The Butterfly Effect Essay

I sat on the driver’s seat nervously and took a deep breath. It was a hot Saturday afternoon; the sun was starting to fall and my mom and I were at the Department of Public Safety practicing for my driver’s test. My mom was sitting on the passenger’s seat and reckoned, “Aggie, you will be fine” as I finished parallel parking. This was probably the hundredth time we had practiced and every single one had different outcomes.

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” (Andre Gide) In the novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, written by Julia Alvarez, four sisters are led through a risk infested journey in which they must overcome hindrances with hollow consequences. This historical fiction novel takes us through a rollercoaster of events, incorporating everything from the partialities towards women, to life below the oppressive administration of the Dominican Republic’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo. The events painted by the four sisters give us some insight as to the positives and negatives of life in the Dominican Republic. As the novel progresses, we see the diversity in relation to the

I woke up looking around not knowing what was going on. I looked around realizing that I was in an unknown bed. Panicking at first I tried to find my bearings, but I calmed down quickly as I watched my mother walk into the room.

"Did the hit you received yesterday knock out all of your brain cells?" She snaps, "You don't give patients false hope, not when it's a bad case like that."

Could she not see me? I yelled her name but nothing happened she just stared at the wall behind me. I sat down in the chair next to her but nothing happened she didn't know I was here. By an hour I was sobbing on the ground yelling “why did I leave.” The man appeared sitting next to me telling me to breathe and that I was gonna be okay and that I have to wake up now. I woke up in a hospital with my whole entire family in front of me asking me if I was alright and if I needed pain medicine. I asked my mom what happened? My mom told me that I was in a coma after the car crash on the bridge and that they didn't know if I would of made it or not. It all came to me the car crash.The car crashing into me pushing my car off the bridge. It all wasn’t a dream! I sat there in shock because it actually happened. Suddenly the man appeared of who I saw in my dream I was taken back to see him. He introduced himself to me and said sorry for crashing into me and told me to get better soon . I stared in disbelief that all of this has happened. Every day after the crash I can’t bring myself to look at that car even though it was pretty much all the dream. The thought of it being really haunts me forever

When I regained consciousness, I tried to open my eyes to check my surroundings. However, being so long in darkness, I could hardly see anything. By the stench and the "beep... beep... beep..." sound around me, I knew where I was. A while later, my eyes got used to the bright light and could see much more clearly. The first thing I saw was a doctor looking into my eyes very closely. When I moaned at him, he backed up and smiled. " You will be fine. Just a little painful; doesn't bother too much," he said. Then he turned to my mother, and they chatted for a while. Before he left the room, he turned to me again, "Rest some more." He smiled again and closed the door. His smile was so warm, but not as warm as my mother's. My mother walked up to me, and she pulled a chair and sat down. I was too afraid to look into her eyes; she would be so disappointed because I crashed the brand new car. It seemed like my head weighted 20 kilograms, and I could not pull it up. I

I gripped the wheel and made a sharp left and went up the curb into the heavily landscaped median. My shiney black Charger went airborne, grazed a tree and landed on top of some shrubbery. A disaster had been averted, I was humiliated and ashamed at my negligence, but we were all alive. The people in the car ahead of me with the terrified eyes never even pulled over, they just kept on going. I sat there atop the shrubbery in my sleek black Charger, first laughing and then weeping. I never played the radio that loudly again, and that was the last time I cruised Gratiot Avenue. It was a lesson that was not lost on me. I still love cars but that moment was a slingshot into adulthood, where my carerfree reckless world gave way to booster seats, and insurance rates. Don't get me wrong, I still get goosebumps when I hear the sound of a six cylinder hemi, but from that night on I learned to understand and respect the responsibility that comes with that kind of

I could hear my breathing as if it was a voluntary action. As I saw my mom car come screeching into the driveway, she rushed out, I ran up to her as I tearfully asked, "Is he okay?" With hesitancy and a sorrow- filled voice she said, "He's dead," I screamed over and over again, "No, no, not my brother! Anyone but him!" and I broke down crying, I felt as if I was paralyzed, I felt like I was suffocating; as if a giant hand was clamped around my heart, I wanted to run, I wanted to scream, I wanted for it to not be

Brave New World demonstrates the chaos theory very well, and more specifically the butterfly effect. The theory basically says that small changes have the potential to have monumental effects. In 1890, while working with the three body problem, Henri Poincaré described dependance on initial conditions. Shortly after in 1898, Jacques Hadamard noted the general divergence of trajectories in spaces of negative curvature. These are earlier, more generalized forms of the butterfly effect. Brave New World was written in 1931, which is not long after the concept started gaining more attention. Huxley came from a family of intellectuals, therefore it is likely that he had heard of butterfly effect before. Page 24 in Brave New World tells the

“With brain damage like this only time will tell. Sometimes looking at pictures or videos will spark a memory of what happened. I'm going to leave and give you time to think.” She said.

She nearly slide out of her seat when the car came to a stop, she lifted her head and looked at the male. “Worn someone when you are going to break the car so damn sudden.” She shouted at him. “I could have been killed.” She rolled her eyes. She knew she really wasn’t going to die but she could get badly hurt. “Why did you stop anyways we aren’t…” She turned her head to look out the window, she cocked her head to the side. She arched her brow a little. “Now that’s something you don’t see every day.” She spoke aloud so every in the car could hear

“Medics here, who needs help?” he questioned. It’s almost like Sasha never heard me tell him I was fine.

I do not know who I am, was the thought that floated through my mind as a nurse shook me awake from the hospital bed in the middle of the night. As blood seeped from my veins and into tubes, my vision began to go faint and my ears rang. My mind painted pictures trying to grasp what had happened just a few short hours before. Upon returning to the bed, my mind continued to race with thoughts. I could feel a gust of wind blow through the sheets when the realization came to me that a time bomb in my life had finally exploded and the blaze was sweltered within me. What had I done?

“They’ll both die if we don’t do the surgery.” Lexie countered. “She’ll go into a coma and we probably won’t be able to wake her up.”

The “Butterfly Effect” is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in the chaos theory; namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamic system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. This is a great theory that can be applied to specific aspects of life and life in general. I believe it can be applied to my life in the sense that every event that has occurred in my life; big, small, good or bad. I would not change anything, because they all came together to bring me to where I am today.