My First Day at Au Essay Example for Free

My First Day at Au Essay Most people’s first day at college is the most stressful day of their lives because they don’t know what to expect or they just don’t want to go through an embarrassing situation, but for me it was the most exciting day of my life. First, I met new people who shared my interests, second it was a whole new experience for me in which success depended on me, and third it was the first day that I started studying something that I really liked. Finally I won’t forget it very easily because lots of things were accomplished in my first day at AIR UNIVERSITY First I met lots of people who were as excited as me for their first day at college. I really enjoyed that day because everybody I talked to were people who were going to Electrical Engineering with me, so we shared the same interest. My new friends and I talked a lot that day about the first things that crossed our minds, and then we exchanged our emails. In my case I tried to look for the people who were completely interested in the program, the ones that were 100% of what they were doing and that they were not going to drop out the program in afew months. Second, for me it was an amazing experience that I had never gone through in my life. For the first time in my entire life I was studying something that I was really into of. Studying Electrical Engineering for me was the best choice because I knew that I was meant to study this. The other new thing is that succeeding depended exclusively on me; nobody was going to be pushing me to study or to prepare my homework. This new stage in my life was totally new for me and it was something that I had to get used to.. Finally, I won’t forget that day because it was one of the most special moments of my life. That day I received more things of what I had expected, I got friends.I realized that there was something that I was really good at.I have no regrets, these last few days have been the most remarkable and greatest days of my life.

Conformity Speech -- essays research papers

Remember those times in class when the teacher has asked a question and the answer in mind is surely correct, yet when you look around the majority have chosen an option completely opposite? What about the time your friends pressured you into stealing that shirt or CD or involving in mocking little Johnny because he was a ‘geek’? At the time there was no problems. As a part of the group you felt confident, secure and â€Å"like so cool†. But when you found that your answer was actually the correct one or were caught with the items in your bag or punished for taunting Little Johnny, do you remember your cowardice reason for acting as you did? The vast majority of people will recall saying, â€Å"Everybody is doing it† – a sentence that is one of the worst four-word combinations in the English language. (Acknowledge/greet audience) Conformity involves the changing of one’s attitudes, opinions, or behaviours to match those of the ‘norms’. The â€Å"norms†, established by society, are what we should or ought to be thinking, feeling, or doing if we wish to be accepted into a group. This desire to be accepted and belong to a group is an undeniable human need. When faced with a challenging or trivial task, there are two common ways of handling the situation. One is to do sol vas according to one’s own personal desires and belief with no specific regard to other people. The other is to base the decision on the how others will view and respond to it. The most of us would probably fa...

In many ways the ideas in this dystopian novel are more important than the characters – with the exception of Offred and Moira

In many ways the ideas in this dystopian novel are more important than the characters – with the exception of Offred and Moira. The other characters tend to function as members of groups or as representatives of certain ideological positions. However, as Offred insists, every individual is significant, whatever Gilead decrees, and her narrative weaves in particularities: she continually writes in other voices in sections of dialogue, in embedded stories and in remembered episodes. It is a feature of Atwood's realism, even within a fabricated futuristic world, that she pays dose attention not only to location but to people and relationships. OFFRED Offred, the main protagonist and narrator, is trapped in Gilead as a Handmaid, one of the ‘two-legged wombs' valued only for her potential as a surrogate mother. Denied all her individual rights, she is known only by the patronymic Of-Fred, derived from the name of her current Commander. Most of the time she is isolated and afraid. Virtually imprisoned in the domestic spaces of the home, she is allowed out only with a shopping partner and for Handmaids' official excursions like Prayvaganzas and Salvagings. At the age of thirty-three and potentially still fertile, she is a victim of Gileadean sexist ideology which equates ‘male' with power and sexual potency, and ‘female' with reproduction and submission to the point where individuality is effaced. Offred's narrative, however, does not possess such diagrammatic simplicity, for she resists such reductiveness by a variety of stratagems that allow her to retain a sense of her own individuality and psychological freedom. She refuses to forget her past or her own name when she was a daughter, lover, wife and working mother; she refuses to believe in biological reductionism; and she refuses to give up hope of getting out of her present situation. She knows what she needs to pay attention to: What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth †¦ Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be' (Chapter 24). Offred's greatest psychological resource is her faculty of double vision, for she is a survivor from the past, and it is her power to remember which enables her to survive in the present. It is not only through flashbacks that she reconstructs the past (though these are her most effective escape routes from isolation, loneliness and boredom), but even when she walks down the road she sees everything through a double exposure, with the past superimposed upon the present, or to use her own layered image from Chapter 1, as a ‘palimpsest' where the past gives depth to the present. She has perfected the technique of