The Return by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

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

The short story, ‘Harrison Bergeron’, greatly represents the stages of the hero’s journey. Although some of the stages are less obvious, three points hugely stand out; departure, trials, and status quo. First of all, Harrison’s departure is a very integral part of this short story. In the beginning of the anecdote, Harrison’s “departure” is described, and throughout the writing, George periodically remembers the horrid event. “And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.” (page 1). When Harrison was forcibly taken away from his parents, he leaves his normal world and his comfort zone. The second most obvious stage would be trials. Harrison Bergeron successfully faces

“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.

Social rank and relative wealth play great roles in determining a person’s life in Umuofia society. Sometimes a man with sheer force of will cannot change his future through hard work. One of the main conflicts in Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is the clash between Okonkwo’s determination to succeed, his free will, and fate – which seems to have less appealing things in mind. Okonkwo’s will plays a major factor in determining his future; he chooses to kill Ikemefuna with his own hands, he chooses to kill a government official, and in the end, he chooses to take his own life. However, the pre-destined conditions of his life, his father’s failures, and a series of unfortunate circumstances ultimately lead to Okonkwo’s downfall.

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.

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

Survivor’s guilt has played a substantial role throughout the story. Boa Ninh helps the reader to become aware and understand war as being all conquering by comparing it to love. Kien faced many hardships after war, being one out of ten to survive the Vietnam War, he realized that he should “expose the reality” by writing his own biography. He struggles with both the memories of the war and also his trauma post-war. He says that he is required to write about the war as he is the only survivor of the battalion. He writes to get rid of his tormenting memories going on his head. He is not only traumatized because of war, but he also was traumatized because of the rape of his long lost love Phuong. War is presented as real life situations the killing, bombing, and the loss of many solders. Kien did not only writing about life during war but he went back into his younger childhood days before the war. He talked about his childhood sweetheart Phuong and how their life later drifted apart due to the war. He described the good times and he described the tormented memories. Trauma is portrayed in many ways throughout the story through writing, love, and survivor’s guilt.

Imagine living in a world of perfect paradise, where no one disturbs you or takes away your freedom of thought. You’re living in pure harmony and feel as if your life is going to be peaceful forever. But what if one day someone comes along and changes your world, taking away your custom beliefs and changing your culture. What would you do? In the novel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, the character Okonkwo, an indigenous member of the Ibo tribe, comes in conflict with the European settlers as they try to convert his tribe to Christianity. Even though many people choose to convert to this new system, Okonkwo, along with a few friends, respond adversely to this foreign settlement as they attempt to restore order in their native village. As the Europeans bring their religion, messengers, and government into the tribe, the outcome of Okonkwo 's response, causes him to bring his identity into query when he realizes that things that were formerly common, will always collapse in the end.

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.

● Later he killed one of his men and “... was filled with guilt and grief. He shut

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.

Through Christopher’s eyes, we can see how he copes with loss. Readers can view the difference in how Christopher reacts to loss compared to other people’s reaction to loss and the difficulties of coping. The death of Wellington hit Christopher hard and the way he coped with this was to find his killer. When he finds the killer, the father, he copes by running away, to live with his mother. Through Christopher the reader can see how his thoughts and actions processed the need to run away. “I had to get out of the house,” (Haddon, pg. 152). Christopher is a very logical person, but his decision to leave was irrational, but to him it was the only solution his mind could logically draw. He shows that coping with the loss of trust in his father and the loss of Wellington was very difficult for him, which is demonstrated through his decision to investigate Wellington’s death and the irrational need to run away. Narrative perspective illustrates the theme of coping with loss is difficult and in particular, people like Christopher can make decisions that can be irrational or

Matsu, a 60-year-old Japanese man who is the servant at the beach house in Tarumi, grows close with Stephen over the summer and they seemed to have bonded over their hatred of war. Unlike Stephen and Matsu’s relationship, his relationship with Keiko, a Japanese girl who turns into his first love, is destroyed by the horrors of war. Keiko’s father originally forbid Keiko to see Stephen due to his ethnicity and she soon understands why and feels guilty for disobeying his orders after her brother is killed in action, which creates tension between Stephen and the family. On the contrary, Nathan Algren’s whole world revolves around war and affects him directly every day. Shortly after the American Indian war, Nate is hired to train an army to replace the Samurai by Omura, a Japanese businessman that assists the Emperor in modernizing their country. Omura sent Nate and his army into battle despite Algren’s protests, which ends in disaster. After most of the troops are killed, Nate is surrounded by many men and is expecting to die until someone orders the men to stop. Nate is taken to Katsumoto’s, the leader

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