Suffering In The Book 'The Orchards' By Holly Thompson

"Children of the Forest" is a narrative written by Kevin Duffy. This book is a written testament of an anthropologist's everyday dealings with an African tribe by the name of the Mbuti Pygmies. My purpose in this paper is to inform the reader of Kevin Duffy's findings while in the Ituri rainforest. Kevin Duffy is one of the first and only scientists to have ever been in close contact with the Mbuti. If an Mbuti tribesman does not want to be found, they simply won't be. The forest in which the Mbuti reside in are simply too dense and dangerous for humans not familiar with the area to enter.

In this story “The Bean Trees” by Barbara Kingslover we meet Taylor Greer, an average teenager from Pittman, Kentucky. Even though Taylor has never been through anything truly horrific in her life how can she truly understand how unpleasant the world can be? Taylor’s personal growth in the “The Bean Trees” is a part of an uncertain journey because Taylor is thrown into motherhood and forced to see the bad experiences people go through in life.

This quote explains how the Joads work. They work each of their jobs as hard as they can and

In The Natural by Bernard Malamud, the main character, Roy Hobbs joins the New York Knights with an uncontrollable desire to be the best, at first in baseball, but later on in other aspects of his life. Roy is unable to control his appetites, one of them being for women. Roy is considerably influenced not by stereotypical fatherly figures, but rather women, namely Harriet Bird, Memo Paris, and Iris Lemon. While Harriet and Memo are not positive influences, and only wishes ill of Roy, Iris certainly is a positive influence, and cares about Roy, liking him from the start. Harriet and Memo does not care about Roy, the two women only leads him on to further their own goals. On the other hand, Iris does care about Roy, she is concerned about

Any event has an impact on individuals in a good or bad way. Although, if an experience created a crevice in a person’s heart and mental stability, could they still be able to heal from such a moment? Speak, a novel written by Laurie Halse Anderson, tells the story of a freshmen student at Merryweather High School named Melinda Sordino. Before the new school year, Melinda faced a traumatic experience at an end-of-summer party, where she ended up calling the police. As a freshman, she has lost all of her friends, lets her grades go down the drain, and becomes an outcast. Melinda has kept quiet for what happened to her at the party and for that reason, her life has turned a full one-hundred and eighty degrees. Melinda Sordino can never transform into the person she once was before, but with knowledge and aid she receives from her art teacher Mr. Freeman and his class, she is able to grow once again and not live in a never-ending cycle of emotional disturbance. Mr. Freeman and his art class play a major role in Melinda’s progress towards self-healing by assigning her the year-long project of developing a tree in which she must self-assess herself and her emotions and giving his moral support and critique. Also, Melinda’s ex-best friend, Ivy, starts to reconnect with her through art and Melinda has begun to incorporate her emotions in the tree artwork that resolutely makes her face what she has been trying to ignore since the

Although in the story Melinda is scared to speak and open up about her harsh secrets, at the end she opens up and shows that a person needs to be strong and fight for their rights. Melinda tries to make herself fit in with classmates but has a hard time. “I am outcast” is how she refers to herself at school (4, Anderson). This means that she is not accepted by the other people at her school and does not have a bestfriend like most teenage girls do. She is all alone and does not have someone to support her in her time of need. The tree she tries to draw in art class is a big symbol of her life and how she begins to see herself as a brave person and face her problems. She overcomes her fear of Andy, makes new friends, and becomes brave. She faces these struggles through hard work and grows as a person like a seed growing into a large tree that's full of life. Speak, a book with a static and scared main character or a growing girl that sprouts into a tree of life and strength.

