Family Traditions and Separations

It is vital for certain cultures and traditions to be familiarized among family members and in some cases expected in the hands of future generations, but not all traditions should be practiced just because it is passed down from previous generations. However, I have always believed in making your own individual cultural identity separate from what family members try to encourage you to be.  

As a child, nor my family or myself have never exactly knew the true cultural practices from actual African descendants in our family heritage, but in contrary we have tried to form our own identity. Nearly everyone in my family that I know of enjoy reading books and solving puzzles and try to pass this culture down to future generations in order for them to benefit from it as well. Even though these to activities can benefit you, I never like doing either because I considered it boring and I could never sit down in one spot for long periods of time doing one activity. I have grown out of that habit but I still rarely read books and solve puzzles on my own time.

A way I try to follow my family traditions is by attending a family reunion or gathering that my family always has in the middle of summer. During this time, we celebrate by lighting fireworks, singing songs, enjoying music, playing games, and conversing with each other. This way we can all bind different personalities and characteristics together and celebrate them in an honorable fashion so that everyone can feel grateful and feel acknowledged in replacement from the long period of time that we spend away from each other.

My family is full of ingenious minds and intelligence, but as kids, my parents and other close family members, were all siblings of many other brothers and sisters. In result, their families were practically poor and were never given the opportunity to attend college. Instead they worked several hours a day trying to fend for a way to earn money in order to help support there families. In this case, I will be the only one out of few in my family to attend a four year university and to grasp and take advantage of the opportunity they were never given.

I try not to take for granted the advice that my parents give me because I know that they have developed great wisdom through many of the experiences they have gone through. I trust them in the fact that they only want the best possible future outcome for so that I receive the success that was never in any chance offered to them.

The Haunted House Mystery

In the short story The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe uses suspense, symbolism, imagery, personification, and cliff hangers not only to make it scary in nature but to leave the reader or audience at its feet begging for more interesting and unsuspected events to happen.

Poe does and excellent job with using imagery and symbolism to describe Roderick Usher’s house as a place contained with frightening fear and undiscovered treachery.  Through out the story, dilapidated walls, enormous cracks, tarnished roof tops, and hovering darkness are Edgar Allen Poe’s descriptions of the house and its surrounding area that imply how old and corrupted the house is inside and out. The house is also symbolized to be an huge branched out tree that describe Roderick and Madeline Usher’s family tree which has been manipulated and basically destroyed by the cause of internal family incest.

Poe also uses suspense effectively to help identify the true haunting of the house. In the story, Poe describes how Madeline has suffered from a severe disease but doesn’t describe the cause of the disease which happened to occur from the incest in the Usher’s family. Madeline soon dies but then mysteriously rises from the afterlife in the middle of the story in order to seek revengeful homicide on her brother Roderick Usher and just like the effect from the corruption of the family tree, the house eventually crumbles to ashes with Madeline and Roderick Usher in it.

In my own short story I definitely use Poe’s same concept of undiscovered mystery in order to keep the reader one step behind the story because it causes the reader to become paranoid and unaware of what could happen next. I also would use Poe’s way of keeping the resolution to the story open with cliff hangers because its forces the reader to imagine what will happen next based on their personal interpretation.

One technique I would use differently in my own writing would be to insert clues that would seem obvious to the reader in order for them to predict an unlikely end result that they would believe is very likely to happen. A second literature technique I would use differently would be to use multiple types of figurative language to slowly shift the story into something completely different than what happened in the introduction.

America's Abnormal Culture

American culture has a history of being obsessed with the occult and its association with spiritual phenomenon, ghostly appearances, and demonic ideals. Many allusions to ghost, vampires, werewolves, demons, the devil, and other satanic things have been made from movies, books, poems, short stories, but no one anyone has really had true evidence to prove that these figures actually exist.

The popular 2013 movie The Conjuring is a powerful allusion to the occult in America’s culture. The Conjuring, suggesting a basis on a true story, explains how demons possess a doll in order to get close enough to a family to eventually mass murder them. This American horror movie shows evidence of how America’s culture is an audience possessing enough curiosity to still be interested in entertainment that explains how satanic figures might exist and the danger of running into them, but what are the consequences if they actually exist?

Another source of horror broadcasted by national television is the popular show Ghost Hunters. Ghost Hunters is a show where the group called the ghost hunters go out to find paranormal phenomena, in places where people claim to experience it, in order to find evidence and later prove if satanic monsters actually exist in that area. This is another example of how America’s culture is partially based off of interest in the afterlife where monsters and demons might actually exist, but what if they enter our world?

There is no wrong or right answer to prove it these things actually exist and America or any other place will never know. If these things do exist then what will America come to and will curiosity in this still continue to be broadcasted as a source of entertainment?

Ichabod Crane vs. Walter White, Humanities Anti-Heroes?

Both Walter White and Ichabod Crane both have similarities that establish their characteristic of being anti-heroes. One similarity that describes how both of them are alike in being an anti-hero is that both of them express their greediness in a negative manner. For one, Ichabod Crane expresses his greed through his gluttony. Throughout the story the narrator continuously makes references to Ichabod's literal and metaphorical appetite. From the short story "The Legends of Sleepy Hollow" the quotes, "not a turkey... but a necklace of savory sausages" explains how Ichabod Crane viewed the farm as he rode to visit Katrina Van Tassel and how Ichabod Crane's hunger is insatiable, he is so greedy that he will never be satisfied with what he has. For Walter White, he shows his greed by desperately trying to seek money from being affiliated in a drug cartel that puts his family and his own life at risk.=

The next similarity that explains how both the anti-heroes are they are both selfish. Through out “The Legends of Sleepy Hollow” the author describes how Ichabod reacts toward Katrina only being the love of his life just because of the money she possesses. Because money equals power in Ichabod’s eyes and he despises working for Baltus on his farm, not only because he dislikes him but because Baltus is holding Ichabod back from being with Katrina, the only thing that Ichabod wants to do is marry Katrina so he can gain Baltus’s wealth. If Ichabod were just greedy he would find another way to get rich, but Ichabod specifically wants what Baltus has. As for Walter White, his only intentions are focused on making money, but he is so desperate for it that he disregards his importance to realize how much of a risk he is putting himself and his family at. Walter knows that what he is doing is dangerous and it could cost him his life for death or his life towards prison. One thing that Walter fails to do is consider his son and his wife’s opinion about how their family living conditions are and if they are actually struggling with money, but the only thing Walter cares about is the money. He sees himself as useless and unreliable to his family, but starting to suffer from cancer made him more doubtful. Walter seeing himself as a middle class working chemistry teacher that can’t support his own family jeopardizes his integrity and forces him to resort to other affairs such as leading an international drug cartel.



The last similarity that both Ichabod Crane and Walter White share is that they are both fearful. Ichabod Crane was mainly afraid of the dark. The reason for that is because after her heard stories about The Headless Horseman from Brom and how The Headless Horseman only comes out at night near the bridge where the church was. This feared him the most since poor Ichabod had to cross the bridge to get home after coming from Katrina Van Tassel’s castle. Eventually Ichabod ended up running into the Headless Horseman and realized the legend was true and was later taken by The Headless Horseman and never too be seen again. As for Walter White, his association with the drug cartel feared him because he was putting his family and himself at high risk of danger. His primary though for being associated with the drug cartel was just to obtain enough money to support his family and to pay for his cancer, once he realized he had it, but after he realized what he was getting in to it was to late to get out and eventually his closest friend was killed.