Sounder And Our Town Essay

In the play Our Town, written by Thornton Wilder, and the novel Sounder, written by William H. Armstrong, most of the characters have a great deal of loss to cope with. The mother in Sounder suffered the loss of her husband and also lived through extreme poverty. She is a strong person to have survived the loss of a husband and lived on in poverty with a child to take care of. The next character who suffered lots in their life is Mrs. Gibbs from Our Town. She was forced to cope with the loss of both of her children before she herself died at the end of the play. The third character is the boy from the novel, Sounder. This young child lossed his father, and his dog that meant a lot to him. “Only it seems to me that once in your life before you

Toward the middle and end of the novel, the boy and his mother had to cope with the loss of their loyal dog, Sounder, and the boy’s father. “The boy was crying now. Not that there was any new or sudden sorrow. There just seemed to be nothing else to fill up the vast lostness of the moment.” This is a quote from Sounder, it expresses the immense pain that the boy felt throughout the novel. Luckily, he meets a teacher that becomes his friend. After the novel ends, the boy shows great potential to be an educator, thanks to the guidance from his teacher. His passion to learn and teach drives him to become a teacher. He tries to learn as much as he can, and to overcome the loss and suffering he has experienced.

In the play Our Town, there is a tremendous amount of loss to every character. Mrs. Gibbs is one of those characters with the most heartbreaking story of loss. After the play ends, she longs for something other than Our Town, she wants to travel and see things. Possibly to forget the loss of her children she want to do this. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”. This quote from Our Town depicts how much insight the town’s people get when they die. Mrs. Gibbs does die at the end of the play, but her spirit lives on with her two children remaining at her