Wake Up and Listen The meaning of life is to find the meaning of life. Is it not? We all go through each day trying to figure out which road out the infinite amount of paths will lead us in a better direction where happiness is prominent and society is flawless. However, not every single human being is going to fit on that narrow, one-lane highway to success. Bad choices, accidents, fate, family matters, society, temptation, anger, rage, addiction, and loss of hope can all be deciding factors in opting to choose that wrong path to self-destruction. The adverse thing is, once you've traveled so far down the road, you get so discouraged that you feel like you can never turn back or make up for the "lost time." The past is there for us to learn from and rethink how we're going to take our wide steps into the future. Ambition and determination are key elements needed in achieving your goals. Nathan McCall goes to hell and back, just to go to hell and back again in every stage of his life. But, without a doubt, he always regains strength and bounces back. Working-class families are anything but lazy. Fifty plus hours a week with an average of two to three mouths to feed and backs to cloth, doesn't leave much time left for sleep let alone family bonding. As a young child, Nathan understood one thing for sure - work equaled money and that you need money to survive, especially in the "white man's world." At age thirteen, Nathan was too young, innocent, and ignorant to the fact that racism existed anywhere and everywhere he went. Working to him at this stage in his life was just that...working. Nathan just couldn't understand why his older brothers put up a fight to go with their stepfather to Sterling Point. ... ... middle of paper ... ...ause white people benefit from the advantages they receive by just being white, they have a power to incorporate change in America to help people who are less fortunate. However, it seems as though they're all too content and it doesn't directly affect them so they find no serious need to worry. Personally, this book has exceedingly influenced my train of thought and set up different tracks in my mind to run on. After the first thirteen chapters, I definitely developed a penchant for this book and couldn't seem to put it down. Maybe listening is what more white people (since they are the majority in power of our government) have to do to better understand the surrounding races and possibly build a better society to live in. If we don't listen, how can we ever understand or even begin to feel what it's like to be apart of racially different community in America?
I enjoyed that the book challenged some of the biggest problems in our legal system, or even society as a whole. There is still a lot of racism going on, and this book was not afraid to exploit that. I enjoy those kinds of readings. They are the things that will eventually spark a change and shed some light on the problems that are happening right now.
Nathan views education as not only unnecessary, but potentially wasteful and dangerous: “Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes…It’s hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes” (56). Nathan believes that knowledge will either wreck his daughters, as they might be able to think for themselves, or will simply run out of them because they are too weak to retain their learning. He sees the women in his family as “dull-witted, bovine females” who are pliable to his needs (73). Adrienne Rich refers to this as a part of the “Great Silence” in which men “withhold from (women) large areas of the society’s knowledge and cultural attainments” (Rich 290). Rachel knows she is a victim of this circumstance, “telling him off good in the bathroom mirror,” while proclaiming “I’ll show you whose mind is a blank slate!” (426). However, because she is subservient to her father, Rachel refuses to declare this sentiment to his
As we read in the book, Nathan is easily influenced by his surroundings. I said that the novel is about being pressure because when you do not know who you are as a person you tend to try and find yourself by doing things that does not pertain to you. Teenagers in particular tend to get influenced by the lifestyle of their peers. However, some teens have the courage to resist the pressure and be themselves rather than being the one amongst a group. In the novel McCall was the teen who got influenced by Jerome Gary also known as Scobie-D. Everyone feared and esteemed Jerome, but Nathan respected the respect that Scobie-D demanded. According to Arnold King “ McCall like many other black men felt the weight of a nation on his shoulders because any sense of failure reflected not only on himself, but also on his family and his entire race”. This quote refers back to the book when black parents focus their children to behave in public and if they did not they would get in trouble because the child behavior was the reflection of how their parent raised them. Although, pressure can be harmful and detrimental it can also be beneficial as well. Nathan McCall is an example of that because he came from being a trouble juvenile to a professional
Hayes and Nate had different viewpoints on what freedom is. Although Nate’s lifestyle was different from his father’s, he still was not free. Nate worked to provide for his family, and his father did so as well. Hayes had the mindset of a slave, and held onto the past, and it showed in his behavior towards people.
The author presented the information in a very solid way and sectioned it out very well. I understood what he was trying to explain. It was somewhat a long book but very much full of knowledge and history that in spirit is still alive today. We may not have slavery like it was then, but we still deal with racism and prejudice daily.
I learned a lot from this book. I learned a lot about why some stores are structured the way they are and how race, class, and gender are deeply imbedded in everything in the world and in everything we do. There is nothing we do that does not involve at least one of these aspects.
