Identity In Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road

What happens to a person who has no identity at a time when identity can be one’s last hope – their salvation or a mark for death. In his novel Milkweed, Jerry Spinelli invites readers to experience the Holocaust through the eye of a young boy who misunderstands everything except the love of family and the different forms it can take. Misha, an orphan boy is taken in by a young group of Jewish thieves. He is simple minded of his own identity because Misha adopts the identity of the people around him in his life, first as a gypsy, then as a Jew when he follows his friend’s family into the ghetto. Readers are forced to focus on the simple acts of caring that takes place in a time of suffering because Misha is unable to understand what is really going on around him. Hope and selfless acts of love still exists during a time of havoc in the Warsaw ghetto, is shown through the innocent eyes of Misha. By using techniques such as dramatic irony, revealing characters’ emotion, and a unique choice of a narrator, Spinelli successfully makes his readers to feel empathy.

How would you deal with living in a community in isolation, feeling lost with those around you, and having your whole life changed with one drop of blood? FOUR by Veronica Roth displays all this with a story of a young man named Tobias Eaton. This book demonstrates the drama and strategy which keeps readers involved. From being placed in one environment from birth and choosing something precisely different, readers can see what Tobias had to go through. The main elements of this book are conflict, style, and mood.

A traumatic event will never define a person’s identity, it will never prove character, or show weaknesses. A person is defined by much more than a single life event. Natasha Trethewey uses her confusion and hurt that she experienced as pieces for an artwork that has yet to be finished. By writing Native Guard, Trethewey recreates herself like a disjointed collage. Using gut-wrenching poetry as her medium, Trethewey uses her words to represent a self portrait of her struggles. Giving the reader a chance to immerse themselves completely within “Native Guard”, her audience is a key element throughout the book. You, as the reader, become an empty shell for Trethewey to build herself anew; a skeleton structure for a new identity.

George Saunders tells his story “Victory Lap” in the most intriguing way. He brings to life the characters thoughts instead of having a character tell readers the story. “Victory Lap” is a story about a young girl being taken by an older man who believes he can claim her as his. The boy next door comes to her rescue at the last moment. Saunders cleverly uses a twisted point of view to alter the cognitive and emotional response of the reader towards the characters of “Victory Lap”. Readers not only get to experience the emotions of the young girl, but the boy and the kidnapper as well. This has a powerful effect on readers feelings towards the characters.

No matter where we live, it is no wonder that different people experience different levels of achievements and relatively different kinds of evaluation by other people in every area in life. Most people want the evaluation towards themselves to be more favorable than the one towards others. In most cases, these values in the process of evaluation are viewed in a more honorable manner. On the contrary, these values can be hated by others, which defines as jealousy as a feeling of being fearful of being displaced by a rival. The book, “Three Day Road” by Joseph Boyden, manifests a great theme of jealousy between both protagonists, Xavier and Elijah, who play their roles as the snipers during the First World War. The story demonstrates a bitter act of jealousy by whom the spotlight shines upon; jealousy of fame. As many would agree, based on the evidence from the story, jealousy is a harmful act which has negative influences on human relationships, emotional stability, and human nature.

Life itself, devoid of any actions or reactions, contains no meaning. Through life and struggles one defines his worth and identity. Identity and essence develop through perseverance in the face of adversity, decisions at crossroads and service to self and others. Within the novel, Grendel by John Gardner the characters struggle with the worth of their own life. The monster, Grendel, denies the existence of a vocation as to not collapse his worldview. Grendel, therefore, takes action to remove the meaning from the lives of certain important characters. Grendel cannot remove the meaning from the life of the Shaper due to a complete lack of ability and a lack of personal willingness to destroy the identity of such a powerful man. The Shaper’s

They might not say it out loud, but they know now that I have something special" (109) This shows us Xavier's mentality and how part of his motivation for his actions were to prove his worth. The only reason he felt as if he had to prove his worth was because of the racism within the army that dismissed him as below them, or in this case, "a useless bush Indian" (109). In the same manner, throughout the novel Elijah continuously grows his hunger to prove to everyone including his comrades that he's more than someone to look down upon because of their roots. Eventually this leads to his downfall as he slowly progresses towards a cold-hearted mentality where he only seeks to benefit himself.

