Literature And Selfishness

The memoir,”Night”, shows the perspective of Elie Wiesel, a young boy that was sent to a concentration camp alongside hundreds of other Jews, that lost their valuables , faith and family.The terror within the concentration camp slowly deteriorate the Jews ,physically and mentally.The jews had a choice to be selfish or selfless,given the jews’ situation it is best to do what was in their best interest. Throughout Elie Wiesel’s memoir, “Night”; many individuals had a hard time navigating the brutality within the concentration camps.Through these times of brutality, many people in the camp had to choose to either be selfish or altruistic. Given the jew’s situation, it is better to act selfish than to be altruistic.

Throughout the essay “New Perspective” by: Janice E. Fein, she explores in immense detail how she suffered as a child who grew up with a mother that was very ill. She explains the hardships she underwent and expressed how she felt “cheated in life”. As a small child she could only remember her mother walking her to kindergarten once, as she describes in the essay, but after that she could only remember her mother laying in a “massive” and “ugly” hospital bed. As a child, its difficult sometimes to understand and grasp complicated situations like this. Most of the time children only hold one perspective of things, their own. Fein discusses the impact her mother’s illness had on her childhood and how it taught her later on in life when she became

The theme of loss is portrayed similarly in the two poems ‘Disabled’ and ‘Out, out-’. Both of these poems are about the protagonist dealing with physical loss as they both experience an accident. Both Wilfred Owen and Robert Frost manage to mesmerize their audience’s attention, and also sympathize for the protagonists’ misfortune. They do this by the use of many literary techniques which are obvious at times, but some are very subtle, such as similes, metaphors, personification, and contrasts.

Our eyes unconsciously record thousands upon thousands of bits of information every second. Our brain then acts as a filter to sort out what it thinks is useful and what is not. By doing this, the brain guides us into seeing only what is important. We never see the full picture; just what our brain guides us to see. Metaphors act in the same way in that they guide how people view certain topics and issues. A specific metaphor that becomes accepted by a large enough population of community will determine how most people in the community view that issue. In a way the metaphor skews the perception of those who hear it. This was the case for the metaphors of cancer in the late 20th century which we can see through Susan Sontag’s piece, “Illness as Metaphor”. We can also see this manifested in metaphors associated with people diagnosed with Morgellons’ disease in Leslie Johnson’s narrative, “The Devil’s Bait”. Both pieces deal with how metaphors have shaped the outlook of patients of their respective diseases. Metaphors obscure and shift our understanding of disease and pain away from the full truth into a smaller and less understanding perspective. The similarities between the metaphor of cancer as death and Morgellons as a farce prove that metaphors of disease isolate patients diagnosed with those diseases.

Imagine being in a highly populated concentrated area with many people fighting to just get by each day. Would you try to help others for the sacrifice of your mental or physical health? Would you give up your food so that you can give it to someone who is in worse condition than you? Night shows Elie Wiesel’s experiences with the concentration camp called Auschwitz. Even if people would say that they would help others for sacrificing your health there is always a breaking point. If people think that life will be better in some sort of way in the long run, that is sometimes not true and if that is true as hopeful as they are that could be threatening to their lives. This mental and physical suffering that these people of Auschwitz endure could cause them to become senseless to tasks that would be unethical or immoral to them.

People with disabilities are not completely gone. They are still there and have a mind of their own. They feel emotions and sometimes have a more complex mind than others. Two authors help enlighten this idea that disabled people are much more than helpless bodies. Both Christy Brown and Jean-Dominique Bauby perfectly illustrate their lives and what it is like to be disabled, and they prove by their stories that they think and feel, and can even develop enough to share what they feel with the world. My Left Foot is about the journey of a boy suffering from cerebral palsy. His entire life he was labeled as a loss cause by doctor after doctor, but his mom never gave up hope. Slowly, he started showing signs of development by random movements responding to certain situations. In the end he ends up being able to communicate with his left foot. The next story, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is about an individual who suffered a stroke at the age of 43, leaving him paralyzed, only able to blink his left eye as communication. He develops his own alphabet inspired by the French language in order to exchange conversations with others. His thoughts in the story jump from the present, him currently disabled, and the past, when he was not. Both memoirs, with very different stories, show the lives of two individuals that are not like others. One who had their disability since birth, and the other who obtained one after a tragic event. In My Left Foot by Christy Brown and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, both authors use characterization to show readers the struggles of disabled people and help them understand that just because they can’t use motions such as hand gestures to express how they feel, doesn’t mean that they don’t think and feel.

