The Only Way Out in Richard Miller´s The Dark Night of the Soul

Richard E. Miller, the author of The Dark Night of the Soul, is an English professor/executive director of the Plan-genre Writing Center at Rutgers University. He studies the English curriculum in the U.S and questions if it is successful or a dying art. This is evident in The Dark night of the Soul,

It can be quite a shock to confront the possibility that reading, writing, and talking exercise almost none of the powers we regularly attribute to them in our favorite stories. The dark night of the soul for literacy workers comes with the realization that training students to read, write, and talk in more critical and self- reflective ways cannot protect them from the violent changes our culture is undergoing.

Miller through-out the essay describes his grievances of the loss of importance our society has placed on literature. Millers essay compares many other literary works to prove his point. He compares the following: the shootings in Columbine, The Information by Martin Amis, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauers, Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes, Joining the Liars Club by Mary Karr, and the experiment in institutional autobiography. In this essay we will define what the dark night of the soul is, what helped me get through my personal dark night of my soul, and whether the statement “the only way it is through statement is true.

Through writing this he is facing every English professors dark night of their souls. The dark night of the soul though is not just a writer’s grievance for a lost art, it is the soul’s journey through dark and troubling questions that draw you into the darkness of your past, your nightmares, your fears, and it is facing those giants, slaying those dragons. St. John of the Cross has a book th...

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...soul and it is his way of “going through it”, while also informing us (the audience) of what in general the dark night of the soul is. The essay contains so much more information though than just what the Dark Night of the Soul is. By comparing the literary works that he uses allows us to also the other author’s perspective on subjects. Their perspective is used to prove Millers point and to show that reading and writing can impact society but not in the way it is intended. The ways that Millers shows that it impacts our society is in a negative light. The Dark Night of the Soul is a journey that one must take to find peace. Millers Dark Night of the Soul explains his grievances for the lost art of literature. We can understand this by knowing what the dark night of the soul is, comparing it to personal experience and discussing the proper way to get through it is.