simultaneously inhabiting two spaces: her Handmaid's space (or lack of it) and the freer, happier spaces of memory. Though she is forbidden to use her own name, she keeps it like a buried treasure, as guarantee of her other identity (‘I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day – Chapter 14). She gives her real name as a love token to Nick, and he in turn uses it as an exchange of faith when he comes for her with the black truck (‘He calls me by my real name. Why should this mean anything?' Chapter 46). Offred does not trust the reader with her real name, however, which is a sign of her wariness in a precarious situation, though there is a fascinating essay by a Canadian critic, Constance Rooke, which argues that it is coded into the text and that Offred's real name is June. What is most attractive about Offred is her lively responsiveness to the world around her. She is sharply observant of physical details in her surroundings, she is curious and likes to explore, and she has a very lyrical response to the Commander's Wife's beautiful garden. She observes its seasonal changes closely, for that garden represents for her all the natural fecundity and beauty that are denied by the regime but which flourish unchecked outside the window. It is also a silent testimonial to her own resistance: ‘There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light' (Chapter 25). Her response to the moonlight is equally imaginative, though noticeably tinged with irony, which is one of her most distinctive characteristics: ‘a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink. The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but A God, how beautiful anyway' (Chapter 17). Offred consistently refuses to be bamboozled by the rhetoric of Gilead, for she believes in the principle of making distinctions between things and in the precise use of words, just as she continues to believe in the value of every individual. Of the men in her life she says: ‘Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other' (Chapter 30). It is this sharpness of mind which informs her wittily critical view of her present situation, as in the satisfaction she gets out of teasing the young guard at the gate. ‘I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there' (Chapter 4). Her attitude is discreetly subversive but never openly rebellious. She watches for those moments of instability which she calls ‘tiny peepholes' when human responses break through official surfaces. Offred is mischievous, but, more seriously, she yearns for communication and trust between people instead of mutual suspicion and isolation. Ironically enough, her fullest human relationship in Gilead is her ,arrangement' with the Commander. This provides her with a ‘forbidden oasis', for it is in their Scrabble games that Offred is at her liveliest and hermost conventionally feminine. In his study, Offred and the Commander relate to each other by old familiar social and sexual codes, which alleviates the loneliness both feel. It is after her first evening that Offred does something she has never done before in the novel: she laughs out loud, partly at the absurdity of it all, but partly out of a reawakening of her own high spirits. Yet she is too intelligent ever to forget that it is only a game or a replay of the past in parodic form, and her outing to Jezebel's confirms this. For all its glitter, her purple sequined costume, like the evening, is a shabby masquerade, and in the clear light of day she is left sitting with ‘a handful of crumpled stars' in her lap (Chapter 46). Living in a terrorist state, Offred is always alert to the glint of danger, as in her first unexpected encounter with Nick in the dark where fear and sexual risk exert a powerful charge which runs through the novel to its end. Their love represents the forbidden combination of desire and rebellion, and it is through that relationship that Offred manages to find new hope for the future and even to accommodate herself to reduced circumstances in the present, like a pioneer who has given up the Old World and come to the wilderness of a new one: ‘I said, I have made a life for myself, here, of a sort. That must have been what the settlers' wives thought' (Chapter 41). Offred shows through her detailed psychological narrative how she can survive traumas of loss and bereavement and how she manages to elude the constraints of absolute authority. We know little about her physical appearance because the only time she ever mentions it is when she is at her most bizarre, in her red habit with her white winged cap or in her purple sequined costume at Jezebel's. But we know a great deal about her mind and feelings and her sense of wry humour. We also know that she is a highly selfconscious narrator and that she is aware of contradictions and failings within herself She knows that she lacks Moira's flamboyant courage, and she accuses herself of cowardice and unreliability, just as at the end she feels guilty for having betrayed the household who imprisoned her. Yet, despite her own self-doubts, Offred manages to convince us of her integrity. She survives with dignity and she embraces the possibility of her escape with hope. Her narrative remains a witness t o the freedom and resilience of the human spirit. Offred and Moira are the two main examples of feminist positions in the novel (unlike the older women Serena Joy and the Aunts). Yet they are very different from each other, for Offred's resistance always works surreptitiously and through compromise, whereas Moira is more confrontational. Offred represents Atwood's version of a moderate heterosexual feminism in contrast to Moira's separatist feminism. MOIRA Moira, always known by her own name because she never becomes a Handmaid, is strongly individual, although she is also a type of the female rebel. This is a position which can be viewed in two ways, and both of them are illustrated here. From Offred's point of view Moira is the embodiment of female heroism, though from the Gileadean authorities' point of view she is a ‘loose woman', a criminal element, and her story follows the conventional fictional pattern of such rebellious figures: when Offred last sees her she is working as a prostitute in Jezebel's. Even here, Moira manages to express her dissidence, for she remains a