The Importance of Family

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?gThe family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes society's most basic values.?h
Charles Caleb Colton

What does the existence of ?efamily?f mean to you? To me, family is the group of people who will be by my side through out my entire life. They are the people who cherish myself and turn to me when everything is going wrong. My parents show me how to do the most important things in life which are to love and to be loved. They also give me the chance to do whatever I choose in life without making me do what they want me to. My brother always shows he is interested in everything as well as I do. Family is what will always be by my side and I feel that they deserve the most credit for forming the person who to care, to love, and to fight. The novels The Outsiders and The lost boy, the short story The Left Foot and the poem On Children, all are in the situation of individuals forming their identity while growing up in different families. In The Outsiders, the main character grows up without parents so his family becomes only his two brothers; in the novel The Lost Boy an extremely abused boy finds his strength with new family; in the short story My Left Foot the boy struggles for his disability but successes with a huge support from his family; in the poem On Children the independency of child is narrated ironically. Therefore by examining the works from four different perspectives, it will be revealed that family is something which builds the most important value and identity in individuals.

First of all, in order to gain better understanding of the themes of these works, it is necessary to examine the novel The Outsiders from a historical point of view.?@Susan Eloise Hinton, the author of The Outside, was born in 1948 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she was raised. Her writing style in this novel is very straightforward as it was written when Hinton was only sixteen years old. I suppose that when she wrote the novel, she was also facing the problems which are referred in the novel. Poverty, rejection, violence, alcohol, drug abuse and family conflict, those are often what teenagers confront in a severe society. Interestingly major issues among teenagers have not changed over the time. Without parents, the characters de...

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....com/shortguide-my_left_foot/
• www.funny.co.uk/keywords/christy-brown-book-review.html
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalil_Gibran
• www.columbia.edu/~gm84/gibran4.html
• http://leb.net/gibran/works/prophet/prophet.html
• www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/gibrn.h
• members.rediff.com/eventhorizon/gibran2.html
• www.arab2.com/gibran/
• 4umi.com/gibran/biography.htm
• www.libanvision.com/gibran-vision.htm
?@
• Prentice Hall Literature, Sightlines10, page 98, a poem On Children by Kahlil Gibran
• Prentice Hall Literature, Sightlines10, page 71, a short story My Left Foot by Christy Brown
• ORION – a novel The Lost Boy
• Mass Market Paperback – a novel The Outsiders

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