Maturing in life. At the beginning of life, people are innocent, with life not having a chance to tamper and corrupt them. At the end of life, they 've known loss and heartbreak and life has messed them up. But imagine if people were born all knowing and died as innocent as a baby.
In the search for happiness, both Ginny Graves and Ruth Whippman present their own ideas and beliefs. I believe that Whippman is more persuasive compared to Ginny Graves through her use of arguments and evidence. This can be attributed to Whippman’s arguments being reinforced with evidence and her expertise on the matter. Firstly, the use of real-life examples and statistics by Whippman provides context for her arguments, thus strengthening them.
We live in a society that has increasingly demoralizes love, depicting it as cruel, superficial and full of complications. Nowadays it is easy for people to claim that they are in love, even when their actions say otherwise, and it is just as easy to claim that they are not when they indeed are. Real love is difficult to find and keeping it alive is even harder, especially when one must overcome their own anxieties and uncertainties to embrace its presence. This is the main theme depicted in Russell Banks’ short story “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,” as well as in Richard Bausch’s “The Fireman’s Wife.” These narratives, although similar in some ways, are completely different types of love stories.
Their Eyes Were Watching God What do a bee and a flower have in common with marriage? Even if by accident, nature intends for a mutual relationship of growth and blossoming between two partners. Zora Neal Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, follows Janie Crawford, who attempts to find herself despite the presence of extreme sexism and two dominating husbands.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Hurston introduces readers to the life of Janie Crawford living in rural Florida during the early twentieth century. During this time, women, specifically black women, were considered to be property of men in the south. Legally, women had no voice. Janie Crawford, as well as many others find themselves in a society expecting more out of life than what the time period has to offer. Through love affairs, catastrophes and death, Hurston shows readers how a small voice can make a difference.
A relationship between a father and a son is a sacred bond, one created at birth and strengthened over time. This paternal relationship is core to the value of family, a likewise bond of faith and trust. Such bonds are tested during times of hardship and pain, seen most clearly during times of war. During the events of World War II, and the gruesome events of the Holocaust, this truth was never more true. Through works such as the memoir Night, by survivor Elie Wiesel, and the artistry of the 1997 film Life is Beautiful, directed by Roberto Benigni, these times of hardships are kept alive in common memory.
The ending Kurt Vonnegut’s book, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, took me very much by surprise. I had imagined it to end in someone’s death, Mushari taking them down directly, or something else more along those lines. The book ended with Eliot splitting the Rosewater fortune up to fifty-seven different children that are not even his children. He told them to have their names be Rosewater and, “to be fruitful and multiply,” (Page 275). Those children’s parents had all claimed that Eliot was the father to their children but only because Mushari had started that lie.
In “The Greatest Journey” by James Shreeve, he talks about how we all share the same ancestors and we all come from Africa. He says that it all started in Africa about 200,000 years ago. These people who lived in Africa years ago started to leave the area and expand to Eurasia and Australia. As they were migrating to other places, they were able to adjust to the new environment. This is when everybody started to change because of weather, food, and other factors of environment that affected these people.
No matter one’s career choice, family life, ethnicity, or culture, finding and owning one’s personal identity is a persistent struggle that can last an entire lifetime. One is surrounded by media and messages feigning “the perfect life” which begin to consume one’s thoughts with “what if’s” or “if only’s”. Lucy Grealy struggles with defining her self-image in her autobiography, Autobiography of a Face. Throughout Grealy’s accounts of her battle with cancer, bullies, and her self-esteem, readers get a raw, painful, yet incredibly relatable look into the elements that can contribute to self-image. In writing Autobiography of a Face, Grealy leaves readers with a chilling lesson: only readers themselves, not peers or the media or society, can choose how to define their lives.
The sixties was a decade unlike any other. Baby boomers came of age and entered colleges in huge numbers. The Civil Rights movement was gaining speed and many became involved in political activism. By the mid 1960s, some of American youth took a turn in a “far out” direction. It would be the most influential youth movement of any decade - a decade striking a dramatic gap between the youth and the generation before them.
People tend to go out of their way to impress someone else, even if it means they have to do something they will regret in the near or distant future. As Sammy is at work, a group of three girls walk in the store. He is in awe of the head of the group, Queenie. He is so observant that he even speaks about the pattern of her bathing suit and the details of her tan lines.
I think this is a critical thing when finding self-discovery. An example from the text relating to this is “‘Why do we listen to our hearts’ the boy asked when they made camp that day. ‘Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.’ “The alchemist is trying to tell Santiago that listening to his heart can lead him to what he is destined to find, his treasure. Sometimes we have doubts and feel like trying to pursue our personal legends isn’t worth it.
Every Trip Is A Quest For many people who study literature almost all works of literature are related to eachother in some way or another. The most common relationship found between texts is some structure of a quest. In Thomas C. Foster’s book How to Read Literature Like a Professor a quest is described as “[consisting] of five things: A quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials, and a real reason to go there”(3).
In nearly all historical societies, sexism was prevalent. Power struggles between genders mostly ended in men being the dominant force in society, leaving women on a lower rung of the social ladder. However, this does not always mean that women have a harder existence in society. Scott Russell Sanders faces a moral dilemma in “The Men We Carry in Our Minds.” In the beginning, Sanders feels that women have a harder time in society today than men do.
His student Plato’s story, “The Cave,” emphasizes that humans may independently take the intellectual journey to enlightenment, reach the Realm of Perfect Forms, and discover truth for themselves. Both teacher and student insisted that Man himself had to reach truth, as it is not received from a higher
