the bomb at the end of the poem.
• The ambiguity causes one who looks sufficiently closely at the poem to see the ambiguity to see both of these images with similar effects, and even in one who simply reads over the poem sees, to a lesser extent, the image that doesn't correlate with his or her interpretation of "she," despite that the reader didn't actually understand the ambiguity as ambiguous.