In the beginning, Nathan was a good idea to take his family to Africa to “help” the people of the Congo adopt the ways of Christianity. The girls don’t want to go, but Orleanna and Nathan make them go. The Duke did the same when he realized that no one was going to say he couldn’t go to Africa
For instance, Nathan exhibits the personality of a strict, religious man who strongly believes in traditional religion, specifically Baptism. Nathan acts out in abuse to his family when they do not follow his moral ideals, especially out of his selfishness and cowardliness. These traits illustrate Nathan to a wrathful god who is quick to discipline and punishment. Nathan only try to save unbaptized persons for his own well being, in order to secure a spot in heaven, even if it destroys the lives of others around him, including his wife and daughters.
I am often bombarded with a seven word question in life as I am sure many other people are. “What is your ultimate goal in life?” Many answers may differ, but my answer seems to always be the same; to seek happiness. If one can’t seek happiness what is the point of living? If you are miserable all the time and not living life with a positive mindset is there any so called “value” to your life? I’m not saying that you have to be happy all of the time because that is hard to achieve. Sometimes there are so called “punishments” in order to seek happiness, but once one achieves happiness it is a feeling that is indescribable.
...face. Because of this relatability, I believe black people would enjoy this more than any other race.The conundrums, twists, and turns are relatable to the African American community and keep a constant connection between the reader and the characters. This book is the perfect mix of the literary elements. This book has many conflicts and each one is a little more engaging than the last. It had me on the edge of my seat the entire time! Once I picked this book up I could not put it down. This is one of the most touching and moving pieces of literature I have ever read. It really opens ones eyes to the hardships we don’t have to go through on a day-to-day basis. When I was finished this book all i could say to myself was, “Wow, thank God I don’t have to go through that”. If I had to rate this book on a 5 star scale I would give it 5 out of 5 stars without a doubt.
Nathan Kilpatrick summarizes Nathan Price as a bipolar behavior man who abuses religion and also speaks for the family. According to Adah, Nathan speaks for the family but his words are empty because he stays in his stubbornness and does not learn the culture. Kilpatrick also believes Nathan downgrades Christianity in this book because he does not know the language so he misuses the meaning. Kilpatrick acknowledges that Nathan is teachable about little things like the garden but the things that actually make an impact, he is unmoveable. Adah says, "It is a special kind of person who draws together a congregation, stand before them with a proud, clear voice, and say words wrong, week after week". Even his own kids see his flaws as a person.
... consider the question of the meaning of life is itself meaningless, at least in so far as it seems to be incapable of coherent expression.
The ways in which the author could strengthen the book, in my opinion, is instead all the descriptive, to me meaningless points as how they were coloring themselves, the author should have put a little bit more facts in there to make it more documentary. Anyhow, overall the book has strength in letting the reader understand the history from both sides, whites and Indians. Many people have different views on the persecution of Native Americans, some think that it was all Indians’ fault and that they caused their own suffering, which I think is absolutely ridiculous, because they were not the ones who invaded. And Native Americans had every right to stand up for the land that was theirs.
Again, I believe Taylor is missing some important feature to his theory. It seems he is correct in stating one should have their own sense of meaning to their life not just others’ perception that one’s life is meaningful. However, there is still the problem of giving equal meaning to everyone life that is doing what they love to do. As a result, to answer this problem one could suggest in order for one to have a meaningful life a person must be subjectively fulfilled by pursuing objectively valuable ends. This way it ensures the person must find meaning in their own lives as well as creating something that benefits many that will give others the perception the person has a meaningful life.
"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive...." Joseph Campbell made this comment on the search for meaning common to every man's life. His statement implies that what we seem bent on finding is that higher spark for which we would all be willing to live or die; we look for some key equation through which we might tie all of the experiences of our life and feel the satisfaction of action toward a goal, rather than the emptiness which sometimes consumes the activities of our existence. He states, however, that we will never find some great pure meaning behind everything, because there is none. What there is to be found, however, is the life itself. We seek to find meaning so that emptiness will not pervade our every thought, our every deed, with the coldness of reality as the unemotional eye chooses to see it. Without color, without joy, without future, reality untouched by hope is an icy thing to view; we have no desire to see it that way. We forget, however, that the higher meaning might be found in existence itself. The joy of life and the experience of living are what make up true meaning, as the swirl of atoms guided by chaotic chance in which we find our existence has no meaning outside itself.