Tough Choices No Way Out

James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead” depicts characters that all are seemingly alive, yet, on the inside, are very much dead. The main character, Gabriel Conroy, is more concerned with himself and how he is perceived than anyone else. His conceited nature plays a major role in his epiphany at the end of the story. After his wife, Gretta, divulges her childhood to Gabriel and the first young man who ever loved her, Gabriel come to the realization that “he had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that feeling must be love (p. 628). With Gabriel’s sudden epiphany, the issue the readers knew, but he did not, surfaced. Gabriel was dead inside and only cared about himself. Any form of love he ever gave was to himself to boost his own egotistical personality.

Hurston introduced Joe as a scrawny, small man who was afraid and scary. Joe was married to Lena but the narrator does not discuss what happened to their relationship. The reader can only assume that Joe and Lena had marital problems due to her being around another man. Joe became envious that his wife was with another man. Everyone thought that Joe could not stand up for himself. When Joe allowed Spunk to humiliate him in front of Lena, she was turned off by Joe. At first he was afraid to confront Spunk for taking his wife from him, but Joe was still in love with his wife Lena and wanted her back. After Joe heard that his wife was clinging on another man’s arm around town, he actually got the courage to confront Spunk. “Well, Ah’m goin’ after her to-day. Ah’m goin’ an’ fetch her back. Spunk’s done gone too fur.”(Joyce 1925, 502). Due to Joe being jealous and upset with Lena and Spunk’s relationship, Joe became violent towards Spunk and the guys started to fight. Joe’s goal was to get Lena back and get rid of Spunk. Joe ended up getting shot by Spunk because the author wrote, “See mah back? Mah close cut clear through. He sneaked up an’ tried to kill me from the back, but Ah got him, an’ got him good, first shot, said Spunk.” (Hurston, 1925, 504). After Joe died he started to haunt Spunk, coming back to life in a form of a bobcat. Joe wanted to get payback on Spunk because Spunk killed him and

So he stands up for himself, which shows he is strong. Joe-Boy is a bad friend, he was teasing Vinny about the dead boy in the text it says “ Are you going to let your mom control your life or what”? And” you going to jump down and touch the dead boy’s face beneath the rock”. That shows that he is getting out of Vinny’s comfort zone, which makes him a mean friend.

The grieving that individuals experience with death is unique, but the main stages are universal across cultures (Axelrod, 2017). There are five stages of grief. Nicolas Wolterstorff’s story, Lament for a Son, addresses these five stages as he tries to find joy after the loss of his son. The meaning and significance of death in light of the Christian narrative is also addressed in the story. Having a hope of the resurrection can help comfort individuals in situations similar to Wolterstorff (Wolterstorff, 1978).

He does not understand why his own mother would do such a thing to him. During this moment, Joe begins to transition from precociousness to the confrontation stage. After he kills his mother, he is confronted by Shola, who tells him that his mother is good and she is not the devil. Joe arrives at the Church with his mother’s body being carried in his arms. He lays her at the alter and begins to pray for forgiveness and to say his final goodbyes. His father rudely suggests that he removes Nunu’s body from the church. Joe’s will for his mother and his emotions got the best of him when he confronted his father about the truth and him being his child. Joe was intensely outraged and sat the church on fire burning himself and his father. At the moment of Joe’s death, Joe was in the internalization stage of black consciousness. Joe began to have positive attitudes about his mother’s culture and beliefs.

So Joe’s life in exile began. Although Joe was able to care for himself, his life had become sad, narrow, and lonely. On a stormy day in November of 1924 Joe’s life yet again changed. Thula had gone into labor with their third child but it took all night for them to get to the doctor so that she could deliver their first girl, Rose. That was Thula’s last straw.. A few weeks later they packed up once again, picked up Joe from the school house and went live in Thula’s parent’s basement in Alki Point, Seattle. By 1925 Harry bought an auto repair and tire shop in Sequim, Washington. He was enrolled at the school in Sequim which he attended everyday, this is where he met his childhood sweetheart and the woman that he would eventually marry, Joyce Simdars. One day when Joe was coming back from school he saw his family in their black car as if they were never coming back. Harry told Joe that they were leaving and that since Joe was all grown up he was going to stay in Sequim, alone. So yet again Joe was abandoned in a half finished house with no money and no one to help him. Soon after, he got a job working for one of his neighbors to help cut wood. In the summer of 1923, Joe got a letter from his brother Fred who was now living in Seattle asking Joe to come live with them. So Joe left Sequim and went to live with his brother in Seattle. While attending the Roosevelt High School, Joe joined the gymnastic team.

