Almost Home by Joan Bauer Essay

Adversities are a natural part of an individual’s journey through life, but what is it that empowers us to persist through such hardship despite feelings we have reached the end of our capacities? Perseverance. Perseverance is the foundation that enables individuals to push through challenging situations. Both the novel, Walking Home by Eric Walters and the novel The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis are two works of literature that prove how perseverance is the key foundation for individuals to pass barriers set in their way. Muchoki and Parvana are characters who both persevere through family trauma that hits their household, they are able to preserve getting over the discriminatory mental barriers within their damaged countries and additionally are able to persevere through the physical agony faced upon them in their journey.

Over time, Frank’s journey to rescue his debilitated sister, the siblings’ dependence on each other becomes more evident. Frank and Cee Money, the protagonists of Toni Morrison’s Home, exemplify this powerful need, a need that at times flirts with greed. The reason Frank feels so responsible for Cee is due to the fact while growing up they had neglectful parents as well as an abusive grandmother, his failed relationship with Lily, and lastly him facing his inner turmoil due to his actions in Korea. Toni Morrison states numerous times in the text, how Frank would do anything for Cee. Frank recalls, “Only my sister in trouble could force me to even think about going in that direction”

For the first time in 130 years, more young adults are living with parents until their mid thirties. Part of this could be an emotional attachment keeping them from leaving home because after they leave, everything will change. However, many are losing their real sense of home and are just using it as a place where they can avoid paying bills and many other responsibilities. Many young adults now do not understand the extensive sacrifice it is to leave their one and only home. In “On Going Home,” Joan Didion expounds on her struggle to connect with her current house, in a nostalgic and resigned tone, and vivid imagery, symbolism, and comparison Didion expresses the regret she feels every time she remembers she left her “home”.

Picking up the book Fun Home, one would imagine that the novel would embellish some sort of comical life story of a misunderstood teenager. Although the short comic-book structured novel does have its sarcastic humor, Alison Bechdel explains her firsthand account of growing up with the difficulty of living of finding her true identity. Alison was a teenager in college when she discovered that she was a lesbian, however, the shock came when she also discovered her father was homosexual. I feel that the most influencing panel in Fun Home is where Alison and her father are in the car alone together. Not only does this panel explain the entirety of the novel in a few short speech bubbles, but it is the defining scene that connects

A little boy scavenges in a dumpster in an alley, desperate for food. Separated from his family, he is lost on the streets of Calcutta. After weeks of barely surviving on the treacherous streets, he is taken to an adoption agency and adopted by an Australian couple. Although it seems like fiction, it is fact. This remarkable story is Saroo Brierley’s, and his memoir A Long Way Home, tells this miraculous story of his childhood and how he came to find his birth family. Throughout the memoir, Brierley weaves a tale of his hardships and developing his identity. In his memoir A Long Way Home, Saroo Brierley uses the literary devices of pacing, imagery, and external conflict to illustrate how the hardships one must endure shape one’s identity,

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is an autobiography written by Alison Bechdel. The graphic novel takes its readers through Alison Bechdel’s childhood using engaging diction and detailed drawings. One of the big themes of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is the discovery of one’s sexual orientation. Over the course of her life, Alison Bechdel eventually comes to the realization that she is a lesbian. Ultimately, Alison Bechdel uses this novel to recount her experience of events that helped to shape her personal identity, which resulted in a transformation of the way she sees herself. In the end, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a wonderful narrative that shows its readers the complexity of personal identity, and how things like love, the values of

According to the Webster’s Dictionary, the definition of survivor is someone who remains alive. However, this definition is not always accurate.Hearing the word survival reminds me of the soldiers who fight daily for our safety. Some of these men and women do not survive, unfortunately. A survivor is someone or something that remains strong and courageous through an arduous situation, even if they do not survive physically. In many works of literature, there is often a survivor. The Crucible has many characters who do not survive in the physical form; however, many survived with their moral character still intact. In the Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, Mrs. Rowlandson tells her story of survival while facing unimaginable conditions.

