How I Learned to Drive is the story of Li’l Bit’s teenage life. The 17 year old Li'l Bit functions as the narrator of the story, following her life between 11 and 17 years old. The story mostly revolves around Li’l Bit and Uncle Peck, the man who molests and sexualizes Li’l Bit throughout the story. The story makes the story itself into a story as a result of the narratorial and dissociative structure. The life of Li’l Bit, and even her description of events that are close to her in the present, is structured like a play and her running commentary is filled with humor, satire, etc (like she is a comedian making a joke in poor taste). This manner of narration implies Li’l Bit has an attitude of dissociation, or a detachment from from the events that she describes to the audience. The act of molestation is itself dramatized in such a way that it takes on the appearance of fantasy, losing with its reality its moral weight, and the molester, Uncle Peck, is not only a character of great irony but also of great ambiguity. He is never condemned for his actions; rather he is sympathized with, and he is unwittingly supported by his family. To truly understand How I Learned to Drive, one must not look to the text itself for answers, as the metastory and story are both different fictions (which hampers the use of psychological, social, and formalist critical approaches) and one may not look to an underlying moral message, as the entirety of the text is pervaded by moral ambiguity. It is in the act of interpreting our response by which How I Learned to Drive may be understood. How I Learned to Drive gave me a sense of religious optimism, amusement, anger, and bewilderment.
During my reading of How I Learned to Drive, I was surprised by ...
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... comes from the moral ambiguity and the structural discontinuity of the play, which makes me uncomfortable, as I prefer rigid structures and discernible moral conflict in texts. Overall, I liked How I Learned to Drive and it does touch on some big issues in everyday life (how moral areas are not always black and white and how not everyone’s life turns out perfect) but there were some things in the play that hurt my appreciation for it.
Works Cited
Romans. English Standard Version. N.p.: CrossWay Bibles, 2001. BibleGateway. Web. 24 Apr.
2014.
Vogel, Paula. How I Learned to Drive. The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Spencer
Richardson-Jones. 11th ed. New York: Norton., 2013. 2227-2267. Print.
Žižek, Slavoj. "Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek." Interview by Eric D. Rassmusen.
Electronic Book Review. N.p., 1 July 2004. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.
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Today in society we see racism is okay in a lot of ways because we act like is normal for society and we do not do anything to help or make our voice heard,but we expect one day that it might change. Racism means discrimination or antagonism directed against someone of a different race, which in “Crash,” it shows all antagonism to people that are different .In the movie Crash, directed by Paul Haggis, the author develops the central idea that you never know what your actions will produce. “Crash” is a movie that focuses on the narrator’s message that we all have prejudices, and also that we all need to realize that we cannot judge people by those prejudices because the same people that we pre-judge may actually be the people we need in our lives. The narrator experiences the conflicting emotions with
Driving is something people do everyday. Although many people do it well, some do not, that being said the legal age to drive should be raised to twenty one years of age. The driving age should be raised because teens at the ages of fourteen through twenty should not be behind the wheel for the simple fact that they are just too young and too inexperienced to drive, also someone of that age can get more distracted than a person who is twenty-one or older and has had some time to mature and become responsible enough to operate a motor vehicle. “In the United States, 16–19-year-olds have the highest incidence of motor vehicle deaths among licensed drivers and motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among 15–20-year-olds.” (Haggerty
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