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A Gathering Of Old Men Analysis

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If you want something you need to work for it. If you’re not struggling for what you want then you aren’t working hard enough. The word struggle is something that a lot of people take for granted because of things like technology making it easier for everyday life while simultaneously making us lazier. Susan Muaddi Darraj in her book The Inheritance of Exile will perpetuate the struggles that the immigrant Palestinian women went through in arriving to the Americas after escaping the wars and difficulty in Palestine, Jerusalem. In correlation with these stories from South Philly, we will be able to connect them to the struggles of the old men in A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines as they recollect their memories that augment …show more content…

According to her past and experiences she is an independent strong and do what it takes to survive kind of individual. Huda’s explanation of “When you grow up in the camps and you see what I used to see” (191) demonstrates her bottled up emotions for either showing how proud or envious she is for the next generation of her people, in hopes that they never go through seeing friends and family killed as a result of warfare. Her bottled up emotions reflect the same bottled up emotions that every old men at Marshalls endured when Johnny Paul begins his epiphany of how Mapes “still don’t see. Yes, sir, what you see is the weeds, but you don’t see what we don’t see” (89). After numerous attempts of trying understanding what in the world the old men were talking about “seeing” and “not seeing”, Mapes is contrived to listen to their reason for their retaliation. Both stories embrace Baker’s idea of how “memory and place are woven into the fabric of everyday life in that while personal memory makes place out of space, collective memory contributes to peoples’ material and symbolic understanding of place through shared knowledges” (27). Huda’s personal memory demonstrated what kind of place Haifa was turning into and she did whatever it took to become a survivor. Therefore making it difficult to transition from a warzone lifestyle into a world where Huda thought people viewed survival as a

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Jacob Lawerence’s “Migration Series” encapsulates the black perspective of a massive migration in the early to mid 1900s. The movement of African Americans moving from the rural South to cities located in the North and West searching for opportunities and equality. It was a time of reinvention, through his multiple panel series, Lawerence showcases this movement between worlds. Through his panels Lawerence tells a story, a story of movement and change, but also one of hardship, violence, and discrimination. I picked the last panel of the Migration Series, No. 60, captioned, “ And the migrants kept coming.”

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From our textbook we are able to learn the base information of the depression and migrant workers. The document provides a deeper insight with first hand views on the mistreatment of workers by wealthy landowners. First hand photographs allow a real view of how the impoverished migrant camps actually looked. The photos, along with Steinbeck's firsthand observations and genuine concern for the human suffering that was taking place allows for students to be further engaged into the topic. Our Texbook, Give Me Liberty, describes how the depression transformed American life.

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In the novel, The People of The Book, the Sarajevo Haggadah serves as a way for Geraldine Brooks to reveal aspects and changes of personality in her novel’s characters

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John Steinbeck, in the novel, Grapes of Wrath, identifies the hardships and struggle to portray the positive aspects of the human spirit amongst the struggle of the migrant farmers and the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Steinbeck supports his defense by providing the reader with imagery, symbolism and intense biblical allusions. The author’s purpose is to illustrate the migrant farmers in order to fully exploit their positive aspects in the midst of hardships. Steinbeck writes in a passionate tone for an audience that requires further understanding of the situation.

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In The Gathering of Old Men, by Ernest J. Gaines, and The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, the authors follow the story of different black communities and how they are affected by oppression. In The Gathering of Old Men a white man, Beau, is found dead in a black man’s yard, Mathu. Mathu’s ‘daughter’ brings together all of the black men in the surrounding neighborhoods to say that they were the ones who shot Beau. In The Bluest Eye a black child, Pecola, is oppressed in many ways throughout the story and near the end is raped by her father. The most substantial part of the story however, is afterwards and how she eventually becomes insane from the onslaught of oppression she faced.

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Within Ellis Island by Joseph Bruchac, On Being Brought from Africa to America by Phillis Wheatley, and Europe and America by David Ignatow there are different views of what the American Dream is and what it means to immigrants. Each author writes about their own experience of immigration and life in America, which shapes their view of the American dream. The common theme between the three poems is the variable nature of the American dream and how it has different meanings for each person coinciding with contradictions between leisure and suffering.

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In The Harvest Gypsies, Steinbeck also describes decreasing morale in the displaced farmers as he says “the dullness shows in the faces…and in addition there is a sullenness that makes them taciturn.” The difficulty of finding adequate work to support a family during the Dust Bowl was extremely high—and as the work was competitive, these farmers implicated the work ethic that began at the beginning of the 20th

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However, the outcome of Vance’s life was different as he was graduated from Yale Law School, able to get a well-paying job and currently living the American Dream with his wife Usha. The purpose of the author in this memoir was to understand the reader of how social mobility feels and more importantly, what happens to the lives of the white working-class Americans, in particular the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children. J.D Vance provides an explanation for the loss of the American dream to poor white Americans living in a toxic culture in this Ohio steel town.

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Reading Response Three Many details in the tales told by the three old men in pages 1190--1197 are relevant to Shahrayar 's situation. Shahrazad is using these details to change him from an angry, misogynistic murderer into a loving husband. Through storytelling, Shahrazad is able to change Shahrayar in three ways. After Shahrayar was betrayed by his wife he became cruel and violent because of the pain he was in.

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