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Selfishness In Joy Luck Club And Everyday Use By Alice Walker

489 Words2 Pages

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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