The Life You Save May Be Your Own Essay

Lucynell Crater, an old woman, and her thirty-year-old, deaf daughter, also named Lucynell Crater live in a run-down house that needs to be repaired. One day a man who calls himself Tom T. Shiftlet stops and offers to fix the house and Lucynell’s car. Lucynell explains that she has no money to pay him, but he can eat and sleep in the house for free. Mr. Shiftlet fixes parts of the house and begins to work on the car. Mrs. Crater and Tom come to agreement that Tome will marry Lucynell. Tom, Lucynell and Mrs. Crater go to the court house and finalize the marriage. Tom and Lucynell take off in the car for their honeymoon. They stop to eat for the night and Lucynell falls asleep at the table. Tom Shiftlet tells the waiter that she was a hitch hiker and he needs to take off. Mr. Shiftlet leaves Lucynell at the restaurant and takes off with her mother’s car. As he drives away, he passes a sign that says, “The life you save may be your own.”

“The curious incident of the dog in the night time” written by Mark Haddon demonstrates that disabilities also come with advantages, as shown by Christopher Boone.

(146) In order to emphasize his humility and goodness, Tom has been cast as a ?one-arm jackleg? (as he so eloquently puts it). He is a carpenter, ably fixing up the Crater property. He performs the miracles of reviving Mrs. Crater?s long-dead Ford (the religious connection reinforced by O?Connor?s characterization of his expression ?as if he had just raised the dead? [151]) and teaching deaf and mute daughter Lucynell to say the word ?bird?. He eschews modern man?s obsession with money and claims that he has a ?moral intelligence? despite his physical shortcomings. By emphasizing his focus on the spiritual nature of life, Tom succeeds in marrying the daughter and receiving money from Mrs. Crater.

In her essay “On Being a Cripple”, Nancy Mairs presents her audience with an honest inside view of her life and perspective as a cripple, a word she openly uses to define herself. She brings her world to us by discussing a wide variety of things including language, family, and humor, and how these all relate to her life. Through various stories and insights, she allows her readers to gain an understanding and acceptance of people with disabilities. She examines the public’s view of the disabled, as well as the views they have of themselves, and compares them to her own. She makes it clear that she is not to be defined solely by her disability. In discussing honestly her views, as well as

In her essay, “On Being a Cripple”, Nancy Mairs, an essayist with multiple sclerosis, writes about her experiences with her disease. She wants her audience of able-bodied people to stop pitying towards disabled people and instead show acceptance. Mairs achieves her purpose by presenting herself as similar and relatable to her able-bodied audience with many anecdotes and a blunt tone. This discussion of her condition removes the discomfort about disabilities felt by her audience and allows for them to accept disabled people. While Maris’s primary audience is an able-bodied person who supports disabled people, other readers, like someone with her condition, may be drawn towards this essay as well. Unlike an able-bodied person, a disabled person

Flannery O’Connor’s short story The Life You Save May Be Your Own, takes place in a rural area with a few powerful main characters, and though the literal meaning is not challenging to comprehend, the symbolic and metaphorical meanings are much more complex, requiring further analysis. One of the most touching and relatable themes in the story is that redemption is often overlooked because of personal greed.

The moment she got trampled under the stomps and shoves of others, one could identify what she’d been feeling like previously - a witness to her own inconvenience. This incident not only exemplifies but also symbolizes the burden she feels having been born handicapped, unable to provide assistance or gain to the world. These feelings Adahs has for her life are later rebutted by her longstanding dreams of attending medical school and improving science. By achieving her academic potential, she finally recognized herself as an important asset to the world- no longer being seen as handicapped, physically or mentally.

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.

Living life to its fullest capacity was a very important goal for Nancy Mairs. In “On Being Crippled” she examines depression, direction, choice, and family as she went through her battle with Multiple Sclerosis. Not only did she examine her own battle with MS, but she analyses the views that society has on anyone with a debilitating or handicapping disease. For this reason, it is clear that Mairs is speaking to society. She outcasts herself from the rest of society by her comfort with the word “cripple” towards herself. Mairs is able to pull this essay off because she herself has MS and therefore can provide valid evidence on her experiences and those similar to hers.

For instance, both Flowers for Algernon and Awakenings include themes towards the treatment and respect of those living with mental and physical disabilities. In Flowers for Algernon, Charlie was unknowingly used as a punchline by his supposed friends and colleagues at the bakery, merely because he was mentally challenged and the incompetence that resulted from this made others feel superior to him. Following the surgery and the increase of Charlie’s intelligence, the doctors insinuated that he wasn’t considered a human being prior to the experiment. They implied that those with impaired mental abilities are not individuals capable of independent thought and feeling, which is disproved through Charlie’s progress reports. Similarly, Awakenings sheds light on the treatment of those who have physical challenges, in the manner that the nurses and doctors treated the patients before the medicine was administered. They are visibly reluctant to tend to the patients, and attempt to avoid work with television shows because they lack compassion and understanding towards their conditions. The staff thought efforts to help them were futile due to their catatonic states, therefore neglecting them, treating them like obligations rather than individuals. However, both stories show that in spite of their circumstances, those with disabilities are not lesser people and are deserving of compassion and respect just as others are; though they are often ill-treated and misunderstood.

Crater asked Mr. Shiftlet “Are you married or are you single?” his response was well thought out and planned as he replied “Lady, where would you find you an innocent women today? I wouldn’t have any of this trash I could just pick up” (149). Mr. Shiftlet answers her question in such a way because he knows that she is looking for a caring and hard working man to marry her daughter and realizes that her daughter is the key to getting everything he wants from the old women (Rukhelman). So when Lucynell starts to make noises and ends up falling out of her chair Mr. Shiftlet helps the young girl back in her chair making sure that she is okay and then he proceeds to ask Mrs. Crater about her daughter acting as if he has any interest in her at all. During this conversation Mrs. Crater is sure to point out that her daughter can “sweep the floor, cook, wash, feed the chickens, and hoe” (149), making her daughter seem more desirable and showing that she would make a good wife despite her mental disabilities

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

A couple years after her death The Journals and Letters of the Little Locksmith had been published. After her death, they rediscovered the disease and called it classic of early twentieth-century disability (Lobb 34). The Little Locksmith charts a memoir about Katharine's struggles to transcend physical limitations and embrace her life, her body, and herself in the midst of debilitating bouts of frustration and shame. That expands her world far beyond the boundaries. She grew a lot of confidence during her life she said her life was transformed that just keeps getting better and better. Her story is a frightful tragedy that was resigned into quite modest work of art. That’s all Katharine ever was full of art and love. No matter how much her disability slowed her down she just kept going and going. Today The Little Locksmith is a critically acclaimed but largely forgotten literary classic brought back in print for the first time in thirty years

The dominant model of disability for the majority of the 20th century was the medical model. The medical model’s emphasis is on impairment; this is the cause of the disadvantage disabled individuals face and therefore the site of interventions (Crow, 1996). It is based in the biomedical and clinical. It views disability as a personal tragedy, an idea which is often implicit in work around disability based on the medical model. (Oliver, 1990).

Just about everyone in the world today knows either a loved one or a friend that is dying of a fatal disease or a terminal illness. Every day people are dying of incurable diseases due to the lack of knowledge or the lack of treatment for their disease. Imagine if there was a cure or an answer to save your loved ones or friends life, wouldn’t you want to give them a second chance at living life? In the recent scientific world there has been research done on stem cells. Stem cells are specially grown cells in order to help diseased patients grow better tissue in hopes of their survival and recovery. These cells can be derived though many different procedures. Extracting stem cells from a fetal embryo has proved to be the easiest and most