Hardships Allow Perseverance In life there exists challenges which transform into tests individuals shall overcome. Those challenges may cause trauma which impedes one to keep faith. Faith, that is essential in someone's heart since it provides motivation to conquer difficult obstacles. In Anaya's novel, Bless Me Ultima a young and innocent boy named Antonio abandons childhood and loses his innocence due to innumerable of traumatic events he experiences. He no longer remains unaware of the true significance in life. As the novel progresses he realizes that evil and good exist in the world. However, Tony's life's hardships allows him to always finds a way to persevere. No hardship drastically breaks his prevalent power of growth. Antonio's possession of a curious mind also causes him to reconcile and search for his true identity. As he sees more powerful throughout his bad experiences he gradually loses faith in God. Further on, he faces events that allow him to conquer his …show more content…
Anaya still utilizes the Golden Carp, a god who acts as a symbol of forgiveness. He grows to realize that this symbol offers a different perspective to many individuals than Catholicism. Which appears extremely loyal to Tony since the Christian God appears unforgiving and cruel. The carp can cause awe to anyone due to its beauty. Which eventually leads Tony to realize the existence of other gods. The hole of doubtness severely deepens as Tony's first communion occurs. As he eats God's body in the form of water, Antonio immediately wishes to hear or at least have a sign of the existence of God. He believes that once all of his doubts clear up he will finally have an answer to all of his uncertainties. However, “there was no sweetness” (236) and nothing seems to occur! Tony truly feels disappointment because we wonders why God can not be seen while the golden carp can. The golden carp manifests Antonio's struggle towards
Antonio, the young boy, wants answers to the questions that have been nagging at him since he was introduced to religious ideology. He does not understand why Ultima, a close elderly friend and a healer, can save his dying uncle from the curses of evil while the priest from El Puerto with his holy water and the power of God can not lift the curse from him. He wonders whether God really exists or if the “Cico's” story of the golden carp is true. Bless Me, Ultima, is a compelling story that deals with Antonio's family, beliefs, and dreams.
Life drives us to inevitable places, places where we must cross the metamorphic bridge towards the inescapable. We are not fixed individuals. We hit upon experiences for the sole purpose of change, hence, the “metamorphic bridge”. However, there are certain conditions that all living breeds are destined to encounter overtime, while abiding to a divine plan that many claim was arranged from the moment of birth. Those conditions can be considered fixed; we cannot avoid their occurrences. The ultimate one is death, and the certainty of it provokes religious ambivalence. The crossing of that bridge symbolizes various climactic points in which one results
In the story, A Long Walk to Waters, written by Linda Sue Park, the readers are introduced to many different individuals that were able to survive challenging environments. Those individuals used those factors, perseverance, cooperation, and independence. Those factors have allowed individuals to make it past through the harsh environments throughout their journey. Perseverance shows how those individuals kept on going without giving up. Meanwhile, cooperation represents how struggling individuals are able to work together in order to achieve their goal. Last but not least independence shows how individuals can conquer a hurdle by him or herself.
After reading the book, Bless Me Ultima, I realized the integral importance of religion and need for religion and answers to life’s questions. At first, while reading this book, I thought it was just about relationships and the meaning in them but as the plot progressed I realized the book, is more than that, it questions the structures that decide the rules, morals and values that society is composed of. There were three types of religion that I identified in the book that young Anthony chose to pursue. The first was the paganistic rituals of Ultima. Ultima came into the life of Tony at a very young age and had great influence n the child. Ultima saved the life of Lucas through Tony’s strength. Physical pain was brought unto Anthony because of Ultima's ritual, showing actual validity of the rituals themselves, that they were had tangibility. She brought torment on the Tenorio’s family (he was the antagonist in the book-the bad guy) saving Lucas though using ritualistic dolls and chants. This showed her magic was not only good but bad as well. Ultima guided Anthony through all of the mental and social torment during his early years of grade school. So in away Ultima was a guide for Tony through his early years to make sense of all of the storms in his early life, but also was an instrument of religion to base his life on. But in the end of the book Ultima ultimately dies and the strength he once found in her is destroyed. She is ...
and gain strength with all experiences that you go through. This is evident when Ulti...
Bless Me, Ultima is a story about the maturation of a young Mexican-American boy, Antonio M’arez, struggling with many questions about his destiny, life and death, and good and evil. Ultima who comes to live with Antonio becomes his caretaker and his teacher. Antonio learns there are powers in the world that differ from his beliefs in the Catholic faith. Ultima teaches Antonio “that the tragic consequences of life can be overcome by the magical strength that resides in the human heart”. Ultima shows Antonio how to experience the magic of life with his heart and not with his eyes. For the first time, he sees the river not as something to be feared but as a source of life, “I had been afraid of the awful presence of the river, which was the soul of the river, but through her I learned that my spirit shared in the spirit of all things”. The river is both creative and destructive in nature. It is this new magical way of seeing the river that will help Antonio understand many of the events that occur in the novel.
Ultima , Antonio Marez is the is the one who has to constantly search for understanding. Many of
Bless Me Ultima and Baby of the Family serve as the 'coming of age' stories of two minority children. Rudolfo Anaya and Tina McElory Ansa skillfully reveal the richness, diversity, and conflicts that can exist within the Hispanic-American and African-American cultures primarily through the dream sequences in each novel. Dreams are the mechanism used in each work to magnify the individual experiences and conflicts Tony and Lena encounter. In addition and perhaps, more importantly, Tony and Lena deal with ambivalence and find their voices not only through the relationships with other characters, but through the resolution of their dreams.
