A Hero's Journey In Wild By Cheryl Strayed

In the book Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, Susanna Kaysen was only 18 years old when she agreed to enter a medium security psychiatric facility in Boston, McLean hospital in April 1967, after a failed suicide attempt. She insisted that her over dose on aspirin was not a suicide attempt, but after a 20 minute interview the doctor decided she needed to be admitted to a hospital. During her prolonged two-year stay at the hospital Kaysen describes the issues that most of the patients in her ward have to deal with and how they all differently deal with the amount of time they must stay in the hospital for. While in the hospital Kaysen experienced a case of depersonalization where she tried to pull the skin of her hands to see if there were bones underneath, after a failed escape attempt. Soon, after going to therapy and analysis she was labeled as having recovered from borderline personality disorder. After her release she realizes that McLean Hospital provided patients with more freedom than the outside world, by being free responsibility of parental pressure, free from school and job responsibilities, and being free from the “social norms” that society comes up with. Ultimately, being in captivity gave the patients more freedom then in society and created a safe environment in which patients wanted to stay in.

There are an infinite amount of unique responses to the question “What is the meaning of life?”. However, the majority of people will agree that the true meaning of life is to find happiness and what is really important to one’s self. In Jon Krakauer’s, Into The Wild, Chris McCandless conveys this idealism through his life’s journey as he bravely defies all limitations. Chris McCandless isolates himself from society in his Alaskan Odyssey as a way to defy accepted expectations and to begin discovering the meanings of life without any corrupted influences.

The piece is classified as Aboriginal Australian literature. It was published in the 1960’s. The purpose of the text is to give hope in a new beginning after the events involving the racial tension between the Aboriginals and the white settlers. The poem is directed to the Aboriginal people of Australia who suffered from these events

Throughout the course of the book, A Long Way Home, Saroo Brierley, the author, encounters a series of traumatic experiences that lead to bittersweet moments. Unlike a normal child’s infancy, Saroo was physically and mentally consuming. Through his experience, we are able to get a glimpse of the many struggles and hardships young children live in India daily. His petrifying experiences of living on the streets, Liluah, and Nava Jeevan finally lead to his safe haven of being taken by the Brierley’s.

Straying away from life as a whole only to be alone, some may say is the strong way to heal themselves when dealing with extreme grief or a major crisis . In the book Wild, twenty-two year old Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost it all. Dealing with the loss of her mother, her family torn to pieces, and her very own marriage was being destroyed right before her very eyes. Living life with nothing more to lose, lifeless, she made the most life changing decision of her life. Strayed never seems remorseful on her decisions to up and leave everything behind while deciding to flee from it all. This being her way of dealing with life, it shows her as being strong; a woman of great strength and character. She shows personal strength, which is

In Cheryl Strayed's Wild, she gives readers vivid exposure to her turbulent and harsh past. She tells her journey from the beginning of what was the turning page in her life- her mother's death. Strayed goes through a roller coaster with unfortunate events both in her control and out of her control. She makes several poor choices, and she shares all her triumphs with pure honesty. Strayed speaks of her past with a distant remorse, as if she is looking at her past in a movie. She doesn't come across as ashamed of her past, but why should she? As all humans do, Cheryl Strayed makes mistakes and suffers their consequences as well. Everyone handles situations differently, and the best anyone can do is learn from the mistakes and apply it to

To say that Cheryl Strayed has overcome many things in her life is an understatement. She has an unmistakable amount of courage and bravery. Cheryl goes through a complete transformation within her life. The person she becomes after all of her pain and struggles is unbelievable. During her tough journey through life, Cheryl has truly found herself and becomes the person she knows her mother raised.

Many great writers have a way of connecting to their audience and influence the way we analyze their writing strategies. Cheryl Strayed created a biography, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, about her life changing experience that allows us the opportunity to apply aspects of a rhetorical analysis to her writing. Cheryl’s memory of her journey along the Pacific Crest Trail, that extends over 1,000 miles from Mexico to Canada, provides us with explicit details and evidence that tie into her motives and conditions for writing and her intended audience. Cheryl also makes appeals to her knowledge, trustworthiness, and emotions that help us illustrate her insights as she traveled along the trail.