Selfishness is defined as the act of being someone who lacks concern for others, only caring for personal gain. Often, people are selfish due to a lack of empathy, misinformation, or a lack of information. The ability of literature to have us experience different worlds through different perspectives is fairly useful for combating this. In fact, literature can shock us about the idea of selfishness and give us pause and new insights into it, if not necessarily cause us to realize our own lack of selflessness and shock us out of it.

Disabilities within the characters of “The Life You Save May be Your Own” by Flanner O’Connor

Lucy Grealy tells a story about not fitting in, unbearable pain that takes up residence in one’s head as loneliness and confusion, questioning what things mean, being scared and lost in your family, enduring intense physical pain, and most importantly, figuring out who you are. Lucy had no idea she might die, even though the survival rate for Ewing’s sarcoma was only five percent. She does not present her parents as overly afraid for her life, either. Her autobiography is not a story about the fear of death, but about such courage and anguish. Lucy shows how she falls under the spell of her disability, allowing it to control her life and dictate her future to a greater extent than it would otherwise. Having a disability means that

Analyzing and interpreting poetry takes time and effort due to the variety of elements each poem may possess as well as understanding those elements chosen and used in the piece of work. In addition, one’s life experiences may influence how one perceives the poem. However, in the poem “Alzheimer’s” by Kelly Cherry, published in 1997 and written during a time of personal struggle for Cherry and her dad, a couple of poetic elements appear more prominent than any others. These are the tone and imagery. Cherry begins the poem with a feeling of insensitivity but by the end transforms the feeling in to one of pity or sadness. Through her careful choice of words and use of similes and metaphors Cherry establishes the tone and imagery throughout the poem in a realistic way regarding this disease and its tug on the emotions one feels when caring for someone with this illness.

From Greece to Rome and to Britain, the world’s most renowned philosophers and literary writers have tackled the concept of suffering. From Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, to the poetry written by Jonathan Swift, John Donne and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, multiple literary scholars have demonstrated suffering throughout the last couple centuries. Whether it may be sexual suffering as seen in the work of John Donne’s His Mistress Going to Bed, and Jonathan Swifts The Lady’s Dressing Room and A Beautiful Nymph Going to Bed, or the emotional, physical and psychological suffering in Oedipus the King, literature’s greatest authors have allowed audiences to experience a character’s suffering and emotions in various forms – sexually, emotionally, physically

A martyr is someone who puts everybody else’s well-being before their own. Whilst this sounds

Selfish. Thats a word define by the english dictionary as, “lacking consideration for others.” A selfish person is only concerned about themselves and disregard the severe devastation that a particular action can lead to in another human being. In a family in which a divorce is taking place or has taken place involves a large amount of inconsiderate actions done by parents. When the marriage begins to get difficult, the most simple outcome is to file for divorce. However, at no point is there an attempt into trying to understand how a divorce can affect an adolescent in any way. In a study from Oslo, Norway a prospective study(n=1861) and a cross sectional study(n=2422) took place that demonstrates that early parental divorce causes risk behaviors in an adolescent. It is grueling for an adolescent to attempt in balancing the

Most of us assume that some selfishness is healthy, but "too much" selfishness will lead to loneliness and despair. This idea rests on an incorrect definition of selfishness. Selfishness means acting in one's rational self-interest. By " rational" I mean that one can logically prove that an action is in one's self-interest—in the long run as well as the short run.

To begin, selfishness is one of the most common personality traits shared amongst society, Kenneth Grahame’s literature features the theme of how making rash decisions can lead to dramatic effects to those around you. As this is still seen today through historical marks such as, the Zimmerman case which led to social movements across nations. Sadly not every selfish decision made leads to something greater. Such decisions include WWII and dictators amongst history. Kenneth Grahame’s use of personification by having animals represent humans in many of his stories can be interoperated as an analogy for how making selfish and rash choices, can cause humankind to look barbaric and primitive, just as animals.