Essays on David Sedaris

David Sedaris’s Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is a collection of short stories, which are thought-provoking, symbolic, interpretative and at times delusional. Through the world of animals, the author immerses the reader into the world of morals, contrasts and human-relatable relationship patterns. The main devices, used for this, are personification and irony. With personification it is more or less straightforward: animals represent people, which adds spice and expressiveness to the stories. Irony, however, is used in its full force, making each story somewhat grasping and multi-layer, adding deep surface meaning to it. Overall, the purpose of the book is to ...

The essay SantaLand Diaries by David Sedaris is definitely a piece of fun and a great opportunity to improve your mood in case you feel sad. It is the story of the author, somewhat exaggerated about the way he worked as an elf in "SantaLand" at Macy's department store. The way he describes the stories he witnessed and took part in at work is really entertaining and interesting. Moreover, it makes me also think about the role of Christmas in my life and the way this holiday is celebrated. I do not completely share the attitude of Sedaris to the ...

Introduction

David Sedaris is known as a humorist. Time magazine named him the Humorist of the Year in 2001. Many of his essays are said to locate comedy in his childhood in North Carolina. The same can be said of these two of his essays: Six to Eight Black Men and Now We are Five. This paper compares and contrasts these two essays, covering a number of elements including whether they meet abide by the ‘humorist’ tag given him, and to what extent they may be autobiographical (that is, whether they are rooted in his childhood in North Carolina), as well as ...

Essay Prompt Two

Guilt and remorse are two common themes from “What Work Is” by Philip Levine and “Now We Are Five” by David Sedaris. These themes lead the reader to understand the cruelty of materialistic society and the important of family bonding.

In growth it is clearly seen in the poem that the health conditions of the workers were very pathetic while the work was tiresome and very difficult. The author therefore shows the cruelty of the society in treating its workers ruthless without taking consideration the amount of labor and productivity they are contributing to the state or country. The ...

“Us and Them” is a story by David Sedaris that is originally from his book Dress your Family in Corduroy and Denim which was first published in 2004. The story is about a family that does not have a TV in the neighborhood and the viewpoint comes to us from the author David, but when he was a boy. The boy’s perspective of the fact that this family has not a TV is in one sense not real because he is so young. But on the other way around it is real because he is a boy and so his thoughts are pure. The ...

In “Us and Them”, David Sedaris writes about his childhood when he finds a family that is very different from every family he knows. Sedaris writes about his younger self from an adult view. This view shows the amusement and sadness he finds about his life when he was young. When he was young, he did some things to other people that were not kind. He shows he does not approve of the way he acted as a child. An important message in “Us and Them” is that children are learning about themselves by watching to see how other people act ...