Through my understanding of the book, Homeward Bound by Elaine Tyler May explores two traditional depictions of the 1950s, namely suburban domesticity and anticommunism. She intertwines both historical events into a captivating argument. Throughout the book, May aims to discover why “Post-war Americans accepted parenting as well as marriage with so much zeal” unlike their own parents and children. Her findings are that the “cold war ideology and domestic revival” were somewhat linked together. She saw “domestic containment” as an outgrowth of frights and desires that bloomed after the war. However, psychotherapeutic services were as much a boom then as now, and helped offer “private and personal solutions to social problems.” May reflects her views on the origin of domestic containment, and how it affected the lives of people who tried to live by it.

There are many characters in the book, Wild, but Cheryl is the main character of the book. In this book she has blonde, short hair and is twenty-two. What motivates her is the death of her mother. Her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, they found out and it was too late to get her treatment. This took a huge toll on Cheryl’s life and her brother, Leif. Also, Cheryl and her husband, Paul, get a divorce because of her unfaithfulness. This also is another reason that motivates her to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. She knows that it is important for her to be alone and find herself. She wanted to hike the trail to become the woman her mom had always believed she was. Once her mother died, she lost herself and she was having difficulty dealing

The novel, Girl, Interrupted is a memoir of author Susana Kaysen’s life and her journey through early adulthood as she suffered with Borderline Personality Disorder. The novel captures her time at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric hospital located in Belmont, Massachusetts. Kaysen divides the novel into separate anecdotes of events and fellow patients she encountered during the two years she was admitted at Mclean.

In a Perfect World by Trish Doller takes place in Cairo, Egypt. Caroline looked forward to spending the summer with her best friend in her boyfriend before senior year. Plans quickly changed though when her mom got offered her dream job in Cairo at a One Vision clinic. She moves to Cairo with her mother while her dad stays in Ohio to work. Caroline expects to spend her senior year trying to navigate a new city and being homesick. What she wasn't expecting was a thrilling new culture, a few new friends, a beautiful city, and a new love who challenges her in many ways. In a Perfect World mainly focuses on how love will always find its way.

In the book Wild, Cheryl Strayed removes herself from society in order to travel the PCT alone. She faced

Comparatively, as Cheryl Strayed gets more immersed in the Pacific Crest Trail and spends more time in the wild, she is able to face her issues head on and find peace. Strayed decided to hike this intense wilderness trail in response to the inability to

Cheryl starts her trip off naïve and unaware of the hardships her journey will provide. From the very first day she couldn’t believe what she’d got herself into. Despite this rough start to her journey she soon begins to see her life on the trail as normal. She also lacks a lot of confidence in her hiking abilities at the beginning. She got embarrassed when she would run into other hikers and they would mention the size of her bag or other information that is common knowledge to most hikers. However, later on she begins to become more confident in her abilities and even goes as far as to say she, “felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen”(202). Her newfound confidence is shown as she meets people who are not hikers and is eager to explain to them about the PCT and tell them about her journey, particularly when she meets the reporter for Hobo Times. She earnestly argues that she is not a hobo and calls herself an expert hiker and explains how far she travels and the hardships of the trail. Her newfound confidence shines through during this encounter, as she is no longer the insecure hiker from the start of her trip. Most importantly, Cheryl finds strength and direction throughout her trip. Before her journey her life is a mess, she has just divorced her husband and acquired a heroin addiction. Not only does the fact that she’s disconnected keep her from her bad habits, such as heroin, but it also gives her direction with her life. Her journey inspires her to write this novel, which she says she had been ashamed she had not written one before already, and she plans to have a yard sale so she can make enough money until she finds herself a job. Whereas, at the beginning of her trip she had no clue what she was going to do after. She thanks the trail at the end of her trip and although she doesn’t understand completely the true