declared lesbian and her costume is a deliberate travesty of feminine sexual allure, as Offred notices when she meets her again on her night out with the Commander. Moira's own wryly comic comment on it is, ‘I guess they thought it was me' (Chapter 38). Moira, too, is a survivor of the American permissive society, a trendy college student who wears purple overalls and leaves her unfinished paper on ‘Date Rape' to go for a beer. Much more astute about sexual politics than Offred, she is an activist in the Gay Rights movement, working for a women's collective at the time of the Gilead coup. When she is brought into the Rachel and Leah Centre she is still wearing jeans and declares that the place is a ‘loony bin' (Chapter 13). She cannot be terrorised into even outward conformity-, instead she tries to escape and succeeds on her second attempt. She manages to escape disguised as an Aunt. Always funny and ironic, to the other women at the Centre she represents all that they would like to do but would not dare: ‘Moira was our fantasy. We hugged her to us, she was with us in secret, a giggle; she was lava beneath the crust of daily life. In the light of Moira, the Aunts were less fearsome and more absurd' (Chapter 22). Moira continues to surface in Offred's narrative, bobbing up in memory, until her devastatingly fimny final appearance at Jezebel's. Behind the comedy, however, is the fact that Moira has not managed to escape after all, and as an unregenerate has been consigned to the brothel, where she tells Offred that she has ‘three or four good years' ahead of her, drinkingand smoking as a Jezebel hostess, before she is sent to the Colonies. Our last view of Moira is on that evening: ‘I'd like her to end with something daring and spectacular, some outrage, something that would befit her. But as far as I know that didn't happen' (Chapter 38). Moira is one of the spirited feminist heroines, like Offred's mother and Offred's predecessor in the Commander's house who left the message scrawled in the closet. The sad fact is these women do get sent off to the Colonies or commit suicide, which Offred herself refuses to do. Offred and Moira are both feminist heroines, showing women's energetic resistance to the Gilead system, but there are no winners. Neither compromise nor rebellion wins freedom, though it is likely that Offred is rescued by Nick. However, their value lies in their speaking out against the imposition of silence, challenging tyranny and oppression. Their stories highlight the actions of two individual women whose very different private assertions become exemplary or symbolic. Their voices survive as images of hope and defiance to be vindicated by history. SERENA JOY Serena Joy, the Commander's Wife, is the most powerful female presence in Offred's daily life in Gilead, and as Offred has plenty of opportunity to observe her at close quarters she appears in the narrative as more than just a member of a class in the hierarchy of Gileadean women. As an elderly childless woman she has to agree to the grotesque system of polygamy practised in Gilead and to shelter a Handmaid in her home, but it is plain that she resents this arrangement keenly as a violation of her marriage, and a continual reminder of her own crippled condition and fading feminine charms. The irony of the situation is made clear when Offred remembers Serena Joys past history, first as a child singing star on a gospel television show, and later as a media personality speaking up for ultra-conservative domestic policies and the sanctity of the home. Now, as Offred maliciously remarks, Serena is trapped in the very ideology on which she had based her popularity: ‘She stays in her home, but it doesn't seem to agree with her' (Chapter 8). Serena's present life is a parody of the Virtuous Woman: her only place of power is her own living room, she is estranged from her husband, jealous of her Handmaid, and has nothing to do except knit scarves for soldiers and gossip with her cronies or listen to her young voice on the gramophone. The only space for Serena's self-expression is her garden, and even that she cannot tend without the help of her husband's chauffeur. If flowers are important to Offred, so are they too to Serena, and she often sits alone in her ‘subversive garden', knitting or smoking. To see the world from Serena's perspective is to shift the emphasis of Offred's narrative, for these two women might be seen not as opposites but as doubles. They both want a child, and the attention of them both focuses on the Commander of whom Serena is very possessive: ‘As for my husband, she said, he's just that. My husband. I want that to be perfectly clear. Till death do us part. It's final' (Chapter 3). Offred seldom knows what Serena is thinking, though there are indications of her attitudes and tastes in the jewels and the perfume she wears and in the furnishings of her house: ‘hard lust for quality, soft sentimental cravings' as Offred uncharitably puts it (Chapter 14). There is also evidence of a certain toughness in Serena's cigarette-smoking and her use of slang, not to mention her suggestion that Offred, unknown to the Commander, should sleep with Nick in order to conceive the child she is supposed to produce: ‘She's actually smiling, coquettishly even; there's a hint of her former small-screen mannequin's allure, flickering over her face like momentary static' (Chapter 31). But Serena has her revenges too: she has deliberately withheld from Offred the news of her lost daughter and her photograph which Offred has been longing for. By a curious twist, Serena occupies the role of the wife in a very conventional plot about marital infidelity, as well as in the privileged Gileadean sense. She is one of the points in the triangular relationship which develops between Offred and the Commander: ‘The fact is that I'm his mistress †¦ Sometimes I think she knows' (Chapter 26). Actually, she does not know until she finds the purple costume and the lipstick on her cloak. It is a clich6-like situation, but Serena's own pain of loss goes beyond this conventional pattern: †¦ Behind my back,† she says. â€Å"You could have left me something.