Half A Life Essay In Half a Life, Darin Strauss recounts his life from the time of accidentally, guiltlessly killing Celine Zilke. Darin continually apologizes for his behavior after the accident, and as a reader, it is easy to judge some of his actions. We must not judge the normalcy of a response to an exceptional circumstance. Darin and his readers judge him to react abnormally, but actually his response to the accident is incredibly normal. “Our lives are designed not to allow for anything irrevocable,” so our judgement of how to behave stems from our comfortable, unremarkable lives. For events that are irrevocable, there is a completely different model for what is normal. Darin faced something tragically irrevocable, and he follows the accepted Kübler-Ross model of …show more content…
The emotion and actions he felt and performed aren’t typically those that characterize anger, but in grief, anger is often simply the acknowledgement that the tragedy occurred, the asking oneself why it happened to you rather than someone else, and the placement of blame. When Darin is at the assembly at the end of the year when the principal speaks of Celine, he performs a “ritual” in order to try to avoid the judgement. He has accepted that his car is the reason Celine is dead, but he doesn’t want to be watched or judged. He would rather be staring at someone else in the gym than have everyone staring at him. Also, Darin frequently asked himself why she swerved into his car. He blames Celine for his pain. When he finds out about her diary entry, he grasps onto the words that could feasibly make the death a suicide. Even though the entry could just as easily have nothing to do with suicide, the stage of anger causes him to use it as an excuse to blame her. All of these actions and thoughts cause the reader to judge him slightly, but in reality, he is experiencing the anger that comes naturally with grief and acting as it
When we think of human suffering on a mass scale, our telescope does not work, because it was not designed to work in such situations.” (404) Vedantam ends his essay by stating, “Our conscious minds can tell us that it is absurd to spend a boatload of money to save one life when the same money could be used to save ten—just as it can tell us it is absurd to be more worried about homicide than suicide. But in moral decision-making, as in many other domains of life where we are unaware of how conscious biases influences us, it is the hidden brain that usually carries the day.” (405) For the most part this essay was to explain to the reader about how we process our thoughts when it comes to the way we think. One tragic event is easier to understand and comprehend then many things
Person vs. Society: Frank must learn to cope with the people who are unforgiving of his mistake and think he should receive further punishment. It is difficult for him to hear negative remarks and ruthless comments for strangers saying he should have greater consequences, even though he is paralyzed for life.
There are many unpredictable and ungovernable accidents, coincidences, and chances that drive the universe and can ultimately affect the events of a person’s life. One of the main concepts surrounding David Guterson’s novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, is the power of free will vs. fate. The last sentence of the novel: “accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart” explains the lack of control that humans have on the forces surrounding them compared to the control they have over their actions or decisions and the impact that it has. Snow Falling on Cedars looks closely at the effect free will and fate has through the murder trial that occurs post World War II in the story where a Japanese American, Kabuo Miyamoto, is charged with the murder of an American, Carl Heine. As the trial takes place, the story interconnects the characters one of who is Ishmael Chambers, a journalist who may be Kabuo’s only hope but struggles with the decision to do what’s right as he was left burned by Kabuo’s wife and his childhood love, Hatsue. The notion of chance and free will can be seen especially in the character of Ishmael who struggles against the effects of the war and Hatsue leaving him. And as a Japanese American during the war, Hatsue herself displays the power of free will in her self-acceptance and in creating a balance in her life. Apart from the portrayal of free will vs. chance in the development of the characters, certain events in the novel such as the case of Carl Heine’s death and the war itself exhibits similar themes. However, unlike Carl’s death, the war shows that there are instances where circumstance may be the result of human actions. In David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, the events tha...
In “Luck Swallows Everything” and “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility” Galen Strawson and Susan Wolf’s explain the concept of responsibility in both a compatibilist and determinist view. Strawson argued that change was not possible at all when it comes to responsibility due to an individual’s mental nature, while Wolf argues that change is possible for an individual when it comes to responsibility. This essay will be focusing on the criticism of Wolf’s work.
In Harry Mulisch’s novel The Assault, the author not only informs society of the variance in perception of good and evil, but also provides evidence on how important it is for an innocent person experiencing guilt to come to terms with their personal past. First, Mulisch uses the characters Takes, Coster, and Ploeg to express the differences in perspective on the night of the assault. Then he uses Anton to express how one cannot hide from the past because of their guilt. Both of these lessons are important to Mulisch and worth sharing with his readers.
Unger’s main example, titled The Envelope, is a case that forces the reader to re-evaluate their initial reactions when compared to other examples such as The Vintage Sedan. In the case of The Envelope, a person, who is not financially well off, receives a letter in the mail from UNICEF asking for one hundred dollars that will go to save thirty children in poorer nations. Instead of putting a minimal amount of energy and resources into writing the cheque, they choose to disregard it and throw it in the trash (25). In The Vintage Sedan, a person has just recently restored a classic luxury sedan that they can only barely afford. This person encounters a wounded man on the road who caused the injury himself by recklessly trespassing over barbed wire fencing. Now the owner of the sedan is faced with ...
