The night the bed fell by james thurber. “The Night the Bed Fell” by James Thurber 2022-11-09

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A classification essay is a type of academic writing that organizes and categorizes ideas or objects into specific groups or categories. The purpose of this type of essay is to provide a clear and logical structure for presenting information, making it easier for the reader to understand and process.

There are many different ways to write a classification essay, and the specific approach will depend on the topic and the purpose of the essay. However, there are a few common elements that are typically included in this type of essay.

One of the key elements of a classification essay is the use of clear and concise categories or groups. These categories should be based on a logical principle, such as shared characteristics or common features. It is important to ensure that the categories are mutually exclusive and exhaustive, meaning that they should cover all of the possible options and not overlap with one another.

Another important element of a classification essay is the use of examples to support and illustrate the categories. These examples should be relevant and specific, and they should help to clarify and reinforce the points being made in the essay.

Here are a few examples of classification essay topics and the categories that could be used to organize the information:

  1. Types of pets: This topic could be organized into categories such as dogs, cats, birds, small mammals, and reptiles. Each category could include examples of different breeds or species within that group.

  2. Forms of transportation: This topic could be organized into categories such as cars, buses, trains, planes, and bikes. Each category could include examples of different types of vehicles within that group, such as different makes and models of cars.

  3. Types of music: This topic could be organized into categories such as rock, pop, hip hop, classical, and jazz. Each category could include examples of different artists or styles within that group.

Overall, a classification essay is a useful tool for organizing and presenting information in a clear and logical way. By using clear categories and relevant examples, it is possible to effectively convey complex ideas and information to the reader.

List each character in “The Night the Bed Fell” by James Thurber and identify the strange characteristics (or paranoia) that he or she possesses.

the night the bed fell by james thurber

Her frantic pulls on it only added to the general banging and confusion. I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father. Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio to Charles L. Part of the semi-autobiographical, semifictional genre that Thurber excelled in, the piece describes a hilarious sequence of events and misunderstandings that purportedly took place one evening during the humorist's childhood in Columbus. It happened, then, that my father had decided to sleep in the attic one night, to be away where he could think. The banging on the attic door finally wakes Thurber's father, the deepest sleeper of the family, who believes the house must be on fire.

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The Night The Bed Fell by James Thurber

the night the bed fell by james thurber

Our bull terrier, Rex, slept in the hall. He thought that mother had become, for no apparent reason, hysterical. The layout of the rooms and the disposition of their occupants is important to an understanding of what later occurred. We could hear father crawling out of bed upstairs. Longtime New Yorker cartoonist and author Michael Maslin recounts a 1986 pilgrimage to the Thurber house in this Ink Spill entry from 2018.

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The Night the Bed Fell

the night the bed fell by james thurber

Hence I did not wake up, only reached-the edge of consciousness and went back. Herman, who knows his mother and her mind well, believes that she has finally lost it. As the shouting persists, however, the narrator calls out, moaning, about the noise, assuming he must be in some kind of horrible nightmare. He decided that the house was on fire. Still, it did take place. It was his feeling that if he were not awakened every hour during the night, he might die of suffocation. One of the writer's earlier New Yorker stories is also one of his best — "The Night the Bed Fell" from the summer 1933 series "My Life and Hard Times" July 8; the series was subsequently published as a hard-cover collection under the same title.


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SuperSummary

the night the bed fell by james thurber

By this time I was conscious of what was going on, in a vague way, but did not yet realize that I was under my bed instead of on it. Father caught a cold from prowling around in his bare feet but there were no other bad results. But I am straying from the remarkable incidents that took place during the night that the bed fell on father. Old Aunt Clarissa Beall who could whistle like a man, with two fingers in her mouth suffered under the premonition that she was destined to die on South High Street, because she had been born on South High Street and married on South High Street. The second is the date of publication online or last modification online. Foggy with sleep, I now suspected, in my turn, that the whole uproar was being made in a frantic endeavor to extricate me from what must be an unheard-of and perilous situation. .

