Mr. White in The Monkey’s Paw and Sammy in A&P are both protagonists who misjudge the situation around them. Even though they are different in age, name three or four similarities about their personalities or about what motivates them.

"The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs and "A&P" by John Updike have protagonists that are similar in a number of ways. Mr. White is an old British man and Sammy is an American teenager. Separated by age and geography, they are still kindred spirits when it comes to making poor decisions. You should consider how both Mr. White and Sammy are negatively affected by their curiosity.
Mr. White is interested in his friend, Sergeant-Major Morris, who traveled across the globe for the military. Mr. White remarks that he would like to go to India as well, to "just to look round a bit." This desire for the exotic grows when Morris produces the titular monkey paw. Despite repeated warnings, Mr. White takes the cursed item and makes a wish.
Sammy becomes curious when three girls walk into his grocery store wearing bathing suits. He ogles them, becoming distracted to the point where he cannot do his job properly. While staring he builds up a fantasy about the girls, imagining a hierarchy and interpreting meaning from the way they walk. When his manager chastises them for wearing bathing suits to the store, he decides that they must be defended. He tries to impress the girls by quitting in protest, not because he cares about them and their embarrassment but because he hopes "they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero."
Sammy and Mr. White make terrible choices because they are curious about a group of cute girls or an exotic item. Other similarities worth exploring are how they receive and reject warnings, as well as their interest in fantasies such as the Arabian Nights and the Queenie hierarchy.

How has the "To Be, or Not to Be" speech impacted art and literature?

Hamlet's first line in this particular soliloquy ("To be, or not to be") is very likely the line most famous in all of literature and film. This indirect reference to "being" or simply "existing" is also possibly the most famous one-liner of all time. It is a contemplation of suicide. It is a reflection upon the importance of life itself. It is melancholic wisdom in a nutshell. If we look at this line a little more closely, we see what most scholars readily admit: Hamlet is deeply pondering the benefits and the drawbacks of simply "existing" in this world. To put it more bluntly, Hamlet is considering suicide. This idea hinges on the verb "to be" being defined as "to exist." The rest of Hamlet's soliloquy is the character's melancholic reasoning for that suicide (which he never attempts). It is important to note that the entire soliloquy (which encompasses forty lines or so) is often alluded to in other works of literature. For example, another common indirect reference in other works of literature or art is to speak of "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." (There is even a movie from the 1980s called Outrageous Fortune, a direct allusion to Shakespeare's Hamlet.) Yet another common allusion in modern literature comes from the following line: "To die, to sleep-- / To sleep--perchance to dream." This line makes a direct comparison of the death of the mortal body to the act of sleeping. It also suggests a direct comparison of the afterlife that a person experiences after death to a dream that a person experiences during sleep. Another allusion that should be mentioned is "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all." In this line, Hamlet is admitting that, due to fear of hell or due to consequences in the afterlife, he becomes a "coward" in that he can't actually take his own life. Further, he subjects all of us to that idea. (Some scholars think the irony in that idea is that even though Hamlet remains a coward in not being able to commit the act of suicide, it is Ophelia who is the brave one by doing so.)

What role did William McKinley play in the Spanish–American War?

