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Leadership In The Last American Man

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Following Footsteps: Leadership in The Last American Man
Parents set the perfect example of leadership while raising their own children, making their kids the priorities of their lives by being able to protect and love them through any given situation. In addition, many parents strive to make their children like themselves because nothing would be better than a parent seeing another human being walking in their own footsteps. However, some parents push their children to become exactly like them, making their own dreams come true through their child. This makes it hard for the child to grow up and become an independent person because they are too busy living the lives that their parents are making them live. In The Last American Man, Eustace …show more content…

Eustace does not realize that what causes people to leave Turtle Island “isn’t the physical labor but the psychological stress of losing their identity” (216). Eustace is independent when he ignores the expectations of his father because it is not very individualistic to become an exact copy of anyone else. However later in Eustace’s life, he expects other people to become just like him by making them do what he wants all of the time, taking away their own individuality. This is both oppressing and humiliating to Eustace’s followers because they will have to become a different people order to make Eustace aware of their own existence. This form of leadership is a definite result of his instinct to copy the actions of his father. Eustace continues to act like his father because he wants to copy the control his father had over him. During Eustace’s horse trips across the nation with his brother and his girlfriend, Eustace couldn’t put his their needs first “When the stake of each of these journeys was so massive-nothing less than the prize of getting his father’s attention at last” (183). This form of leadership not so much as self centered as it is honoring his own father. However, Eustace needs to know that although he thinks he needs to match his father’s level of leadership, it doesn’t mean that he should treat other people the same way that his father treated him. This is why Eustace has problems with relationships throughout his entire lifetime; he is too concentrated on copying his father’s behavior than on building new relationships with different

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