†Ã¢â‚¬Ëœ Offred wonders, ‘Does she love him, after all?' (Chapter 45). Serena is still there in her house, standing anxiously beside the Commander at the end as Offred is led out through the door. Her farewell to Offred is wifely in an old-fashioned sense which has none of the pieties of Gilead: †¦ Bitch,† she says. â€Å"After all he did for you (Chapter 46). THE OTHER COMMANDERS' WIVES These merely exist as a gaggle of gossips in blue, for Offred knows nothing of their lives apart from overhearing snatches of their conversation at Birth Days, Prayvaganzas or social visits, when they make scandalous comments about their Handmaids. Only the Wife of Warren achieves a moment of grotesque individuality when she is seen sitting on the Birth Stool behind Janine, ‘wearing white cotton socks, and bedroom slippers, blue ones made of fuzzy material, like toilet-seat covers' (Chapter 21). There is also one other unfortunate Wife who is hanged at the Salvaging, but Offred does not know what her crime was. Was it murder? Was it adultery? ‘It could always be that. Or attempted escape' (Chapter 42). THE AUNTS Like the Wives, the Marthas, the Econowives and most of the Handmaids, these are presented as members of a class or group, every group representing a different female role within Gilead. With their names derived from preGileadean women's products, the Aunts are the older women who act as female collaborators on the orders of the patriarchy to train and police Handmaids. They are a paramilitary organisation, as is signified by their khaki uniforms and their cattle prods, and, as propagandists of the regime, they tell distorted tales of women's lives in the pre-Gileadean past. The villainesses of the novel, they are responsible for the most gruesome cruelties, like the female Salvagings and the Particicutions, as well as for individual punishments at the Rachel and Leah Centre. Only Aunt Lydia is individuated, and that is by her peculiar viciousness masquerading under a genteel feminine exterior: ‘Aunt Lydia thought she was very good at feeling f6r other people' (Chapter 8). A particularly sadistic tormentor, Aunt Lydia is an awful warning that a women's culture is no guarantee of sisterhood as Offred's mother's generation of feminists had optimistically assumed, but that it is also necessary to take account of some women's pathological inclinations towards violence and vindictiveness. OFGLEN AND OFWARREN Only two of the Handmaids, Ofglen and Ofwarren Ganine), emerge as individuals, one because of her courage and rebelliousness and the other because she is the conventional female victim figure. Both are casualties of the Gileadean system. Ofglen has no past life that Offred knows about, but she does have a secret life as a member of the Mayday resistance movement which she confides to Offred after weeks as her shopping partner. There is nothing exceptional about her appearance except her mechanical quality which Offred notices, ‘as if she's voice- activated, as if she's on little oiled wheels' (Chapter 8). Offred is proved right in her suspicions, for under the disguise of Handmaid, Ofglen is a sturdy resistance fighter. She identifies the alleged rapist as ‘one of ours' and knocks him out before the horrible Particicution begins. She also dies as a fighter, preferring to commit suicide when she sees the black truck coming rather than betray her friends under torture. Offred learns this from her replacement, the ‘new, treacherous Ofglen', who whispers the news to her on their shopping expedition. Janine is a female victim in both her lives: before Gilead when she worked as a waitress and was raped by a gang of thugs, then as a Handmaid. At the Rachel and Leah Centre she is a craven figure on the edge of nervous collapse, and consequently one of Aunt Lydia's pets. Though she has her moment of triumph as the ‘vastly pregnant' Handmaid Ofwarren in Chapter 5, she is also a victim of the system with which she has tried so hard to curry favour. Even at the Birth Day she is neglected as soon as the baby is born and left ‘crying helplessly, burnt-out miserable tears' when her baby is taken away and given to the Wife (Chapter 21). There is no reward for Janine. Her baby is declared an Unbaby and destroyed because it is deformed; Janine becomes a pale shadow overwhelmed with guilt; finally, after the Particicution, when Offred sees her again, she has slipped over into madness. OFFRED'S MOTHER Offred's mother and her life belong to the history of feminism which is being recorded in this novel, for she joined the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, campaigning for women's sexual and social freedom. As an older woman she continued to be a political activist, and at the time of the Gileadean take-over she disappeared. Only much later does Offred learn that she has been condemned as an Unwoman and sent to the Colonies. Like Moira, and possessing the same kind of energy, Offred's mother resists classification. In an odd way she even resists being dead, for she makes two startling appearances in the present, both times on film at the Rachel and Leah Centre. On one occasion Offred is shocked to see her as a young woman marching toward her in a pro-abortion march, and later Moira reports seeing her as an old woman working as slave labour in the Colonies. Offred's mother is, however, more than a feminist icon. She haunts her daughter's memory, and gradually Offred comes to understand her mother's independence of mind and to admire her courage. Her mother is evoked in a series of kaleidoscopic images: at a feminist pornographic book burning (Chapter 7), with a bruised face after an abortion riot (Chapter 28), and as an elderly woman proudly defending her position as a single parent to Offred's husband, while accusing her daughter of naivet6 and political irresponsibility. It is her jaunty language which Offred remembers as distinguishing her mother: A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. Not that your father wasn't a nice guy and all, but he wasn't up to fatherhood. Not that I expected it of him. Just do the job, then you can bugger off, 1 said, I make a decent salary, I can afford daycare. So he went to the coast and sent Christmas cards. He had beautiful blue eyes though. (Chapter 20) An embarrassing but heroic figure, this is the woman whom her daughter misses when it is all too late, though Offred continues her dialogue with her mother in her own mind as a way of keeping her alive: ‘Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one. It isn't what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies' (Chapter 21). Finally Offred tries to lay her mother to rest, but without success: ‘I've mourned for her already. But I will do it again, and again' (Chapter 39). Deprived of the freedoms which her mother fought for, Offred learns to admire her mother's courage and to value her memory as a vital link with her own lost identity. Her elegy to her mother underlines the thematic motif of Missing Persons, and particularly lost mothers and daughters, which runs through the novel. MALE CHARACTERS The few male characters in this novel seem little more than functionaries of the patriarchal state or functional to the workings of the plot. Most of them have no names but only group identities like ‘Angels' or ‘Eyes' or ‘the doctor', while Professor Pieixoto is a satirical sketch of a male academic. Only three male characters are given any individuating characteristics. They are Offred's Commander, her lover Nick, and her absent, vanished husband Luke. THE COMMANDER The Commander is the most powerful authority figure in Offred's world. He is a high-ranking government official, and he is head of the household to which Offred is assigned. It is his first name which she takes, though whether as a slave or as a parody of the marriage service is never made clear. Yet he is an ambiguous figure, substantial but shadowy, whose motivations, like his career in Gilead, remain unclear to Offred; even in the ‘Historical Notes' his identity remains uncertain. As a Commander he wears a black uniform and is driven in a prestige car, a Whirlwind. He is an elderly man with ‘straight neatly brushed silver hair' and a moustache and blue eyes. He is slightly stooped and his manner is mild (Chapter 15). As Offred observes him with his gold-rimmed glasses on his nose reading from the Bible before the monthly Ceremony, she thinks he looks ‘like a midwestern bank president', an astute judgement, as he tells her much later that before Gilead he was in market research (Chapter 29). The image he presents is that of male power, isolated and benignly indifferent to domestic matters, which include his Wife and his Handmaid. This is, however, not entirely true, for Offred has seen him earlier on the day of the Ceremony, a figure lurking in the shadows outside her room, who tried to peer at her as she passed: ‘Something has been shown to me, but what is it?' (Chapter 8). It is only after the official Ceremony, performed by the Commander in full dress uniform and with his eyes shut, that Offred has the chance to get to know him a little and his stereotypical male power image begins to break down. It is he who asks her to visit him ‘after hours' in his study, for he is a lonely man who desires friendship and intimacy with his Handmaid and not the serviceable monthly sex for which she has been allocated to him. In his Bluebeard's chamber, what he has to offer is not ‘kinky sex' but Scrabble games and an appearance of ‘normal life', with conversation and books and magazines, all of which he knows are forbidden to Handmaids. On his own private territory the Commander is an old-fashioned gentleman with an attractive sheepish smile, who treats Offred in a genially patronising way and gradually becomes quite fond of her. ‘In fact he is positively daddyish' (Chapter 29). He seems to have the ability to compartmentalise his life (in a w ay that Offred cannot manage) so that he can separate her official role as sexual slave from her unofficial role as his companion. In many ways the Commander's motives and needs remain obscure to Offred, though they do manage to develop an amiable relationship, which from one point of view is bizarre and from another is entirely banal: ‘The fact is that I'm his mistress' (Chapter 26). Yet their relationship is still a game of sexual power politics in which the Commander holds most of the cards, as Offred never allows herself to forget. For all his gallantry, he remains totally trapped in traditional patriarchal assumptions, believing that these are ‘Nature's norm' (Chapter 34) and allow exploitation of women, as his comments and conduct at Jezebel's suggest. Their private sexual encounter there ends in ‘futility and bathos' and is strongly contrasted with Offred's meeting with Nick later that same evening. As she leaves his house for the last time, Offred sees the Commander standing at the living-room door, looking old, worried and helpless. Possibly he is expecting his own downfall, for nobody is invulnerable in Gilead. Offred has her revenge, for the balance of power between them has shifted: ‘Possibly he will be a security risk, now. I am above him, looking down; he is shrinking' (Chapter 46). The academics go to some trouble later to establish the Commander's identity: he may have been ‘Frederick R. Waterford' or ‘B. Frederick Judd'. Waterford, it is revealed, had a background in market research (which seems most likely), while the more sinister Judd was a military strategist who worked for the CIA. Both of them ‘met their ends, probably soon after the events our author describes'. NICK Nick is presented as the central figure of Offred's romantic fantasy, for he is the mysterious dark stranger who is her rescuer through love. He also hasa place in her real world, of course, as the Commander's chauffeur and the Commander's Wife's gardener. He ‘has a French face, lean, whimsical, all planes and angles, with creases around the mouth where he smiles' (Chapter 4) and a general air of irreverence, wearing his cap at a jaunty angle, whistling while he polishes the car, and winking at Offred the first day he sees her. At the household prayers he presses his foot against hers, and she feels a surge of sensual warmth which she dare not acknowledge. In the daytime he is rather a comic figure but at night he is transformed into Offred's romantic lover, the embodiment of sexual desire. This transformation is made all the more piquant because he is always acting under orders, either as the Commander's messenger or as the lover chosen for Offred by the Commander's Wife. From their first unexpected encounter in the dark living room (Chapter 17) theirs is a silent exchange which carries an unmistakable erotic charge. It is Nicles hands which make his declaration: ‘His fingers