In order to further the discussion that socioeconomic status is correlated with an elevated level of suffering, Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment, experiences similar levels of suffering due to his extreme financial poverty. When explaining his theory to Porfiry, that was published in the newspaper on the social divisions of man, Raskolnikov acknowledges that the “extraordinary man has the right...to overstep certain obstacles” while the “ordinary” man will “transgress” the law, ultimately leading to an amplified level of general suffering (Dostoevsky 260-61). Some humans are more susceptible to suffering when compared to others and Raskolnikov’s situation supports a complementary idea. Because of his close relationship with poverty, Raskolnikov
Everyone makes at least one decision in their lifetime and it’s not always a good choice or decision. Some are small, domestic, and innocuous. Others are more important, affecting people’s lives, livelihoods, and well-being. Many of the simple decisions people make like what color pants they will wear today or whether or not they want spaghetti for dinner, etc. are often automatic or based on their preference at a given moment. Inevitably, we make mistakes along the way. So as you look back at your life and think about some of the poor choices you have made, you might find yourself wondering exactly why you made those decisions that seem so poor now in retrospect. Why did you marry someone who was all wrong for
Williams’s and Nagel’s concept of moral luck encounter more disagreement than being agreed since moral luck is not universally applicable in every situation. The existence of either motive or agent-regret will, in some cases, be enigma since they are private matter and unknown to the rest of us. Therefore, the case of moral luck has been yet remains unsolved due to its inconsistency. On the other hand, if motives and intentions (of being moral) are not counted and/or agent-regret does exist, it will be unfair to the person who is incorrectly treated since the result is actually out of their control. Thus, the moral luck is a sensitive matter and should be applied per case based on the presented facts. There is no such universal formula for relevance of moral luck in each situation.
The average man or woman would be interested in this essay because it unveils a reality which all of us face at one point or another, common mental errors. As previously mentioned Wise mentions several key terms for the reader to use and understand. . The author uses five key points, The Domino Effect, Double or Nothing, Situational Blindness, Bending the Map and Redlining. The Domino Effect according to Wise, is when people look not to their logic but to their emotion and fall victim to the same fate as those their trying to save. You often see this situation in people trying to save someone who is drowning or trapped in a house fire. Double or nothing according to Wise, is where people fail to calculate true risk. Wise says this is seen most often at Casinos and in investing. We’ve all seen the guy or woman who is at the black...
To most, it is a mystery whether the outcome of one’s life is dependent on the choices, decisions and actions that are made throughout that lifetime, or if it is simply predetermined and a matter of fate. Does man have any control over his life, or is he just acting as a pawn, experiencing a predetermined sequence of events as they come? Do the decisions he makes and the actions he takes affect the outcomes of events later in his life? And perhaps even more concerning, since they are out of his control, do the decisions and actions of others have an effect on the outcome of his life? In the play Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare explores these ideas and questions in great depth. At a quick glance, it seems that the tragic death of the
Gould suggests in his Wonderful Life that “replaying life’s tape” (Gould 1989 p51), setting time back to a point previous to the present day and letting events play out, would result in outcomes markedly different from actual history. He posits that we would see radical differences between the results obtained from the replay, and the results obtained from actual history, if even an event seen to be unimportant was altered by a small amount. This is Gould’s concept of the contingency of outcomes. Gould’s idea suggests that results are highly dependent on the events preceding their conception, that they are reliant on their initial conditions. He considers the concept important as it represents the ability of the individual to have large effects on the final outcome of history (Gould 2002 p1341).
This propensity for survival does not necessarily manifest itself in the most positive ways in some cases. In fact, the human will to live can, in extreme situations, override a person’s conscience and guilt. In Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, several of the characters experience this phenomenon. Marchand, for example, buys his freedom and therefore his survival without showing any empathy for his peers unable to do this themselves. Worse yet, Leduc feels guilty when he takes Von Berg’s white ticket because he knows it means Von Berg is trading his own life for Leduc’s. Yet, Leduc ignores this guilt and leaves. His sheer will to survive allows him to not only indirectly end the life of another human but also totally ignore the natural guilt he feels about it.
Negative stimulus automatically triggers the response of counterfactual thinking. The different effects of counterfactual thinking integrate in to a functional model that contrasts positive consequences of the inferential mechanism (Myers & Twenge 72-73). Thoughts that relate to adverse emotional circumstance of the past and hypothetical reinterpretations of history, one is bound to experience feelings of despair, intense sense of loss, and regret. Social psychologist have studied the worth of thinking and feeling of a counterfactual character and in the process confirming that undesirable emotions could arise from counterfactual discerning. The social psychological theory could functionally become beneficial to individuals with an integrated possibility of causal inference. In most circumstances, extreme events activate the counterfactual specially the influential negative consequences and the version of the past established the
If we are to be truly innocent and humble beings, we must recognize our own innate guilt as human and accept it. If we do not, we will constantly be obsessed by our “state of apparent acquittals”. Kafka, Franz. A. The Trial. Trans.