The Return by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

The book Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Coates writes a letter, addressing his son. He composed this message to his fifteen-year-old son, who that year had learned of the unjustified murders of numerous black individuals, including Eric Garner and Michael Brown; killed by police officers who received no punishment for their actions. Coates describes to his son many realities, that he has experienced firsthand, with which a black person must contend. He details his difficult childhood, living in fear – fear of the streets, fear of the police, fear of losing his body. In his letter, he illustrates how Howard University, the Mecca, and his experiences and interactions there shaped him. Another incident he discusses as one that

The river was very real; it held his comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years (140). While he drifted in the water, he imagines his future being different from his past in the sense of being able to relax and take time for himself. He feels like he is being taken away from people who hold him back from being himself and is entering a new life where he is

Standing on the shoreline of Canada, Tim O'Brien's moment of reckoning deepens as he not only faces the immediate path ahead, but also the entirety of his past. This pivotal moment is marked by an intense reflection on his life, as he feels the weight of his experiences and dreams overwhelming him. The description, "My whole life seemed to spill out on that river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or wanted to be. I couldn't get my breath. I couldn't stay afloat.

In an attempt to take away some of the guilt he has placed upon himself from the Vietnam War, O’Brien tells his tales –in the fictional book The Things They Carried- of the many challenges he faced as a soldier. In On the Rainy River, through the illusions on the banks of the river he sees his past, present and future each memory reveals a part of him. O’Brien’s thoughtful story about death -shown in The Man I Killed- illustrates that the jungles of Vietnam blur boundaries between hallucinations and actuality. The killing of soldiers both American and Vietnamese feed into the disillusions and sensations built up from war, but soldiers use an “anesthetic” to shelter themselves from everything that goes on.

When men are sent to war most fear that they’ll never return home but both Tayo in Silko’s Ceremony and Frank Money in Toni Morrison’s Home found their sense of home in the status of the uniforms they wore and orders they followed. Though these character’s appear to exhibit the lasting wound of post traumatic stress disorder in their daily lives after the war and are struggling to cope with there identity as a minority in America without the respect of being a soldier. The continuing effects caused by the traumatic experience of war allows for both Leslie Silko and Toni Morrison to use it to their advantage in narrating the story of these characters by their style of writing and what the characters recall or what they can or cannot remember.

Life is full of many unknowns. It is unknown what will happen tomorrow, what will happen next week, next month, next year, and twenty years from now. Some unknowns are negligible. For instance, like what will be served for dinner next Sunday. But some unknowns are life-changing. Ishmael Beah’s and Mariatu Kamara’s unknowns were the wars that lead to the demolition of their childhoods. But, both fortunate enough to survive their civil wars, Beah and Kamara have written memoirs of their experiences in the war, Beah, as a child soldier in the war, and Kamara, as a child victim of the war. This provides vastly different perspectives, however, due to Ismael Beah’s A Long Way Gone containing more psychological and physical aspects of the war, it

Nick is a World War I veteran who, as many veterans, suffers from emotional trauma that his experiences from the war left him with. Multiple scenes throughout the story, Big Two Hearted River, relates to Nick, the main character’s, journey toward recovery. Nick describes his surroundings in way that parallels to his own experiences and current voyage in respect to his revival.. He takes a calming adventure saturated with calming natural paths over hills, through woodland, and along a river to find peace with himself and to return to his prewar state of mind.

The novel The Samurai’s Garden and the movie The Last Samurai introduce two main characters, Stephen Chang, 20-year-old Chinese college student who is sent to his family beach house in Tarumi in order to improve his declining health due to Tuberculosis, and Nathan Algren, a formerly retired soldier turned alcoholic due to the acts he committed in the American Indian War. Although both characters leave their Ordinary Worlds, cross the First Threshold into their Special Worlds, where they face several tests and challenges which will change them before returning to their Ordinary Worlds, their experiences are very different. Stephen and Nathan’s experiences vary from how war affects them, how they are mentored, and how they have changed by the end of the story.

