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Maya Angelou struggles in the literary world
Maya Angelou struggles in the literary world
A literary analysis by maya angelou
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Many people take life for granted every day. Many of the characters in the stories we have read often do this. In “The Necklace”, Mathilda does this by always thinking of herself and nobody else. My Left Foot shows how Christy Brown never takes his life for granted, and by doing this it helped him overcome his disabilities. In the story Our Town not taking life for granted is one of the main themes, such as when Emily dies and George becomes very upset about it. In the story My Left Foot, Christy Brown was diagnosed at the age of three with cerebral palsy. Many people began to give up on him, but his mother did not. She told everyone that they were all wrong and that he was a normal child. She worked with Christy every chance she could get and tried to teach him how to write and read. One day his mother’s perseverance finally paid off. Christy was playing with his sister and saw her playing with the chalkboard. He wanted to play with it also so he picked up the piece of chalk with his foot and tried to write on the board. He could not get it at first but on th...
Sometimes all one needs to create a better condition is putting in a little effort. However, as the poem implies, it is easier to do nothing for staying in a comfort zone is better than achieving a better condition. She complains of the heat in the room because the sun for sunlight pours through the open living-room windows. All she needs to do is get up and close the windows, but she won't do it either. She also reveals the futility of trying to get out of the meaningless routine that people adopt. In an attempt to be proactive, she thinks about the essence of living and is almost convinced that routine is the nature of life. She thinks for a long time and thinks again but ironically, the same routine chores distract her yet again. She goes to buying a hairbrush, parking, and slamming doors. At the end, she gives up on finding the essence of living; she wants to do things like she has always done
“I am a Cripple,” when people typically hear these words they tend to feel bad for that person, but that is exactly what Mair does not want. She prefers that people treat her the same as they would if she did not have the disease. Throughout the essay, Mair discuses her disease openly. She uses an optimistic tone, so that the reader will not recoil with sadness when they hear her discuss the disease and how it affects her life. In Nancy Mair’s essay “On Being A Cripple,” Mair uses her personal stories, diction, and syntactical structures to create an optimistic tone throughout the essay, so that the audience can better connect story.
People has times that they are looking forward to. The times such as childhood, schooling help lead us through our life. While this way of thinking has many positive side, we forget the appreciation of all details of the moments. We see the moments in Thornton Wilder's play “Our Town”. This play takes us to a small town in New England and we see how simple it is, to the point where we may get bored to our lives. After looking through the events in the play we might have see as big and important described as relatively simple and straightforward, we begin to question how important that these events are in our life. Not like Emily realize how much of life was ignored until death. But after death, she can see how much everyone goes through life without noticing the events that are occurring all the time.
Mom’s words and doctor’s advice did not become a way to obstruct the narrator and his pride. Paying no attention to Mom and the doctor’s warning, the narrator took his crippled brother out and trained him anyways regardless of Doodle’s physical restraints, because he is embarrassed. “When Doodle was five years old, I was embarrassed at having a brother of that age who couldn’t walk, so I set out to teach him (Hurst 204).” Even worse, the narrator knew it was his pride that made him to force Doodle into cruel training, “I did it for myself; that pride, whose slave I was, spoke to me louder than all their voices, and that Doodle walked only because I was ashamed of having a crippled brother (Hurst 206).” In addition, due to his embarrassment, the
Up until now Lynn had it very tough growing up in a hearing world, but as soon as she started learning and using sign language her world turned around. Lynn finally gained a means of communication and Thomas and Louise were finally able to understand and communicate with their beautiful little girl with whom they were cut off from with a language barrier. Through communicating with other deaf individuals like her, Lynn finally felt like she was “normal” without trying to please the society’s normalcy.
Life is not always what a person expects it to be. O’Henry realizes this and incorporates it into his stories The Ransom of Red Chief and The Gift of the Magi. Guy de Maupassant also incorporates this theme in his story The Necklace. Unexpected things happen to everyone; the characters from these stories deal with it by ignoring it, accepting it, or facing it head on.
Brenda S. tells a story from childhood about her sister, Shirley who had Down syndrome. Complications arose and at the age of two Shirley died. About two years later, Gerald, Brenda's new brother, was born. Few years later and Brenda's mom is cleaning the attic while her father was working in the basement. Brenda says her mom heard clearly as if in the room; "Dadda! Dadda! Momma! Momma! The mom immediately ran to her husband, she had heard Shirley call for help. Albeit, the father had heard the same call at the same time. He too was running for her. They almost collide in the front room where Gerald was napping. But, looking over they see the baby got wrapped up in a plastic bag and was suffocating. Shirley had saved her brother's life.