William McKinley was a former Congressman and Governor of Ohio before becoming the president of the United States in the election of 1896. McKinley had served in the Civil War and was generally thought highly by his superior officers for his actions as a soldier during the war. He had a national reputation as a capable legislator and for his work as governor.
McKinley took an interest in the revolution in Cuba almost immediately upon taking office. During this period of American history, the United States was in the national mindset of expanding American influence outside of the borders of the United States. Latin American countries and those located in the same hemisphere as the United States were looked upon as potential areas where the United States could flex diplomatic and military muscle, making the United States a player in international affairs. Cuba is approximately one hundred miles from the tip of Florida and drew particular interest from McKinley.
In February of 1898, the USS Maine (an American battleship) was thought to have hit a mine while entering into the port at Havana Cuba. The vessel sunk, and as you might imagine, the calls for retaliation rang loudly throughout the media in the United States. Spain was identified as the culprit and with requests for Congress to go to war McKinley was faced with a critical decision; go to war or negotiate a peaceful settlement by waiting to see more evidence of what caused the catastrophic explosion killing two hundred and sixty American sailors.
McKinley attempted to reconcile and negotiate with Spain to avoid war. No doubt, his experience in the Civil War influenced his thinking that the ends of war may be justified, but the means have catastrophic negative consequences on civilians and military alike. Spain had a reputation for having if not the finest fleet of naval vessels in the world certainly one of the most formidable. Uncertainty about the untested naval power of the United States may have also influenced McKinley to consider the possibility of avoiding war through diplomatic means. The evidence of the explosion on the USS Maine was determined by Naval Intelligence the result of an explosive mine, but no determination was made as to who had placed the mine in the harbor.
In the end, the public sentiment to retaliate for the sinking of the USS Maine resulted in a declaration of war. The sinking of the USS Maine was only part of the justification for war, as the Spanish had zealously suppressed the Cuban rebellion with aggressive military tactics that claimed the lives of innocent civilians as well as members of the rebel forces. American corporations had numerous investments in Cuba at the time, and it was thought the only way to protect those investments was to use military force. The Spanish–American War began and ended in about one hundred days, with the Spanish naval and military forces soundly defeated. The United States gained control over Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico.
Although McKinley tried to peacefully negotiate a pre-war settlement, he ended up successfully presiding over a war. As a footnote, McKinley's reluctance to immediately declare war for the sinking of the USS Maine was justified by historians and a group of naval investigators. In 1976, using modern forensic techniques, naval investigators determined the USS Maine sunk as the result of a fire and explosion in the ammunition lockers of the ship, not from contact with an explosive mine.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/mckinley.html

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-maine-explodes

https://www.newspapers.com/topics/american-imperialism/sinking-uss-maine/

Why was the woman who entered the carriage upset?

According to her husband, the woman is upset because their son, an only child to whom they have “devoted their entire lives” is set to leave for the warfront in three days time.
The couple enters the “stuffy and smoky second-class carriage” that already has five people in it, in the early morning. The two appear melancholy: The text describes the woman as “bulky and in deep mourning,” and the man as “puffing and moaning” with a “death-white face.” When the man asks his wife whether she is fine, she does not answer and instead “pulls her collar to her eyes, to hide her face.” The man then feels it in order to explain to the rest of the travelers in the carriage what the matter is with his wife. As he does this, the woman “twists and wriggles, sometimes growling like a wild animal,” for she is sure that her predicament isn’t to be pitied as there must be many people going through similar, if not worse experiences as a result of the war. Indeed, after her husband’s explanation, some of the travelers venture to explain how they too have suffered because of the war. One says that

“You should thank God that your son is only leaving now for the front. Mine has been sent there the first day of the war.”

Another says,

“I have two sons and three nephews at the front.”

They argue that they all are suffering from having their sons at the war-front and that the couple’s suffering isn’t unique.
One of the travelers, a fat old man with “bloodshot watery eyes of the palest gray,” joins the discussion and says that perhaps, it is better for their sons to die young, “without experiencing the ugly sides of life, the boredom of it, the pettiness.” He says that he does not cry even though he has lost a son at the war-front, for, before his death, his son sent to him a message saying that “he was dying satisfied at having ended his life in the best way he could have wished.”

In Guilliver's Travels, what two accidents hurt Gulliver while he is in the garden of the court?

In Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver goes to the garden of the court in part 2, chapter 5. There he is seen as extremely small among the large people of Brobdingnag, and his stature makes him extremely vulnerable to injury and danger. In the garden, Gulliver has all sorts of adventures, like rowing a boat in a river created by the queen and outrunning giant falling apples.
The two instances where Gulliver is hurt occur because of animals that happen on him in the garden. The first is when he is interacting with birds in the garden. Gulliver attempts to attack one of the birds and capture it, but the bird is close to his size, and it wakes up from its stupor to attack him:

However, the bird, who had only been stunned, recovering himself gave me so many boxes with his wings, on both sides of my head and body, though I held him at arm's–length, and was out of the reach of his claws, that I was twenty times thinking to let him go (part 2, chapter 5).

The second instance is like the first. A monkey at one point is released and takes Gulliver. The monkey isn’t trying to hurt him; instead, it is treating him like a child and feeding him sweets. The problem is that the monkey overfeeds him, and Gulliver becomes too full—and when he tries to escape, it squeezes him more tightly. Eventually, he can get away, and his injuries are described:

I was almost choked with the filthy stuff the monkey had crammed down my throat: but my dear little nurse picked it out of my mouth with a small needle, and then I fell a–vomiting, which gave me great relief. Yet I was so weak and bruised in the sides with the squeezes given me by this odious animal, that I was forced to keep my bed a fortnight (part 2, chapter 5).

