The Only Way Out in Richard Miller´s The Dark Night of the Soul

Term II Reading Project: Response to Literature Essay The book A Child Called It, by Dave Pelzer is very traumatizing and gruesome. The author, Dave, wrote about his abusive childhood with very descriptive details and imagery. In the book, Dave is a student in elementary school and is only twelve years old at the beginning of the book.

Dave Pelzer was born in San Francisco, California in 1960. At 18 years old he enlisted in the Air Force, serving during Desert Storm. He is a successful motivational speaker, voted 1990s California Volunteer of the year, top ten young Americans in 1993 and 1994, recognized by three presidents and surprisingly an abuse survivor. Dave’s mother was a struggling alcoholic and forced Dave into eight years of physical, psychological, and emotional abuse. For years both his father and various adults in his life ignored his abuse. Eventually, after a nurse reported a series of odd marks Dave was placed in foster care. In 1995 Dave wrote A Child Called “It” to share his story of abuse, a story that many other children likely share. Dave says he did

A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer is an interesting but awfully truthful story of growing up in an abusive childhood. This story is about the author life as a child. He gives first hand experiences of how he felt growing up. Dave was the outsider in his family and was the main victim of his parent’s abuse. This book will have you on the edge of your seat in suspense as you wait and hope for the end of a little boys struggle to live. This book does a wonderful job giving the first hand experiences of what it is truly like to be an abused child. Not all of the book is negative and the story can be viewed as an inspiring journey of how strong one child can be and what he will do to survive.

In the two books filled with kids being brutally abused. ¨A Child Called It” By Dave Pelzer is a real story written by the Dave Pelzer that takes the readers throughout his childhood. When he was a young kid he was brutally abused and starved by his mom. Throughout the book, it becomes worse with many life-threatening events. The author Dave Pelzer teaches the readers that child abuse is horrible for young kids. In¨Beaten¨ By Suzanne Weyn takes place in high school where a “Dream highschool couple” turns out to not be so good. The two main characters ty and keah get into a fight causing ty to become arrested for assault, and causes lots of drama. One lesson in this book is what you see is what you do, jealousy can cause abuse.

In literary education, from childhood to maturity, individuals are taught how to write not to improve themselves as critical thinkers, but to fulfill the requirements given to them in a prompt. Whether to analyze or argue, this form of writing has led to a cease of literary improvement in students today, making many question the effectiveness of writing classes. Mike Bunns, in his article “To Read like a Writer”, explores this topic and stresses the necessity for young readers to critically examine the author’s choices in order to improve their own pieces of work. Bunns effectively argues to his audience of college students that improved comprehension comes from focusing on the rhetorical choices authors decide to make in their compositions by tying personal narratives with repetitive questioning throughout his article.

The power of literacy is not the ability to read and wright or to have good penmanship but rather than an individual’s capacity to combines those skills and express one’s thoughts and feelings and comprehend the same from others. An individual’s capacity of combining these skills and using them to trudge a course for his or her own life is where the power of literacy lies. In the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Mr. Auld warned Mrs. Auld that if you give a nigger an inch he would take an ell (Douglass 1845) and Fredric Douglass did just that. Literacy is the key that unlocks one’s ability to increase learning process. Fredrick Douglass is prof of this and should serve as an inspiration to others to learn how to read and wright and or to enhance their literary skills.

A Child Called ‘It’ is a one-hundred and fifty-three page long autobiography by Dave Pelzer depicting his childhood. This story is horrific, terrifying and as described, plainly child abuse. In this story, Dave is but a young boy in a terrible home setting surrounded by his two brothers (Ronald and Stan), a supportive father (Stephen) and a very wicked mother (Catherine). During this story, David is abuse by his mother in so many times for the most petty of reasons with horrifying consequences. Some were that he forgot to clean the bathroom other times it was stealing food from his classroom because his mother refused to feed him.

