20;If this wind holds and the boat don’t swap, we can’t do much else”, is a statement from the captain. He has given up also. They feel they are up against a wall and can’t climb over. They all feel the lack of concern from the world around them. Voegele also writes that Crane “now understands what it is to be human; that constant striving in the face of futility, and that need for others that ultimately none of us can deny”. The reality in the story seems a bit harsh in the beginning, but it becomes evidence of the characters human spirit in the end. The main conflict is human vs. nature. A single human life is insignificant in respect to the rest of the world.Source: www.jvoegele.com/essays/openboat.htmlWilla Cather, “Paul’s Case”Paul seemed to me to be a boy who really needed good attention. His father emotionally abused him and he was looked down upon at school. All he really needed was someone who would just listen to him and talk to him like he was normal. Even though he was a problem child, I ended up liking Paul in the end of the story. I don’t know if it was a pity liking or what. You can’t help but feel sorry for someone who has lost their mother, who’s father abuses them, and who wants to make their life better but is stuck where they are. I also don’t think he had any learning disability either. I just think that he didn’t get the right chance because everyone looked down upon him like he was the devils spawn. People were not willing to give Paul a chance. On a website I found, the article could not agree more. They also had written that his teachers misunderstood Paul because he didn’t fully understand some of the harder lessons. In the article, they wrote about how Paul’s teachers “made Paul feel as if he were inferior to the other students, and that he was not worthy of their extra time for tutoring sess...