Gulliver faces many dangers in the garden, but his encounters with the bird and the monkey are the two that cause him actual harm. He is lucky to survive his time in the garden, as many of the things that happen could easily kill him.

Can we equate the narrator’s voice with Welty’s?

In reading a piece of literature, one is almost always advised to separate the speaker or narrator from the author of the text. Even when the author and the speaker are indeed the same, the version of the author as he or she presents himself or herself within the context of a given text is still usually distinct from the author as a whole person.
In Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.,” Sister serves as the narrator who comes from a dysfunctional family of oddball characters in Mississippi. The central conflict Sister has is with her younger sister Stella-Rondo, whom Sister blames for both stealing her man (Mr. Whitaker) and thinking she is superior to Sister.
Welty was inspired to write this story based on a photograph she took while working for the WPA. The photograph depicts a woman using an ironing board in a post office. In light of these contextual realities, it would be a mistake to equate Sister’s voice with Welty’s personal voice.
Welty was certainly a Southerner, and her diction and character development are authentic aspects of her distinctly Southern realist style. However, voice typically refers to the persona behind what a character says. Welty is a skilled craftswoman who fleshes out a believable character in Sister, but Sister and Welty do not share the same narrative voice.

In act 1 scene 2 in Hamlet's soliloquy, how is the theme of revenge developed?

It is interesting to think about the theme of revenge before Hamlet has his meeting with the ghost of his father. At this point, Hamlet has no idea that Claudius might have murdered his father. The ghost has not yet asked Hamlet to avenge his death by killing Claudius.
Nevertheless, Hamlet, as we can see from this soliloquy, has angry thoughts and feelings, especially about the quick marriage of his mother to Claudius.
Hamlet opens the soliloquy wishing he could comment suicide: that is what the words mean when he says:

Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew


He wishes, too, that the "Everlasting" (God) did not forbid "self slaughter" (suicide). Suicide is anger turned inward, so we know that Hamlet is angry.

A sense of depression follows as Hamlet complains about the world as "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable." Then he returns to anger. He is very upset that his mother married Claudius fewer than two months after her husband died. Hamlet can hardly believe his mother would marry Claudius. He says that his father was:


So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr.


Hamlet means that his father was like a God of light (Hyperion) compared to Claudius, who is like an oversexed beast (a satyr is part man and part horse or goat and was supposed have large sex organs). We can tell that Hamlet is angry and disgusted with his mother.

Hamlet goes on to say that his father, also named Hamlet, treated his mother so gently that he hardly wanted a harsh wind to blow on her face:



he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly


And Hamlet remembers that his mother hung all over his father. It really galls him that now—as he determines it— "within a month—" (a change from two months) she remarried. This was much too fast, he thinks.

By the end of the soliloquy, Hamlet has worked himself into a frenzy of anger about his mother. He says "frailty thy name is woman," meaning she is weak, then criticizing her again for the remarriage. He says that even a beast would have waited longer—the word "God" is important in the passage below, showing his distress.



Why she, even she—
God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer!—married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules.


As Hamlet repeatedly and forcefully states, he is angry at his mother for two reasons: that she remarried so quickly and married a man he despises and hates as completely unworthy.

If you are going to talk about vengeance in light of this soliloquy, it seems important to note again that Hamlet is rage filled even before his encounter with the ghost—and that most of his rage is aimed at his mother. You could argue that it is his mother he subconsciously wants revenge on from the start, rather than Claudius. You could tie this to scene where he accuses her bitterly of making a mistake in marrying Claudius. This is act 3, scene 4, and Gertrude cries out in genuine fear that Hamlet is going to hurt her or kill her.


So, one way to go would be to argue that from the start Hamlet wants revenge against his mother, and this is what makes him hesitate to kill Claudius. People have talked for a long time about the Oedipal nature of the play—that Hamlet's rage against Claudius is driven by the fact that Claudius enacted what Hamlet secretly wanted, which was to kill his father and marry his mother (the Oedipal fantasy).

Does Hamlet hesitate to kill Claudius because Claudius, on a subconscious level, reminds him too much of himself and his own repressed desires? When he kills Polonius, thinking he is killing Claudius behind the arras in act 3, scene 4—the scene that links strongly to this soliloquy—can Hamlet do so only because he is in a frenzy and wants his mother to suffer by witnessing her new husband's being murdered?

These are all ideas that would connect this particular soliloquy to the revenge theme, and tie revenge to Oedipal desires.