Miller asked a question in his text, The Dark Night of the Soul, which is asked on numerous occasions. ‘What might the Literate Arts be good for?’ Miller gives situations and reasons why we could say the Literate Arts are useless in today’s world. What might the Literate Arts be good for? I ask this question a lot nowadays too. When I go for an English class or see literary books, the question creeps into my mind unconsciously. In this modern world ‘reading and writing’ have gone downhill and yet people do not seem bothered or affected by it which makes the doubt in literary power even stronger. But after a lot of thinking and research, I have come to realize that literate arts are still needed in

A Child Called It, is an astonishingly horrific true story of “one child’s courage to survive”. Once said “Such a story cannot fail to move.” this is exactly how I felt about this book. Dave Pelzer the author and protagonist of A Child Called It tells the story of his life as one of the worst seen cases of child abuse in the state of California. Dave’s mental strength and resilience is what truly drives the theme of the story and the physical and mental abuse that he had to endure.

Over the past month, we have been studying the concept of reading and writing in different communities. To assess this, we have read two different texts. Richard Rodriguez’s the achievement of desire”, from his autobiography “Hunger of Memory”; and Lucille McCarthy’s “A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing across the Curriculum” from “Research in the Teaching of English”. Both answer key questions regarding what it takes to become a great reader and writer, however, from the reading that I have done, each one only answers one part of the question. Rodriguez’s main focus is in the aspect of reading, whereas McCarthy mainly focuses on the writing portion. Both do a decent job of analyzing and putting forth a view of how they believe a person can best perform in these environments. This then allows us to use their concepts and create our own version, based on their points of view. But why should we care? Most people at this level of academia will have developed a system of writing that works for them, and will have a difficult time breaking from it if they’re process doesn’t meet the criteria that Rodriguez, and McCarthy put forth. The reason it’s so important is because of implications these ideas have. Both authors put forth concepts that are indirectly related to one another and that are highly beneficial to all who will apply them. They will force you to conform to new environments in order to succeed, this in turn will make you more

Various individuals seek answers through literate arts. While books can’t always give us answers about how to live our lives or how society works, we can still learn a lot. The truth of the matter is that nobody can determine your future, but yourself. The literate arts can teach individuals different skills or knowledge about society, but what you retain from the books will drastically affect your point of view and actions. Through Millers essay, “The Dark Night of the Soul” and Heath Ledger, well known for his role as the joker in the movie, Dark knight, is a good representation of how the literate arts can be perceived in many different ways. Literate arts can open your mind to many different thoughts, but the way you interpret them

As a child Dave Pelzer was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother; a mother who played tortuous, unpredictable games that left one of her sons nearly dead. She no longer considered him a son, but a slave; no longer a boy, but an 'it'. His bed was an old army cot in the basement, his clothes were torn and smelly, and when he was allowed the luxury of food it was scraps from the dogs' bowl. The outside world knew nothing of the nightmare played out behind closed doors. Dave dreamed of finding a family to love him and call him their son. It took years of struggle, deprivation and despair to find his dreams and make something of himself. A Child Called 'It' covers the early years of

Dave Pelzer is the survivor of the third worst case of child abuse in California's history. Dave grew up with his two brothers and two parents. Catherine, Dave's mother, loved to cook exotic meals for her family and decorate their home in creative and imaginative ways each holiday season. She was full of energy, often taking her kids on tours of downtown San Francisco while her husband was at work as a fire fighter, exposing them to Golden Gate Park and Chinatown. Once, while on a family camping trip, young Dave was watching the sunset when he felt his mother embrace him from behind and watch the sunset with him over his shoulder. "I never felt as safe and warm as at that moment in time," he recalls.

Educators are charged with not only teaching the content of their subject, but also responsible for creating a learning environments that fosters communication, engagement, and reflection so that the students will be prepared for their future careers and learning. Creating a classroom that fosters reading and writing is one way to engage students while promoting that they reflect on the material and communicate their understanding or misconceptions of the content. In order to form a literacy-rich classroom educators need to increase the amount of time students interact with all forms of print and literacy and the classroom environment is an essential key to setting the precedent and model behaviors that will make students more successful and capable of high level learning. (Tyson, 2013)

As I read, “The Dark Night of the Soul” by Richard E. Miller, I found it to be an interesting read. He inquires, why we read, why we write and what might literate arts be said to be good for? In his essay he describes the school massacres that have occurred throughout the years. As he describes these events, he asks a deeper question, “What is the point of continuing to read, write and learn in the face of such underlying dangers. I think that with all that is happening, individuals/students should continue with education because reading, television, writing and communication makes a difference in the lives of individuals around the world. The bottom line is that literary art has a way of touching students unexpectedly one way or another and students should not just throw the art away because of society’s perception.