Montag never appreciated the simple things in life. He would never walk or drive slow enough to see the colors of things. This bothered Clarisse McClellan very much. She loved to catch raindrops on her tongue, and she always left little presents for Montag to make sure he appreciated these simple things. Through her spirit and her small simple presents, Montag finds the strength to also appreciate these things.“And then very slowly as he walked, he tilted his head back in the rain for just a few moments and opened his mouth..”(Bradbury 24). Montag begins to see that no matter how hard life gets, he will always have these smaller things that he can enjoy.
When Walker was eight years old, one of her older brothers shot her in her right eye with a BB gun; the Walkers didn’t have a car, nor had a lot of money, and ended up not being able to see a doctor for a week, leaving Walker partially blind. Walker, being left blind, was teased by her schoolmates, and resented her father, and often at times felt suicidal. She then began to write poetry and stories, finding comfort in the solitude it afforded her.
Thus, when people experience loss, their lives change. Just like Blanche, A delicate lady who couldn’t find her way in the challenging and intolerant world we live in after her husband died. As a result, she built her own world, where she lived all her illusions, but in the process, she ended up destroying all that really matters; her personality, relationships, and wellbeing. As Robert Louis Stevenson said “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
This realization and knowledge has presented itself in the most realistic way just within the past three years, while I continually helped disabled children learn various life skills. In these three years, my attention was unforgivably snagged by one child, Damion, who seemed to have an unfathomable web of trials and difficulties in his fragile little life. On an undying attempt to learn more about this child, I started working with him one-on-one and with his therapists and teachers. I soon came to realize that Damion had moderate to severe learning disabilities, speech impediments, fine (small muscles) and gross (large muscles) motor problems and sensory difficulties. His previous doctors considered Kabuki Syndrome, an extremely rare disease that is terribly difficult to diagnose, as a possible diagnosis.
Alison’s story is the perfect example of what many families must go through when faced with the possibility of having a child diagnosed with a learning disability. Alison was not diagnosed with visual and auditory dyslexia until the summer before entering college. However, while still a toddler, her symptoms had been brought to her mother’s attention by her sister’s teacher. Alison’s mother then noticed her habits in repeating words incorrectly and how Alison would need tactile clues to follow directions. At the recommendation of her kindergarten teacher, Alison was tested for learning disabilities and the results from the school psychologists were that she was acting stubborn or disobedient. Her family did not stop with the school’s diagnosis. They had private testing completed that confirmed Alison did not have a specific learning disability. The final word came from a relative that happened to be a psychologist. He insisted Alison would grow out of her difficulties. So Alison continued on with her entire elementary, middle and high school journey as a student and daughter with an undiagnosed learning disability.
Daniel-Day Lewis portrayed the character, Christy Brown, beautifully in the film, “My Left Foot”, directed by Jim Sheridan. The film focused on the story of Christy Brown, a man born with cerebral palsy, which only allows him to control his left foot and to at first speak in mumbled sounds. Christy was born into a very large and poor Irish family that tries to hide him from the community due to the embarrassment, except for his mother, who sees his true intelligence and potential. As Christy grows older, he begins to complete tasks with his left foot that at first seemed impossible, like writing a word, painting a picture, holding objects, and even kicking the front door to save his mother. A major theme in the film is, “he struggle to overcome extreme obstacles and triumph is a testament to the human spirit”. Even though Christy’s cerebral palsy restricts him from doing selected activities and causes people to view him differently, he eventually finds a way to overcome what he is restricted of accomplishing and makes the most out of what he is capable of.
On March 3rd 1887 Keller’s life changed for the better, her mother Kate, heard about the Perkins school for the Blind and called Alexander Graham Bell and wrote to the head of the Perkins school for the Blind to ask for a teacher for Helen. This day was the day that Anne Sullivan arrived and became a large part of Keller’s life. Anne expected Keller’s behavior, because the girl was both deaf and illiterate. Anne knew she had to find a way to make Keller understand the meaning of words and, after a month of spelling in sign language words into Keller’s hand everything clicked into place as Anne held Keller’s hand under a water pump and the cool water washed over there hands she spelled out ‘W-A-T-E-R’ into Keller’s hand. Keller realized what this meant and was so excited and wanted to know everything, she learned 30 words that day.
In life, many things are taken for granted on a customary basis. For example, we wake up in the morning and routinely expect to see and hear from certain people. Most people live daily life with the unsighted notion that every important individual in their lives at the moment, will exist there tomorrow. However, in actuality, such is not the case. I too fell victim to the routine familiarity of expectation, until the day reality taught me otherwise.