However, with her alcoholic dad who rarely kept a job and her mother who suffered mood swings, they had to find food from her school garbage or eat expired food they had previously when they had the slightest bit of money. In addition, when bills and mortgage piled up, they would pack their bags and look for a new home to live in, if they could even call it a stable home, since they would be on the move so often. Jeanette needed a dad who wouldn’t disappear for days at a time, and a mom that was emotionally stable, but because she didn’t have that, she grew up in an environment where she would get teased or harassed for it. Jeanette suffered so much, that even at one point, she tried convincing her mother to leave her father because of the trouble he had caused the family already. A child should be able to depend on their parents for food and to be there for them when they need it, and when that part of a child’s security is taken away, it leaves them lost and on their own, free and confused about what to do next.

“The Flowers” by Alice Walker is a short story written in the 1970’s. The story focuses on Myop, a ten year old African American girl who loves to explore the land in which she lives. Carefree and naïve, Myop decides to travel further away from her ‘Sharecropper cabin’ and travels deep inside the woods to unfamiliar land where she discovers the decomposed body of an African American man. It is then Myop quickly grows up and suddenly becomes aware of the world in which she lives. The story relies on setting and symbolism to convey the theme of departing innocence.

“After a traumatic experience, the human system of self preservation seems to go into permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment” (Judith Lewis Herman). The psychoanalyst Lewis Herman describes how encountering agonizing pain causes individuals to become more cautious as a result. The psychoanalytic lens is based on Freudian theories and asserts that “ people’s behavior is affected by their unconscious:...the notion that human beings are motivated, even driven, by desire, fears, needs, and conflicts of which they are unaware…” (Tyson 14-15) High schools a place where tragedy are brought upon people, but their voices aren’t heard. Melinda, a high school freshman, is the protagonist in Laurie Halse Anderson’s book, Speak.

“It troubled Leah that people thought our household deficient, not because our mother was parked at death’s door, but because we lacked a bakala mpandi - a strong man - to oversee us.”

The 1930s were a time of hardship for many across the United States. Not only was the Great Depression making it difficult for families to eat every day, but the Dust Bowl swept through the plains states making it nearly impossible to farm the land in which they relied. John Steinbeck saw how the Dust Bowl affected farmers, primarily the tenant farmers, and journeyed to California after droves of families. These families were dispossessed from the farms they had worked for years, if not generations (Mills 388). Steinbeck was guided by Tom Collins, the real-life model for the Weedpatch camp’s manager Jim Rawley, through one of the federal migrant worker camps. He was able to see for himself,

When the story first begins, the father pleads with the mother to let him see Christina and Stella once again. Although he makes the effort to reach out he attempts to take the easy way out by asking the mother if she would talk to the girls first, making things easier for him: "'Talk it over with them,' she finally said. 'They'll eat me alive if you don't talk to them first'" (Michalopoulou, 76). The reader finds out that he has been watching the girls frequently from a distance outside of their school. He has many opportunities to approach them but chooses not to therefore letting even more time pass by. He uses the excuse that he does not have an "explanation" for them as the reason for not approaching them. He knows that they will not excuse what he did so, in other words, he needs an excuse for when he sees them.

Seed, a book by Lisa Heathfield, applies the idea that knowledge is power, but ignorance is bliss through the character development of Pearl, the depth of settings and ambiguity. Seed’s narrative quality explores that knowledge does not always make one influential, however, not acquiring knowledge is a relieving sensation.

The Farmer's Daughter is 1947 American films of romantic-political comedy genres. The story is about Katrin "Katie" Holstrom, a Swedish-American country girl who moves to the big city of Capital Hill to attend a nursing school. However, when a painter who had completed a job for his dad offers Katie a ride, he ends up stealing her tuition and expense money. After losing her nursing-school tuition, Katie had decided to rebuild her savings by applying for a temporary job as a maid in the home of young congressman Glenn Morley and his influential political mother Agatha. She eventually enters the political arena and was running for Congress herself.

Is it human nature that people tend to be selfish and impatient during bad and dark times? From my personal experience, people that do and people that don’t. Unfortunately, I have seen more that do resort to selfishness and impatience. After all, humans aren’t perfect and are sinners as well. I believe human nature often shows weakness rather than strength in times of obscurity.