Self-Discovery In Night Waitress, By Lynda Hull

Self-Discovery

Journey; to some, it may be just be the vacation they took last summer. To me, however; a journey is more about mentality and coming of age. As one gets older, they learn to think for themselves, which is valuable for succeeding in life. Being able to have the right mindset encourages me to not give up when issues with school or dance arise. Each setback that I face is just another journey to travel through. The journey of believing you cannot do something to believing you can is crucial achieving your goals. Throughout high school english classes, students are taught about conflicts with man vs. self, man, society, nature. With these conflicts comes a journey the character must go through. I believe that a man vs. self conflict

Being able to identify similar themes in poems, articles, and other works can broaden your understanding of the whole writing. “Night Waitress” by Lynda Hull has many topics throughout the fifty-line poem. The topic of desire and pleasure seems apparent when Hull says, “I would not stop him if he touched me”, but another way to look at this line is that the narrator is in such a daze that she does not have the effort to stop the man if he were to touch her (Hull 16-17). I focus on the topic of the unconscious during the passage while the narrator is at work because she is just unconsciously going through the motions of her job. During the poem, the narrator goes on a mental journey to her past. A great part about analyzing things is that there is no one right answer. Literary works can be interpreted in many ways, none of which are flat out wrong is you can explain your

The poem itself is not the thoughts of the man as it told from the point of view of an observer. Although we do not know exactly what the potential jumper was thinking, we know that something in his mind clicked, and he decided to get down from the roof. The journey in his brain about what he was about to do registered with him, and the man stepped towards the cops. The mental journey of this man was that he was on the brink of willingly leaving everything in his life to lighting cigarettes “back at the beginning of the world” (Olds 40). In this case, the journey of the man is more focused than the destination. The end of the poem is the start of a new beginning which shows that instead of a destination, the man is just starting a new journey. Death is recurrent when it comes to the theme of journeys, and it is thought to be the final destination in the journey of life. In the poem “When Death Comes,” by Mary Oliver, death is the inevitable end of a journey. Oliver is not afraid of death, but rather more afraid of not having lived life to the fullest. The last line of the poem, “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world” expands the journey (Oliver 28). A visit is much less memorable than a journey. With just a visit, one does not learn from experiences and carry that knowledge to the next journey. Once again the journey,