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Selfishness In Joy Luck Club And Everyday Use By Alice Walker

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Selfishness is the lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure including egocentric, egotistical and self-absorbed. In the Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan and Everyday Use by Alice Walker both demonstrate that children make mostly selfish decisions throughout their life through actions that benefit themselves only without thinking the effects on others. Waverly Jong from Joy Luck Club and Dee from everyday use are both characters who demonstrate that children make mostly selfish decisions by making spiteful, self- benefiting decisions over very small details in their life. In Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Waverly Jong is a professional chess player but after criticism from her mother she decides to skip a tournament as she would “refuse to play in it”(Tan 171) since she believed her mother didn't deserve to critique her performance. Also, in Everyday use by …show more content…

Despite this decision to support her family, she was actually making selfish decisions when she was deciding on a job because she chose jobs that didn't make her seem lower in society as her “ intellectual pride kept me from selecting typing” (Angelou 80) even though it would have been a job that could have benefited both her and her mother. Another example of this occurring is in Everyday Use where her mother was going to give the quilts to her other daughter but “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts”(Walker 58) when Dee received the news she wouldn't be getting the quilts for herself. Both of these example show that children will mainly make selfish decisions while that one percent may make selfless decisions while the other 99 percent makes selfish decisions

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There are many good and bad attractions a human can have. Being selfish is definitely a horrible quality to possess. As a human not having consideration for the feelings of other people around you is troubling. In the novel, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Anse and Dewey Dell’s true identity is finally revealed after a mournful death in the Burden household. Focusing on their mother/wife's final wish, to get buried in Jefferson, was not their main concern.

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Not caring for others can make someone not see the big things in life. In the short story Box Nine by Rob Thomas, a girl named Teesha is doing a community service project during Thanksgiving to give food to the poor in order to walk the stage for graduation. Teesha is accompanied with other students throughout this community service project who don’t care about the poor people and only about themselves. Selfishness can make a person not care for others because the students questioned the poor people's life choices. When the students delivered box six the students saw a man puffing cigarettes and wondered why he was able to afford cigarettes and not food.

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The definition of selfish is “ lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure.” Ayn Rand claims that a selfish person is a person who pursues their goals. In the novel Equality 7-2521 does not want to be a part of the society that he is in so he runs away. After equality ran away the council thought of him as selfish for thinking for himself. But it's not selfish to Ayn Rand, it is a person trying to find their happiness.

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In life, some people are motivated by selfish feelings or desires but sometimes these selfish ambitions have a negative effect on other people as in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. In this novel, Janie is a character who is on a journey motivated by finding herself, however, the desires of others always seem get in the way. Nanny’s selfish ambitions are the first to affect Janie on her journey, soon followed by Joe Starks, Mrs. Turner, and even Tea Cake. Throughout this novel, the strive for money and power are recurring desires that inevitably result in unhappiness and pain for Janie. It all starts with Nanny, in this novel Janie’s grandmother only wants the best for Janie and she thinks her decisions are in Janie's best

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Yes it is selfish, but there was more to it, she was depressed. Her kids and husband never supported her because they were just always mad at the mother for not going out and getting a job but in reality

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The short story “The Scarlet Ibis” by James Hurst elucidates the theme “selfish people aren’t the ones that suffer their selfishness: it's those around them, in which it harms”. The story is about a boy who received a brother after six years of being an only child, but because of an unfortunate disease, his brother wasn’t expected to live long. He unexpectedly lived far longer that anticipated, so his parents finally named him: William Armstrong. Because William wasn’t “all there”, his brother had plans to kill him with a pillow, but his plan was corrupted when his brother smiled at him, showing that he was “all there”. The narrator (who is also William’s big brother) renamed his brother Doodle.

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Do you take things for granted? Well I don’t think you should. People always take everyday items for granted. The story is “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker. “Everyday Use” was written in the 1960 and 1970-time period and it was publicized in 1973.

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Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” illustrates Dee’s struggle for identity by placing her quest for a new identity against her family’s desire for maintaining culture and heritage. In the beginning, the narrator, who is the mother of Dee, mentions some details about Dee; how she “...wanted nice things… She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts… At sixteen, she had a style of her own: and (she) knew what style was.” Providing evidence to the thesis, she was obviously trying exceptionally hard to find for herself a sense of identity. She wanted items her family couldn’t afford, so she worked hard to gain these, and she found a sense of identity from them, but it also pushed her farther away from her family.

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In the short story, “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker uses her contrasting characters of Maggie and Dee to show a cultural split. Dee, the eldest daughter, comes home to visit her family who lives a very traditional way of life. Dee has gone to college and lives a more modernist lifestyle, whereas her sister Maggie has not gone to school and lives a more traditionalist lifestyle. This difference between the sisters shows the division in the 1960s between a traditionalist and modernist lifestyle through the characters Maggie and Dee. During the 1960s some African-Americans began to replace their birth names with names of African or Muslim descent, but what was the reason behind this change?

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The point of view in the story “Everyday Use,” by Alice Walker plays a big part. Throughout the story, one of Mama’s daughters came to visit. The way Mama and Maggie see her is not in a very pleasant way. In fact, they are scared to tell her no when it comes to anything. From Mama’s perspective Dee seems like this rude, stuck up, spoiled child because she had the opportunity to go out and expand her education, while Mama and Maggie continued to live their lives on the farm.

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Even the good people can be selfish too. The bad people are doing bad things, but the good people are too selfish to even help. In the story “The Diary of Anne Frank” the family has been hiding from the Germans for a long time. They have little food and little amounts of everything. Mrs.Frank catches one of the VaanDaans stealing.

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Separating from one’s true values may lead one to betray their own family and culture. In the short story Everyday Use a young woman who disregards her family inferiorly is faced with the conflict of self identity. The author reflects betrayal of family values through his exposure of heritage and education in the story. Heritage unveils the concept of who Dee is and the disconnection from her own shows her inadequacy to have one. Dee tries her best to stray away from the life she once had and went the extent of changing her name.

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Alice Walker’s Everyday Use (rpt. in Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson, Perrine’s Literature Sound and Structure 11th ed [Boston: Wadsworth, 2012] 166-173) is a short story told by the mother of two daughters, Mama. The story tells the tale of the return of Mama’s oldest daughter, Dee, and the problems that Dee’s return causes for Mama and her youngest daughter, Maggie. This short story includes humor and irony, displays detailed characterization, and portrays a very effective point of view. These three literary elements contribute to this story by giving insight into the past and the true personalities of the characters, and the way the characters have changed over time.

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“Everyday Use” is one of the most popular stories by Alice Walker. The issue that this story raises is very pertinent from ‘womanist’ perspective. The term, in its broader sense, designates a culture specific form of woman-referred policy and theory. ‘womanism’ may be defined as a strand within ‘black feminism’. As against womansim, feminist movement of the day was predominately white-centric.

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