move, feeling my arm under the night-gown sleeve, as if his hand won't listen to reason. It's so good, to be touched by someone, to be felt so greedily, to feel so greedy (Chapter 17). As a subordinate, Nick, like Offred, has to remain passive until ordered by the Commander's Wife to go to bed with Offred. On that occasion his attitude is not directly described but veiled by Offred's three different versions of that meeting. Certainly she falls in love with him, and in defiance of danger she returns many times to his room across the dark lawn on her own. Towards the end, she tells him that she is pregnant. Nevertheless, her description of their love-making is suggestive rather than explicitly erotic, and Nick tends to remain a mysterious figure. Even at the end when he appears with the Eyes to take her away, Offred really knows so little about him that she almost accuses him of having betrayed her, until he calls her by her real name and begs her to trust him. Ever elusive, he is the only member of the household not there to see her depart. We want to believe that Nick was in love with Offred, and we must assume from the ‘Historical Notes' that he did rescue her and that he was a member of Mayday resistance. However, as a character he is very lightly sketched and it is his function as romantic lover which is most significant. LUKE Luke, Offred's husband, is one of the Missing Persons in this novel. Probably dead before the narrative begins, he haunts Offred's memory until he fades like a ghost as her love affair with Nick develops. He is the one person Offred leaves out when she tells the story of her past life to Nick (Chapter 41), though she is still worrying about him at the end (Chapter 44). He is also the most fragmented character in the text, appearing briefly as a name in Chapter 2, and then gradually taking on an identity as Offred's lover, husband and the father of her child. He is a figure whose life story stopped for Offred at a traumatic point in the past: ‘Stopped dead in time, in mid-air, among the trees back there, in the act of falling' (Chapter 35). Through her reconstruction Luke appears as a late twentieth-century ‘liberated man', full of courage and humour and remembered by Offred entirely in his domestic relations with her. He is an older man who has been married before, so that there is an ironic parallel drawn between him and the Commander. Offred remembers their affair when she goes with the Commander to Jezebel's, for it is the hotel where she and Luke used to go (Chapter 37). She retains the memory of a strong loving partner, and her detailed recollections are of Luke cooking and joking with her mother, of lying in bed with her before their daughter was born, of collecting their daughter from school. We never know what Luke's job was, but Offred recalls his supportive behaviour when she lost her job at the time of the Gileadean take-over and her resentment against him for being a man (Chapter 28). Luke figures insistently in Offred's recurring nightmare of their failed escape attempt, not only in that final image of him lying shot face down in the snow, but also in her recollections of his careful preparations and his coolly courageous attempt to take his family to freedom over the Canadian border. His afterlife in the novel is very much the result of Offred's anxieties about what might have happened to him. Is he dead, or in prison? Did he escape? Will he send her a message and help her to escape back into their old family life? ‘It's this message, which may never arrive, that keeps me alive. I believe in the message' (Chapter 18). It is also her hope of this message which keeps the image of Luke alive. The anxieties we may feel for his fate are projections of Offred's own.

An Analytical Report On Wesfield Incorporation Finance Essay - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 8 Words: 2270 Downloads: 4 Date added: 2017/06/26 Category Finance Essay Type Analytical essay Did you like this example? Establishment: It was founded in 1903 in Georgia as a manufacturing of disposable paper cones for the growing textile industry. Employees: Westfield employed more than 1000 person in operations throughout the United States. Position: Westfield was the leading manufacturing of paper tubes for the paper industry, the 3rd largest manufacturing of composite cans, and one of the largest users of west paper. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "An Analytical Report On Wesfield Incorporation Finance Essay" essay for you Create order Conversion to packaging company: Westfield was a paper company but through accusations and internal development, it was now (in 1986) disrobed as a packaging company. The company was moving into plastic packaging with the production of plastic containers to complement the composite can product line. Composite cans Project Composite can are manufactured from convolutedly or spirally owned plies of paperboard with labels and liners of foil, plastic or paper. The major advantage of composite cans is that they offered definite cost advantage. For can manufacturers, they were less expensive to fabricate than material and glass container. The composite cans could be produced at a rate of 24000 per hour. No proprietary technology was employed in the manufacture of composite cans. Companies competed on quality, service, and packaging innovation. Price was already low less than one half can per cent. There was little room for price wars. Packaging innovation was either developed internally or at the instance of a customer. Customers allows try to introduce their product at a differentiated form. So as to insure competitive advantage then other competitors and to insure cost saving. The outside packaging was usually the first thing the consumer saw of the product were making the decision of which the product to buy. The package had to be easily filed and functional in holding the product without product without package or product deterioration. The composite can satisfied a majority of these characteristics requirement. It met customers need for a strong, lightweight alternative to metal and glass containers and could take advantage of high speed filling equipment with minimal changeover cost. Criteria of project selection When any project is evaluated, Westfield maintains the following criteria: 1) Westfield requires a 15% after tax return on investment. 