As opposed to communicating his outrage he tries to avoid panicking. This is either an indication of incredible resilience or utter shortcoming. There, on the other hand, is a moment when Joe demonstrates that his pride has been harmed, to be specific when he leaves the coin under his wife's cushion in the wake of laying down with her. This is a sudden turn in an identity that is apparently unequipped for harming someone else. Anyhow who can accuse the poor man for he has seen his entire world go into disrepair after the treachery of his loved one. The integrity of his character is completely shown in his pardoning toward the end of the story.

Joe Starks is an admirable person. He promises Janie beautiful material things and happiness unlike Logan who only tried to control her and offered her no love. Janie is overwhelmed by this proposal and believes that Joe may be the bee that has come to fertilize her and make her happy, but she is proven wrong. After she runs away from Logan, Joe and Janie travel to a new town that is only occupied by African Americans. There, Joe becomes mayor and is well respected by all. He gains wealth and gives Janie the material things that he promised her, but forces her to work in his local store all day long. He does not allow her to attend parties or have any fun and makes negative comments about her constantly. He says,

Janie’s inner self is entirely composed of her desires, needs, and true feelings. When Joe dies, Janie is internally genuinely happy; However, she can only express this inwardly because she can’t portray her husbands death as a happy aspect to society. On the outside, Janie participates in the funeral and the requisite mourning period; while inwardly, rejoicing.

He wants to run a town and the only way he feels he can look good is to have a pretty woman by his side. In the beginning of their marriage Joe treats he like a queen. He tells her that his woman needs to relax in the shade sipping on molasses water and fanning herself from the hot sun. Janie fell in love with the idea.

Janie’s relationship with her second husband, Joe Starks, is perhaps the most damaging. In the beginning of their marriage, Janie is proud and admiring of the successful, strong man she marries and runs off with. At first, it seems as though Janie has executed a successful breakaway from her unfulfilling life with Logan Killicks, and transitioned to an exciting, happy life with Joe Starks. Unfortunately, Janie and Joe’s marriage retracts from the infatuated love it once was, into a

The poem “Faith”, written by Mark Doty in 1995, works to destigmatize Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) through his relationship with his partner, Wally. Since this poem was written in the mid-1990s, it is a progressive piece that focuses on normalizing homosexuality and raising awareness for AIDS. His writing focuses on combatting the largely-held belief that AIDS only affects homosexual men. There was also the idea that there were “good gays” and “bad gays”. “Bad gays” were the ones who had the misfortune to contract HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and “good gays” did not contract HIV. Additionally, he describes the profound effect that a terminal disease can have on a relationship. Doty’s poem represents the idea that true love provides mankind with the ability to conquer fears. The main purpose of his poem is to show his love for his significant other and show the effect that AIDS had on their relationship, strengthening it, while making it more fragile at the same time. Doty’s poem is important because it opens up a non-judgmental conversation about AIDS, which was unique for that time.

Remembering the Bills of 80s Literature can serve as a bridge between the past and the present, between the truth and the lies, or the exposed and the hidden emotions of the historical moments, often capturing history in a way that an expert or even a witness cannot do so. The poem “Thinking of Bill, Dead of AIDS” by Miller Williams is a such a bridge between the 1980s’ America struck by the horror of AIDS and today’s approach to it. The poem not only takes us back in time, but shows the emotional and social implications of AIDS in people’s lives.

Because of these changes in emotion and attitude that have occurred in both Joe and Violet, Joe feels that he needs to find a way to re-sensitize himself to emotion: As he describes to Malvonne in the apartment, it is the quiet that he cannot take with Violet, he is “just hoping for a lady friend. Somebody to talk to” (49, 46). Joe needs to express himself to someone, but Violet is not letting Joe do that. The narrator describes Joe’s lover as being “Joe’s personal sweet—like candy” (120). Candy, though, as Joe describes in a totally separate incident, “is something you lick, suck on, and then swallow and it’s gone” (122). By providing the image of Dorcas as the temporary candy, Morrison shows how the relationship is not what Joe believes it to be. Yet, Joe wants to convince himself that his affair with Dorcas is more than the transient taste of a peppermint stick, and as he describes in his speech to himself, “This was something else. More like blue water and white flowers and sugar in the air” (122). Joe wants to have a deep relationship with Dorcas—a relationship where he can talk with her and share his feelings, but it is just his mind fooling him into this belief that the relationship is built around a deep bond.

Within this novel, Morrie embraced his mortality with “love, acceptance and open communication” as he gave the reader a glimpse into what he considered to be “The Meaning of Life.” Using Mitch Albom as a vessel to pen his “own culture values,” Morrie was able to define the contradictions between others vision of “popular culture values” and his style of truly living through “life, death and reincarnation.” With the use of materials obtained from the course, this writer was able to summarize various observations about Morrie’s “final lecture” on life, death and family amidst his perceptual understanding that reorganized “aging as growth and not