In the prologue, Audre describes her “home” as being a place that could only be from a fairy tale (enchanted even). This home is somewhere Lorde never visited or never observed. She only knows this extraordinary place through her mother’s stories. As Audre grows older, “home” is something she does not have in life. She even expresses that the extraordinary place (Carriacou) from her mother’s stories in no longer the home, she longed for it to be (Zami 256). Even though her home was in Harlem, New York, Stamford, and Cuernavaca, they never felt like home. Throughout the novel, it appears that Carriacou helped Audre deal with the racist society. She finally accepts her character in society as a black lesbian. She in time grows to admit that

Fun Home is a retelling of Alison Bechdel’s life through the lens of her relationship with her father. However, because of what she considers to have been his suicide, Alison is left with an incomplete picture of who he was in life. By calling Fun Home an autobiography, Bechdel enters an autobiographical pact with the reader that ensures that what Bechdel is telling us is the truth. However, elements out of her control leave Bechdel unable to provide certain objective facts necessary to her narrative. As an attempt to remedy these absences and in turn maintain the validity of her story, Bechdel uses intertextuality to fill in the gaps of in her retelling. By overlaying masterplots of fictional narratives over her own, the reader is able to get at an understanding of the kind of person Alison’s father was. In this way Bechdel is able to reveal things about her father that she can 't prove to be true, but are reflective enough of his life to become true.

In the book “The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War

Meg Rosoff illustrates survival and relationship in her novel How I Live Now. Survival is best shown when the narrator Daisy and her cousin Piper are surviving on their own because the war has separated them from their family. Daisy and Piper have been walking for many days and nights trying to find their way back home. They spots a small hut in the distance hoping they can use it as shelter. Daisy says, “we could have kept going for another hour or two but around mid-afternoon we saw something that looked like a falling-down hut and it was a little way off the path and hadn’t been burned.”(Rosoff page # ). “ We felt as relieved as if we’d came across a five-star hotel.”(Rosoff page #). This shows that Daisy and Piper are surviving with what

Lola arrived at our house on a raining Sunday afternoon after we came home. Home is where she will be living with our family. Family will now include our little yellow with a purple collar puppy, Labrador retriever, is our newest pet which we named her Lola. Lola first ran into our house and headed straight for the barstool. Barstool has become her safe haven when she gets scared. Scared is how Lola is feeling without her sisters and brothers.

You may be thinking that this quote is coming off a little harsh, but I thought that it gave an ideal understanding of the theme of Survival. If you ask yourself what the real meaning of survival is, what do you think of? Is it the ability to stay alive or the capability of staying out of danger despite circumstances? I felt that this quote above had given the best meaning of survival, which is to fight to protect your loved ones no matter what it takes. The character, Mr. Porter, had done everything he could possibly do to ensure that his family would survive the nuclear war. Even if that meant constructing a brand new bomb shelter to prepare for the worse, fighting off others to ensure that there was a sufficient amount of supplies, and

“"It would increase some risks," [Maria] acknowledged, but then turned to me and said, "But it's your life." (20) The trip to Amsterdam had an alarming possibility of taking a big toll on Hazel’s life yet she still decided to go figure out what happens after the ending of the book. In the end, they ended up having a fantastic trip that showed those people who struggle with “limited lives” can also live a meaningful life and have fun when even though time is running out.

Sex has become romanticized and idealised through movies and porn in modern times, which results in many such as teenagers becoming disappointed when they finally have sex for the first time and realize that it is nothing like they had imagined. ‘’Are We Nearly There’’ is short story that was published in 2015 and written by Kate Smalley Ellis. It follows the young and inexperienced Jen, who is driving her family around after she got her driver’s license. However her mind is somewhere else, as she reflects over how it was to have sex for the first time the previous night with a guy named Simon. The sex did not measure up to her expectations and she jumps in between the present tense and the past tense, which leads her to stop the car at the end.