Question: Help to check my essay, please? This is a comment on Peter Carey's The Rose.\nrefer to: http://spaces.msn.com/xatom

Answer: (I have not read Peter Carey's "The Rose"...)\n\nYour story is very good, and I hope I’m not too late to have a look at it.  (I thought there might be others who would want to have a go at editing it before me!)\n\nI hope I have got the gist of it correctly; do you actually mean “glasshouse”, or would “greenhouse” be better all the way through?  In the UK we would normally use “greenhouse”.\n\nWell, here is how I would say it – just a few minor corrections:\n\nThe story is about how a former Commandant of Auschwitz hid himself in an isolated mountain village, passing his days by growing a black rose, (would you put, instead, “passing his days by growing a black rose, in fear of his fate….?) and his fate of being captured by the government.  The story is set in a poor Mediterranean town twenty-five years after World War II.  The former Nazi Commandant turned into an old man who made (a helmet while living in a shabby room/home/ house?  Not clear!)  He was afraid that the locals would identify him as a demon (try “criminal”, or “war criminal”), so he lived a simple life by growing roses.  As the town was (I would keep the tenses consistent) rural, aliens (or, more colloquially, “newcomers”?) were not very welcome, even though the old man (had?) lived there for twenty-five years.  In the story, there are contradictions between repentance and forgiveness; fear and hope; awe and fortune.\n\nThe settings of the story are rather vague.\n\nThe reader can only infer that the place is an isolated mountain village in which the locals spoke Spanish very badly.  It seems that the place is somewhere in the Mediterranean.  There are only about two sentences implying where it is: “I have looked for the village in an atlas and cannot find it”; “He spoke Spanish very badly”.  Such a vague description of place creates an atmosphere of loneliness that reflects the old man’s life.\n\nThe time is precise in detail but vague as a whole.  The author does not imply the exact time when the old man arrived in the town, but just says: “after twenty-five years”.  This shows that the longer the old man stayed there, the more horrified he felt.  In the story, the clock the old man sent to the school as a gift stopped, and “its hands were still showing eighteen minutes past seven when two more foreigners arrived in the village fifteen years afterwards”.  The description of the precise time shows the destiny of the old man while the author does not give the exact time.  The time is just a symbol.\n\nSymbolization is the most important feature of the story.\n\nThe old man planted roses and nurtured a tremendously large, black rose.  Roses are ancient symbols of love and beauty.  In the story, the black rose has its own special symbolic meaning, analysing it by its context.  First, as a true black rose is impossible to produce naturally, to grow one represents slavish devotion.  The old man put all his time and energy into growing roses in an intricately-wrought glasshouse, so that he produced a black rose twice the size of a man’s fist.  Black roses in subculture mean tragedy.  At the end of the story, the old man was captured/caught as a war criminal.  In addition, the black rose might denote shame and dishonour.  Why was the old man willing to be teased by the idle clerk?  Why did the old man look fragile and pitiful?  Maybe he felt shame for what he had done before in his life.  He might have wanted to atone for his crime by growing roses.  Furthermore, the black rose might symbolize the dark side of a person.  The old man knew that being captured was his destiny, no matter how he concealed his past, but the instinct of survival motivated him to take the chance.  Finally, the black rose in the story has an implication of hope of life.  The black rose was left while the old man was taken away, and its descendants were carefully nurtured by the locals.  They, in turn, show complex feelings towa
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