2) Pricing should cover the following cost: variable and manufacturing cost, plant fix ed cost, marketing, technical and administrative cost (MTA), and recovery of initial capital outlay. 3) Westfield used a straight line depreciation period of eight years and allocated MTA as 5 percent of net sales. 4) Account receivable and inventory averaged 25% days of sales and 50 day of cost of goods sold, respectively. Critical Analysis of the Project People: Every organization is the group of people striving to achieve common goal. People are the blood of every organization. So it is very important to select good and effective people those can achieve the organizations goal. This people must be directed by the efficient leader. By analyzing people composition of the company is quite good. It is the third largest company of its industry. It is lead by right people. Project management: A successful Project Manager must effectively manage the resources assigned to the project. This includes the labor hours of the designers, the builders, the testers and the inspect ors on the project team. It also includes managing any labor subcontracts. However, managing project resources frequently involves more than people management. The project manager must also manage the equipment used for the project and the material needed by the people and equipment assigned to the project. ÃÆ' ¢Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚ ¬Ãƒâ€šÃ‚ ¢ People: Project employees, vendor staff, subcontract labor ÃÆ' ¢Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚ ¬Ãƒâ€šÃ‚ ¢ Equipment: Cranes, trucks, backhoes, other heavy equipment or Development, test, and staging servers, CD burners or Recording studio, tape decks, mixers, microphones and speakers. ÃÆ' ¢Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚ ¬Ãƒâ€šÃ‚ ¢ Material: Concrete, pipe, rebar, insulation or CD blanks, computers, jewel cases, instruction manuals. Managing the people resources means having the right people, with the right skills and the proper tools, in the right quantity at the right time. It also means ensuring that they know what needs to be done, when, and how. And it means motivating them to take ownership in the project too. Team leadership: Team leadership differs from traditional top-down leadership in the following ways: Responsibility for group effectiveness is not on the leaders shoulders but is shared by the group. Control over the final decision is not held by the leader but is best left to the group. The importance of ones position and power are de-emphasized in team leadership. The leader perceives the group not as a set of individuals but as an interacting and collective team. The task-oriented functions of the team are not performed only by the leader but are shared by the entire group through its new roles. Group maintenance functions are not performed systematically but are emphasized and shared by the group as a whole. Socioemotional processes and interactions, while mostly ignored by leaders in top-down settings, are observed closely by team leaders. Expressions of members needs and feelings are not discourag ed but are encouraged by team leaders and are dealt with openly in meetings. SWOT Analysis Strengths: Westfield was the leading manufacturer of paper tubes for the paper industry. It is the 3rd largest manufacture of composite cans and one of the largest users of waste paper. Price is lower each cans at one and half cent The major advantage of composite cans was that they offered definite cost advantages. Weakness: Packaging innovation was either developed internally or at the instance of a customer. Historically Westfield was thought of as strictly a paper company Opportunities: Westfield had just licensed a plastics forming process, The plastic package was an attractive substitute for composite cans. Plastic packaging provided a functional solution to a long problem. Composite can satisfy the customer demand for convenient, reasonable packaging. Plastic would give Westfield a proprietary technological competitive advantage and provide i ts customer with a container that Westfields competitors could not offer. Threats The composite cans market had been threatened by alternative packaging type, principally plastic. If the plastic technology cannot be introduced portfolio in the market, the competitors will take the advantage of sneaking market share of Westfield. Take the more effective plasticak technology in time. Competitors can be more effective plastitek technology before the implementation of Westfield technology. As a result the Westfield expected market share can significantly fall. Risk Analysis Business risk Business risk is the uncertainty of income flows caused by the nature of a firms business. The more uncertain the income flows of the firm, the more uncertain the income flows to the investors. Business risk depends on a number of factors that are as follows Demand variability: The more stable the demand for a firms products, other things held constant, the lower its busine ss risk. Sales Variability Variability of Net Income Sales price variability: Firms whose products are sold in highly volatile markets are exposed to more business risk than similar firms whose output prices are more stable. Input cost variability: Firms whose input costs are highly uncertain are exposed to a high degree of business risk. Ability to adjust output prices for changes in input costs: Some firms are better able than others to raise their own output prices when input costs rise. The greater the ability to adjust output prices to reflect cost condition, the lower the business risk. Ability to develop new products in a timely, cost effective manner: Firms in such high-tech industries as drugs and computers depend on a constant stream of new products. The faster its products become obsolete, the greater firms businesses risk. Foreign risk exposure: Firms that generate a high percentage of their earnings overseas are subject to earnings declines due to e xchange rate fluctuations. Also, if a firm operates in a politically unstable area, it may be subject to political risk. The extent to which cost are fixed (operating leverage): If a high percentage of its costs are fixed, hence do not decline when demand