After the war and significant traumatic life experiences, minds can be negatively transformed to work and think in different ways. In the novel Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, a young boy named Elijah had his life and mindset changed when addiction to morphine overcame his self conscious and humanity. This was shown in his relationship with Grey Eyes, his sudden interest and enjoyment of death, and his relationship with Xavier. Elijah’s relationship with Grey Eyes shows how addiction to morphine had a part in him changing and losing his self conscious.

Joyner Lucas’s music video “Ross Capicchioni” and Joseph Boyden’s novel, “Three-day road” Correspond with a lot of similarities with iconic symbols like the trickster, and how the story is formed in an aboriginal way of storytelling. But what stands out between the “Three-day road” and “Ross Capicchioni” is how they're both centered around a theme of betrayal and conflict. Both stories represent, that hanging out with different groups of people can change who you are as a person, knowing that Elijah was changed fundamentally when he started to collect the scalps of enemy soldiers at the whims of the French to get respect and Ross’s friend who changes fundamentally from a normal kid into a criminal when he was convinced by a gang member to

An adult's growth is reflective on their background and childhood development leading up to adulthood. Some common questions that are often reflected on include "What did your childhood and background look like? Who influenced you the most? What are the events that shaped who you are? " These questions can be applied to the main character, Xavier from Joseph Boyden's novel "Three Day Road."

We often consider the world to be filled with core truths, such as how people should act or what constitutes a good or bad action. In The Road, McCarthy directly challenges those preconceptions by making us question the actions of the characters and injecting a healthy dose of uncertainty into the heroes’ situation. From the very beginning, the characters and their location remain ambiguous. This is done so that the characters are purposely anonymous, amorphously adopting all people. While on the road, the order of the day is unpredictability; whether they find a horde of road-savages or supplies necessary for his son’s survival is impossible to foretell. While traveling, the boy frequently asks “are we the good guy” and the father always replies with “yes” or “of course,” but as the story progresses this comes into question.

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien looks back on the Vietnam War and how the line between right and wrong in personal and societal morals can be lost when a war is morally unclear. Specifically, in the chapter “On the Rainy River,” O’Brien’s personal morality is tested when he must decide whether to flee to Canada to escape the draft or stay and fight in the war. Similarly, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn examines the effect American social values have on Huck Finn’s decisions about his own life and the slave Jim. Both Twain’s and O’Brien’s works reflect the American culture of their day. Each story offers an example of how the “story-truth” the characters describe can be different from the “happening-truth,” and how

In the text, "The Book of Margery Kempe”, transcribed by an anonymous priest, Margery Kempe incited a notion that she was a part of something greater than herself through the transformation of her identify by her performance after her first child-birth, how she dealt with the scared through her crying performances, and how she taught and persuaded those around her to follow God through her religious performances.

Identity is who a person is or how they see themselves, but is this something they are born with or is it something they learn over time? Can this identity be changed? Or is it permanent once set? Identity is a major theme in Toni Morrison’s Sula. Scholars discuss the different identities that the characters possess, but tend to fail to mention character development or lack of character development. Character development or lack thereof is usually an important literary move in most writing. This development provides a deeper understanding of characters in addition to a deeper understanding of themes throughout the literature. Sula focuses mainly on the lives of Sula and Nel, which makes tracking their character development easier to track and observe their identity and sense of self. Identity is a major, yet easily overlooked theme in Sula.

As Elbert Hubbard, famous American writer once said “He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.” This quote does a great job at explaining a trend between the main character’s strongest relationships. Xavier and his best friend Elijah are the first example, as well as Xavier and his aunt, Niska in the novel Three Day Road, by Joseph Boyden. In Xavier’s life, different sounds and silence are very important and play a major role in his feelings of safety. The quote speaks to silence as evidence of a significant relationship, which is shown throughout the experiences between both very different relationships along with the struggles they face. On the contrary, in the text there are many examples as to why silence can bring great hardship. The motif of duality is developed through the pattern of silence, as silence can be both a virtue and a burden.