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Ben And Abel Essay

Decent Essays

I still have to go through the last 30 pages of the book, so my analysis might evolve again after reading the end of the book. In the meantime, I wanted to discuss about the character of Benally who resembles, but also contrasts with Abel. From the first moment he meets him, Ben is attracted to Abel because he senses how much Abel is psychologically damaged by the loss of his cultural bearings moving from the reservation to Los Angeles. He discovers he and Abel have a lot of things in common: Ben is also a Native American who grew up in an Indian reservation surrounded by breathtaking natural landscapes very similar to Abel’s. Like Abel, he has no family left, but his grandfather who raised him. So, Ben and Abel are united by the comparable …show more content…

Ben has been able to find and keep a well-paid job which allows him to share an apartment with Milly. He talks about the psychological challenges to live in L.A. and the distress to lose its cultural roots: “You know, you have to change. That’s the only way you can live in a place like this” (131). “You’ve got to take it easy and get drunk once in a while to forget about who you are” (140). But somehow he has been able to overcome these difficulties and adapt to this new lifestyle, even it’s not without torment. In order to bring back their Indian culture to life, Ben and some Indian friends are used to gather on a hill to sing, play drums and dance like in the reservation. Up on the hill, Ben had found his way to “forget about everything” (128) to express his true Indian identity and finally be himself. However, Abel is “unlucky” according to Ben (131, 139). Abel’s oversensitivity and sense of loss appears to Ben to like a “sickness” (146) that cannot be cured. This disease consumes Abel, driving him to fall into the abysses of alcoholism and loses his job. In contrast with Ben, it seems like Abel will never been able to adapt to the life of L.A. Instead, this foreign world propels him to

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