falls, then the firm is exposed to a relatively high degree of business risk. This factor is called operating risk. Financial risk Financial risk is the uncertainty introduced by the method by which the firm finances its assets. If a firm uses only common stock to finance assets, it incurs only business risk. If in addition to using common stock, a firm borrows money to finance investments, it must pay fixed financing charges prior to providing income to the owners. Presently west field, Inc debt is low in so it incurs less financial risk but when the company will go for higher debt to capital structure then it will raise the financial risk. Financial Leverage: Financial leverage is created by sources of financing th at have fixed costs such as primarily debt requiring interest payments, preferred stock which obligates the company to make preferred dividend payments, leases which requires specified lease payments. These financing costs effects the companys EPS in the same way that operating fixed cost effects EBIT. The more fixed charge financing the firm uses, the more leverage it will have. The degree of financial leverage is calculated as: The degree of financial leverage reflects the leverage in the firm that is due to the firms financing policy. The effect of financial leverage is to magnify changes in EBIT into larger changes in EPS. The British expression of financial leverage is gearing. DuPont Analysis The importance of ROE as an indicator of performance makes it desirable to divide the ratio into several components that provide insight into the causes of a firms ROE or any changes in it. This breakdown of ROE into components ratios is generally referred to as the Dupont syste m. To begin, ROE ratio can be broken down into two ratios- net profit margin and equity turnover. Net Income Sales Total Assets  ¸  ¸ Total Debt Total Assets  ¸ Asset Turnover Profit Margin Financial Plan Return on Assets  ¸ (1-Debt/Assets) Return on Assets Return on Equity  ´ = From the figure we can see that Westfields return on equity was 18.29 % in year 1981 and after that return on equity decreased to 13.14 % in 1982 and 14.18% in year 1983. But after that ROE increases and in year 1985 ROE increased to 16.9%. Qualitative Judgment Price -Quality- Service Relationship If Westfield can ensure better quality service than other competitors it can charge little bit higher price. Competitive advantage Plastitek would give Westfield a proprietary technological competitive advantage and provide its customers with a container that Westfields competitors could not offer. Market Share Westfield already holding 23% market share of the total FCJ market. As their strategy in case of plastitek is proactive rather than reactive, so it has an opportunity to charge a higher price. Findings If Westfield launch Plastitek at the prevailing price of composite cans it can earn after tax ROI of 12.5% over the estimated eight year life of the projec t. If the projects life is stretched for further two years past its eight year estimated life it can earn on an average ROI of 13.67% over the life of the project. To meet the target after tax ROI of 15% Westfield would have to charge a price of $53.75 per thousand units that is $ 1.41 ( $ 53.75-$ 52.34) higher than the prevailing price of composite cans. NPV of the Plastitek project (at the prevailing price of composite cans For the estimated eight year life $ 847.39 thousands For 2 years past estimated eight year life $2394.57 thousands 5. IRR of the Plastitek project (at the prevailing price of the composite can) For the estimated eight year life 18.9% For 2 years past estimated eight year life 21.39% 6. NPV of the Plastitek project (at the new price of $ 53.75 per thousands) For the estimated eight year life $ 2763.29 thousands For 2 years past estimated eight year life $4514.86 thousands 7. IRR of the Plastitek project ( at the new price of $53.75 thousands) For the estimated eight year life 18.9% For 2 years past estimated eight year life 21.39% Recommendation Composite can project should be replaced by innovative Plastitek technology and will charge a price of $ 53.75 per thousands of cans. Besides this some significant recommendations are given below: Westfield should increase the employee cohesiveness by facilitating various social campaigns inside the organization. Management process should segmented in small groups and delegating authority to this small group to influence innovation. Besides management innovation technological innovation should bring to fulfill the customer needs and demand. Though financial condition of the firm is good more dynamic decision should bring in to accelerate their growth. Justification Targeted after tax ROI could be ensured with charging little bit higher price or premium of $ 1.41 than prevailing price (per thousand cans) to make the project economically feasible. Expected NPV with different scenarios is positive. Expected NPV with additional risk and inflation adjusted WACC is positive. The premium adjusted price that has ensured the targeted return would be quite possible because of Quality services provided by west field Introduction of innovative packaging system that would enhance price level through differentiating customers product than other competitors via increasing demand for Westfields plastitek packaging system. The tendency of moving toward plastic packaging of the industries that could provide the opportunity of price premium via increasing demand. IRR is higher than risk and inflation adjusted WACC Conclusion It could be expected that projects are managed and therefore that management theory would apply to the management of projects but this research has revealed that the commercial nature of the origin of management and the industrial nature of the origin o f projects has kept these two theories on separate paths. Of particular interest has been the discovery that neither management nor project management, despite their importance to society and longevity of application, have to date not been ascribed professional status. That is to say no formal accredited body represents the profession in either case. If one is to consider that these two occupations are responsibly for practically all of wealth production and consumption, then greater is the surprise that no governing body exists.