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The Night the Bed Fell by James Thurber

the night the bed fell by james thurber

This is the backdrop of the story, which begins when Thurber tumbles out of the army cot that he uses for a bed and crashes to the floor in the middle of the night, waking his paranoid mother. This seemed to allay his fears a little, but he took the precaution of putting a class of spirits of camphor on a little table at the head of his bed. Some nights she threw them all, some nights only a couple of pair. Roy and the dog were now up, the one shouting questions, the other barking. My bed was an army cot, one of those affairs which are made wide enough to sleep on comfortably only by putting up, flat with the middle section, the two sides which ordinarily hang down like the sideboards of a drop-leaf table.

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The Night The Bed Fell By James Thurber

the night the bed fell by james thurber

We had visiting us at this time a nervous first cousin of mine named Briggs Beall, who believed that he was likely to cease breathing when he was asleep. In July 1951, after a quarter century of best-selling books, James Thurber was featured on the cover of Time magazine. Photo of Woollcott was taken upon his return from Europe in January 1933. My mother began to weep when she saw him. Then there was Aunt Sarah Shoaf, who never went to bed at night without the fear that a burglar was going to get in and blow chloroform under her door through a tube. I was not asleep, however, and called to him. The episodes first appeared in The New Yorker in eight installments during the summer of 1933 and then as a book in November.

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Story of the Week: The Night the Bed Fell

the night the bed fell by james thurber

This seemed to allay his fears a little, but he took the precaution of putting a class of spirits of camphor on a little table at the head of his bed. It was a boarder, not one of his aunts, who—thinking a thief was in the house—hurled a shoe through a transom window, shattering the glass. Both of his parents greatly influenced his work. Hearing the sound of James hitting the floor, his mother wakes with a start, absolutely certain that the sound she heard was the crash of the headboard in the attic bedroom, which she believes must have crushed her husband to death in his sleep. I guess it's the first chapter in a larger volume, which I may seek out later.


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My Life and Hard Times

the night the bed fell by james thurber

He reassures her that everything is fine and that she is all right, all while she is shouting for someone to save her husband from his entrapment underneath the heavy headboard she believes fell down. By midnight we were all in bed. It left me still warmly bundled up and unhurt, for the bed rested above me like a canopy. My mother began to weep when she saw him. The fact that she never missed anything was to her no proof to the contrary. The dog, who never did like Briggs, jumped for him assuming that he was the culprit in whatever was going on and Roy had to throw Rex and hold him.

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The Night the Bed Fell Themes

the night the bed fell by james thurber

Thurber remarried in June, 1935 to Helen Wismer. He slept in my room and I told him that I was such a light sleeper that if anybody quit breathing in the same room with me, I would wake Instantly. It makes a better recitation unless, as some friends of mine have said, one has heard it five or six times than it does a piece of writing, for it is almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and bark like a dog, to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. She was confident that burglars had been getting into her house every night for four years. His father, a sporadically employed clerk and minor politician who dreamed of being a lawyer or an actor, is said to have been the inspiration for the small, timid protagonist typical of many of his stories.

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James Thurber, “The Night the Bed Fell”

the night the bed fell by james thurber

He had been accustomed to setting an alarm clock to ring at intervals until morning, but I persuaded him to abandon this. The story is told chronologically, with a brief introduction describing some of the strange behaviors of the author's family that contribute to the chaotic plot of the brief tale. Many of his most famous pieces took a bit of family history or a funny incident and turned it into an over-the-top farce in which his friends and family became high-strung, yet somehow endearing, basket cases. My brother Roy was in a room across the hall from ours. It was at this juncture that I, in trying to get up, had the uncanny sensation of feeling my bed above me! The racket, however, instantly awakened my mother, in the next room, who came to the immediate conclusion that her worst dread was realized: the big wooden bed upstairs had fallen on father. But Mame, too, learned to enjoy the resulting celebrity, and she unhesitatingly—and frequently, it seems—boasted of being his mother to complete strangers. What on earth is that man on the left doing? Everyone is soothed and informed of the reality of the situation; despite the absurdity of the situation, all Thurber's mother can say is that she is glad that her father-in-law, Thurber's grandfather, is not home to see the excitement.


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