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Literary notes about baffled (AI summary)

The word baffled is deployed with remarkable versatility across literary works, often conveying a sense of confusion, thwarted intent, or overwhelming surprise. In heroic narratives, it is used to describe warriors whose determined actions end up misdirecting the enemy’s force, thereby underlining both physical and strategic bewilderment ([1], [2]). In more introspective texts, baffled portrays an inner turmoil or a puzzling state of mind when characters struggle to reconcile their feelings or circumstances ([3], [4]). Poetic treatments also employ baffled to evoke the disarray of fate or nature, lending a rhythmic quality to the narrative that emphasizes the inescapability of uncertainty ([5], [6]). Across these varied contexts, the term enriches the narrative by signaling moments when planning is upended, both externally and within the human soul ([7], [8]).
  1. Then the mighty Bhima of dreadful prowess, baffled his (the Rakshasa’s) discharge by resorting to his skill in mace-fighting.
    — from The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1
  2. O accept this weapon of mine—the mace I wield incapable of being baffled by any body.
    — from The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1
  3. Baffled and discouraged at times, I had asked myself the question, May not this, after all, be God’s work?
    — from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
  4. But I was baffled in every attempt I made for this purpose.
    — from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
  5. Woe to the conquering, not the conquered host, Since baffled Triumph droops on Lusitania's coast.
    — from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Baron George Gordon Byron Byron
  6. said I to myself, Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
    — from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
  7. A Wooster is seldom baffled for more than the nonce."
    — from Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
  8. I.26 With a defeated joy, ] i.e. , with joy baffled; with joy interrupted by grief.
    — from Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare

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