Is the American Dream Attainable? (Essay)

Read the excerpt from flannery o'connor's "the life you save may be your own although the old woman lived in this desolate spot with only her daughter and she had never seen mr. shiftlet before, she could tell, even from a distance, that he was a tramp and no one to be afraid of. his left coat sleeve was folded up to show there was only half an arm in it and his gaunt figure listed slightly. which phrase connects these characters to the southern gothic genre? half an arm she had never seen his left coat sleeve folded up

Read the excerpt from cristina garcia’s dreaming in cuban.i don’t really want to talk about my father but i end up telling minnie how he used to take me horseback riding on our ranch, strapping me in his saddle with a leather seat belt he designed just for me. dad’s family owned casinos in cuba, and had one of the largest ranches on the island. there were beef cattle and dairy cows, horses, pigs, goats, and lambs. dad fed them molasses to fatten them, and gave the chickens corn and sorghum until they laid vermilion eggs, rich with vitamins. he took me on an overnight inspection once. we camped out under a sapodilla tree and listened to the pygmy owls with their old women’s voices. my father knew i understood more than i could say. he told me stories about cuba after columbus came. he said that the spaniards wiped out more indians with smallpox than with muskets.how does the structure of the excerpt add meaning to the passage? it includes historical information about the spaniards and indians to indicate the work is nonfiction.it describes the setting of the ranch owned by pilar’s cuban grandparents to explain family values.it uses several narrators to share their points of view about past and present life in cuba.it manipulates the chronological order of events to reveal the close relationship between pilar and her father.

"the only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. they were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house."