“Big Two Hearted River”, a semi-autobiographical short story by Ernest Hemingway, is a story about the main character, Nick, returning to Big Two Hearted River in order to recover from his inner wounds. Nick Adams goes on a journey alone in nature for a therapeutic purpose as he suffers from PTSD. However, Hemingway purposely avoided any direct discussion regarding to Nick’s mental wounds. The absence of the discussion is contributed by Hemingway’s writing style, the Iceberg principle. Hemingway focuses explicitly on what occurs on the surface without mentioning actual theme. This indicates that the theme of self-healing cannot be uncovered by simply looking at the text itself. In order to comprehend the actual theme of the story, the character development of Nick must be examined. This is possible since Nick Adams is a recurring character of Hemingway’s stories. The two preceding stories of “Big Two Hearted River”, “Now I lay me” and “A Way you’ll Never Be”, directly discusses Nick’s suffering from shell-shock and how he comforts himself by returning to Big Two Hearted river in his mind. The two short stories will be analyzed and connected to “Big Two Hearted River” in the essay first. This will provide a strong understanding of Nick’s psyche and the reason behind his return to nature. Then, “Big Two Hearted River” the short story itself will be carefully analyzed.

In life, every action precipitates a reaction, and facing challenge become significant. On the sixth day, Elroy take Tim on the Rainy River to fish, which becomes instrumental to guide Tim to his epiphany. When he is “on the margin of exile”, the collision of self-respect and insecurity aggravates. On the bow, Tim listens to the treacherous waves hitting the boat and feels the brisk wind pounding his face. The sound of silence coerces him into making a decision. There is a “hard squeezing pressure in [his] chest”. He is terrified. He does not know what to think. I do not want to leave my family and my childhood and my dreams and all I have behind! I am not ready to die! What am I suppose to do? Jump? Or stay? He tries to swallow his tears; instead one runs down his face after another. The safe haven---Canada reaches out a helping hand and pleads, “You must jump! At least you get to live a normal life!” He grips on the edge of the boat, leans forward, ready to jump overboard; a force is dragging him

The novel Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, is a novel that describes the life of Joe, the main character, and how he seems to manage his disabilities after he had fought in the war. Throughout the course of the war, Joe had lost all of his senses, despite touch, and every single limb, after he had gotten hit by a bomb. Once Joe wakes up, he begins falling in and out of consciousness and begins to experience difficulty finding purpose in life after his incident had occurred. Surely enough though, Joe had found a purpose for living again and began to try and communicate with his medical staff, found pleasure in reliving past memories, and became angered when it came to the government's role in supplying him with comfort and “honor”. Along with these ideas of self-identity and warfare corruption, flashback, characterization, and author’s purpose are all literary devices that work to enforce the ideas of identity and warfare. Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun utilizes flashback, characterization and author’s purpose to develop the two central themes that hardship is found in finding one’s self identity and that the true effects of warfare are much worse than the public perceives it as.

Kien’s post war experiences can be compared to any other veterans post war experiences with PTSD. It can be assumed that war veterans do not consider war a place of happiness, but rather a terrible place. The Sorrow of War says that war is a place of sorrow, depression, and horror, but also a place of change and maturity. This is conveyed through Kien’s flashbacks and

Their father angry, “His swaying was like shaking a bottle of Coke that burst into violent foam when you opened it. ‘Who brought that painting into this house?’ ‘Me,’ [Kambili] said,” (Adichie 210). From Kambili talking back to her father we can see that she has changed in that she has a voice and courage to talk back to the one person she is most afraid of because he beats her. Although her father beat her she changed for the better and learned from amazing people to speak up and do things she loved and not always listen to her father. When Kambili came back from her Aunt’s village she was different mentally and no longer strictly abiding by her father's ways or her old ways because of the experiences she had at her Aunt’s

Waiyaki is a young man who tackles the responsibility of mending the two ridges of Makuyu and Kameno that separated because of the religious of Christianity. The River Between, written by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, captures the ramifications of the white men religions and its effects on the two mountain ridges, that is separated by the Honia river, while the story surrounds around Waiyaki as he blossoms. In the story, Waiyaki, also known as The Teacher, is a strong, gallant young man that believes in the old ritual ways of the original tribe; however he conjointly intermingles with the white man’s teachings. Waiyaki attempts to bring learning of the white men, not their religions, into the old tradition way and fails miserably. Overall, the people

In Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes, identity becomes inescapable and transiently shared across generations and people, rather than belonging uniquely to individuals. The lingering presence of Mr. Mitani after his death reminds Kikuji of all the moral inadequacies Mitani possessed. As he begins to exhibit these inadequacies himself, Kikuji attempts to hide his imperfections by intoxicating himself and engaging in lustful affairs, but ultimately the cycle of shame continues. Ignoring or hiding from the world is not a sufficient escape from the shame associated with one’s identity. I will argue that Kawabata uses the art of subtle cues in order to convey that shame can be transferred, and shame must be confronted directly to overcome vulnerabilities