What is Chris Theodorakis' motive in the Sam Westing murder in "The Westing Game"?

Theoretically, Chris Theodorakis's possible motive in the the Sam Westing murder is to get the money he needs for treatment for his unidentified illness.  Chris had been "a perfectly normal kid" until about four years ago.  He started "to get clumsy, just little things at first", but the illness progressed until now, he is confined to a wheelchair, unable to control the severe spasms which wrack his body.  Chris, who has a special interest in ornithology, is intelligent and good-natured, completely in touch with what is going on around him, which makes his physical handicap that much more difficult to accept.  There is apparently an experimental operation available that might help him, but it is very expensive.

Despite the fact that he does have a motive to want Sam Westing's inheritance, it is highly unlikely that Chris is the murderer.  Chris does not dwell on his physical limitations, and in more than a few instances, it is pointed out that his interest in the Westing Game is based on his delight in being "part of the outside world".  He guards his clues and insights into the case carefully, doling them out sparingly to his partner, Denton Deere, so that the doctor will have to interact with him as long as possible.  Chris had never "asked for charity...all he wanted was to play the game".

How do you graph in four dimensions? That is, for mathematical dimensions for things like hypercubes and hyperspheres... NOT the Einsteinian idea...

Old Post I Know

 I wonder if anyone will see this?

 Couldn't the 4th plot be time in this way?  By representing the coordinates as themselves plus some rate of change?

 That is the coordinate for time could be a set of functions that show a rate of change for the values of the three other coodinates, at some specific amount of time later, so that in order to "graph" this you would need a series of graphs plotted one after another representing the effect of time on the other variables? A cube that doesnt change, if filmed, is a four dimensional plot of a 3-D object when film is played back and viewed, right? LOL

So, if you were to take say 23 pictures a second of a 3-d plot and run through the set of time functions for the xyz coordinates for each frame you film, then you could see how the shape changes over time. Or you could superimpose all the frames on top of each other and see what it looks like (the equivalent of showing all time functions at once, plotted)

LOL using a little mental gymnastics one can do this. LOL

In "Farenheit 451" what is the great black creature and what happens in Montags fantasy ?

The part you refer to occurs in part 3 of the book.  It is when Montag is drifting down the river after having fled his house where he'd kille Beatty.  He had stopped at Faber's house and Faber gave him old clothes, a suitcase, and told him to head to the river.  The "great, black creature" is the land he sees from the river at night.  It goes on and on because he's not in the city any longer.  The description adds to the tone of alienation and loneliness.  Montag feels he is completely alone in the world because everything he has ever known, he has left behind.  He has no idea of the direction in which he is headed.  Even as this feeling is flowing over him like the comforting water of the river is flowing over him, he begins to transition to a peaceful and happier mindset.  He realizes that the Hound, Millie, and the closed society he left is gone and he's happy to be free from them. In his fantasy, which stems from a childhood memory, Montag sees a barn with a hayloft and farm animals.  He sleeps in the soft hay of the hayloft and in the morning, at the foot of the stairs leading to the loft, is some fresh fruit and a cold glass of milk.  This represents a desire to return to simple, natural things in life.  It is at this point that Montag stops his fantasy and steps from the river onto the land.  He is also stepping into a new life.

What is structuralism for Literature?

Structuralism is a movement that goes back to the work of Ferdinand de Sausssure, the great linguist. The basic idea is that things (things can be anything) are part of a structure. So, words, in order to have meaning, have a structure. Or if one is studying myths, these myths, too, are part of a larger structure. In this way, the application of structuralism can be almost limitless - sociology, classics and anthropology come to mind. Structuralism is, in some ways, a study of part to whole.

So, when we come to literature, the point is that texts also have an underlying structure. To find this structure will be to find the meaning of the text. Also structuralism likes to see things through binaries. This should not surprise us, because, if there are structures, then there will probably also be binaries. Levi-Strauss is probably the one who is associated with this line of thinking most. Finally, it should be stated that literary approaches to structuralism are not without critics. Anything too neat is probably understating the problems and difficulties of life in the real world.

In "Twilight", is Edward a vampire, or are he and his family just pretending?

Edward and his family are vampires who are pretending to be humans. The younger looking vampires (Edward, Alice, Jasper, Emmet, and Rosalie) are pretending to be High School students, even though, in Edward's case, he has been a vampire since 1918. Esme and Carlisle pretend to be foster parents to the younger-looking vampires who are in High School, and Carlisle works as a doctor at the local hospital. The vampires pretend to be human so that they can live among humans easily. The Cullen family has chosen not to live as normal vampires, that is, they have chosen not to drink human blood. Instead they subsist on a diet of animal blood, and that way they don't have to kill humans.

In what city, province, and super-state does Winston Smith live in 1984?

In the opening paragraph of Chapter One of 1984, the reader learns that Winston lives in an apartment block called Victory Mansions. This block is in the city of London, the "chief  city" of the province called Airstrip One, which is the third most populous in Oceania. In 1984, Oceania is one of three super states, the other two being Eurasia and Eastasia.

What is most striking about this setting is how it differs from the reality of London, during Orwell's lifetime and today. In this dystopian vision, London is a dilapidated and crumbling city where people are constantly monitored, food is rationed, and war is ever-present. There are, perhaps, some parallels here to the London in which George Orwell lived and worked: 1984 was published only a few years after the end of World War Two, when London was still recovering from the physical and mental damage inflicted by the Nazis and rationing was still in full-swing. Here, however, the parallels end. The London of 1984 feels far more claustrophobic and oppressive than the real place and,  perhaps, this is done deliberately by Orwell. By using London as the setting of 1984, he gives the reader a stark and frightening glimpse of what fate could befall the city, if communism became a reality. 

How did Mary Davys's novella The Reformed Coquet help to reform the novel?

The mid-eighteenth century novels by women writers turned away from the Restoration idea of women as sexual objects, aware that the new middle class ideology of women as creatures solely of domestic accomplishment was as restricting and narrowly defining of womanhood as the Restoration ideology, though admittedly a much less violent assault on woman's psyche and personhood.

Mary Davys's novel The Reformed Coquet combines the established pleasurable qualities of the romance novel with a new instructional purpose, as was plainly stated in her introduction to The Reformed Coquet. Davys's escorted the novel away from the older romance model of a hero who was uninvolved emotionally and prone to mistreating women toward a new model in which the heroine was given opportunity to be autonomous while still adhering to society's mistakenly founded mores of submissive of females to males.

The Reformed Coquet went beyond good story telling by including liberal literary allusions to Edmund Spenser's epic moral tale The Faerie Queene, thus indicating that her Introduction was meant to be carried to good purpose and provide a new moral tale for women in England. This along with the new model of hero and the development of an autonomous, though social viable heroine, are some features of Mary Davys's The Reformed Coquet that helped reform the novel.

[For further information see Women and literature in Britain, 1700-1800, by Vivien Jones (pages 204-206)]