Throughout reading Wes Moore’s instant classic The Other Moore many key ideas are ascertained, and many themes identified. The crumbling city infrastructure surrounding both “Wes’s” is the perfect landscape to forge a life wrought with poverty, or a resilient attitude with a relentless drive for success and better future. Though many characters embody the poverty surrounding them such as Wes’s father or Tony, foil characters such as Wes’s mother Joy represent the polar opposite. Joy, throughout the story, is constantly battling for Wes to become an upstanding, crime free citizen. Though Joy had the best intentions for her only son, often her efforts were fruitless, even hurtful. The decision to send Wes to Riverdale was one of the most important events in life. Wes’s mother was deathly concerned about the public school situation in the Bronx and opted to send her son to a much nicer private school. Wes’s ultimate departure to boarding school was in direct relation to his events at the school. Moore’s message throughout this section is very clear in that the pursuit of security and achievement was so important to Joy that she would take extreme measures to achieve “certainty”, yet one must take advantage of …show more content…
When detailing the life of Joy when living providing for her children and living with her parents, Moore utilizes long complex sentences with many commas. Moore highlights the idea of an absent, work swamped Joy when stating, “My grandparents would pick us up after school, prepare dinner for the family, and get us to bed” (Moore 47). The list-like sentence structure used by Moore is meant to provoke a sense of absence of Joy. While Joy was fervently working to secure Wes’s future, her parents were taking care of the kids. The extreme work ethic highlighted by Moore’s sentence structure is a testament to Joy’s love and devotion to