Travels with Charley essays

Travels with Charley essays Survival: the continuation of life and existence. Survival is the meaning of the piece from Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck. Although the many circumstances may arise, each living creature is trained to survive the environment in which it lives in. Survival is every beings first duty to perform, to try and beat the conditions of its life. In this piece, Steinbeck uses imagery as a way to let the reader visualize the setting in which he is writing about. Follow the double line of wheel tracks through sand and rock and you will find a habitation somewhere huddled in a protected place, with a few trees pointing their roots at under-earth water, a patch of starveling corn and squash, and strips of jerky hanging on a string. This sentence from the excerpt provides a perfect example of how his word choice and sentence structure creates great imagery for the reader. Steinbecks word choice provides a connection throughout his writing. At the beginning, he uses the word mystery twice in different forms to describe the desert. Steinbeck uses the word mystery to emphasize the way in which such a horrible place could actually be beneficial to anyone, or anything. He links this with the description of the desert, and later links it to his theory on the desert itself. The word itself foreshadows how mystery will be an important role in Steinbecks writing later in the piece. In addition, at the beginning, in sentence above, Steinbeck used great words to create a mental picture of the desert. Such words as huddled, protected, and starveling all generate a different aspect of the desert. Another way in which Steinbeck enhances his writing is in his sentence structure. Throughout the piece, there is not a specific way in which all of his sentences are written, but there are similarities among the sentences that cannot go un...