This Passage is key in realizing Antonio resolves his conflicts between the Catholic God and the Golden Carp. The Catholic God refuses to let Antonio in to heaven during his dream because he worships the golden carp before God. God deems that “I can have [one] who has golden idols before [me]'; (165) thereby forbidding Antonio from heaven because he had an idol, the golden carp, before God. God does not forgive Antonio because he is a “not a God of forgiveness'; but when he does offer forgiveness God claims that Antonio must ask for Tenorio’s forgiveness also. “No! No! I cried, it is Narciso that you must forgive,';(65) Antonio refuses the idea that he, Narciso and Tenorio could all be in heaven together. While Narciso was protecting Ultima from Tenorio, Tenorio claimed that she had put a curse on Tenorio’s three daughters who were each slowly dying. After Antonio yells at God and the Virgin for wanting him to ask for forgiveness for Tenorio, too, God decides to burn the entire village for their sins. The Golden Carp comes after the fires of the Catholic God and swallows the remains of the citizens of the burnt valley up and then changes them into new perfect beings. The dream after Narciso’s murder helps Antonio settle the conflict between the Catholic God and the Golden Carp, Anaya also uses extremely vivid imagery to show that dreams help Antonio settle his conflicts.
Then, Ultima and her magic contradict almost all of those beliefs about God, and Florence later in the novel, who is an atheist, does not believe in anything at all. Being just under seven, in the first chapters of this novel, he is curious about everything he sees and asks everyone a lot of questions. He wants answers to the violence he sees during his childhood and constantly is being tested of his faith and inner beliefs, and his dreams reveal his torn attitudes to each of these sources. In Tony's last dream all three beliefs he has been exposed to have been annihilated, "Everything I believed in was destroyed. A painful wrenching moment in my heart made me cry aloud, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!"
Tony possesses the ability to think critically about supernatural circumstances, even in his young age. After experiencing Ultima dispel the curse from his Uncle Lucas, Antonio wonders “Would the magic of Ultima be stronger than all the powers of the saints and the Holy Mother Church? I wondered” (97). Tony frequently questions the power of the Church, but hearing that even the power of a priest could not overcome the evil of the Trementina sisters left a lasting impression of uncertainty about the church. This is one While at the lake, Antonio intently watches the clear blue waters in anticipation of the grand golden carp. It fascinates him in a way like no other, adding yet another doubt against the god of his Catholic faith. Antonio becomes quizzical, seeking a response to his questions about the world by inquiring, “'And if we didn't have any knowledge?' I asked. 'Then we would be like the dumb animals of the fields,' Florence replied. Animals, I thought. Were the fish of the golden carp happier than we were? Was the golden carp a better God?” (197). This interaction further develops Tony’s skepticism and how Florence’s point of view exposes him to yet another belief differing from that of Catholicism. Seeing a second death caused Tony to further lose his faith in
Although he is always trying to understand new beliefs, the Goddess, the Virgin Mary, remains in the most special part of Antonio’s heart. She represents Meeting the Goddess, as Antonio is now seeing her through mature eyes: “I fastened my eyes on the statue of the Virgin until I thought that I was looking at a real person, the mother of God, the last relief of all sinners” (Anaya 47). As he begins to discover the meaning in both his old and new beliefs, he begins to accept his spiritual questions. By understanding the fact that they cannot always be simply answered, he enters his Apotheosis and ascends as he achieves wisdom and self-acceptance.
In essence, Antonio shows that he is unsure if he truly believes in his religion because of his acceptance of other beliefs, the new ideas that he learns, and the deaths of Narciso and Lupito. Antonio’s experiences lead him to believe that he is in charge of his destiny and he has the ability to choose what he wants, not what his parents want. In the end, Antonio determines his religious values based on what he believes in, so he tells himself to “[t]ake the Ilano and the river valley, the moon and the sea, God and the golden carp and make something new” (247). Antonio’s encounters with religion represent those who follow their religion but are not content with it. All in all, the story suggests that sometimes people want to learn other ideas to discover what fits them best.
In life, people will always have something to say about you in everything one does in life, either negative or positive, but it’s the moment when you let what is said upon you affect the way you live your life, that when its becomes a problem. I for myself have been victim of so many people saying things about me and letting get into my head, but I had the courage to overcome a lot of obstacles like that. I have struggled with a lot of obstacles in my life some got the better of me while I have been able to overcome most of them. I am writing this essay to give an example of an obstacle which I struggled with for a very long time and I nearly took the best of me, but with time I was able to overcome it.
People don't truly accept life for what it is until they've actually tasted adversity and went through those misfortunes and suffering. We are put through many hardships in life, and we learn to understand and deal with those issues along the way. We find that life isn't just about finding one's self, but about creating and learning from our experiences and background. Adversity shapes what we are and who we become as individuals. Yann Martel's Life of Pi shows us that adverse situations help shape a person's identity and play a significant role in one's lief by determining one's capabilities and potential, shaping one's beliefs and values, and defining the importance and meaning of one's self.