“Be happy… not because everything is good, but because you can see the good in everything” is a quote that is used quite often when referring to happiness. This quote fits in really well with the literature that we have been reading, especially when reading Until They Bring The Streetcars Back by Stanley Gordon West, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, and lastly Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck. The reason this quote fits in well is because The literature of our course suggests that one may experience more happiness by helping others, rather than themselves.
There are Multiple moments in the book Until They Bring The Streetcars Back by West where many of the characters in the book are helping each other to get things accomplished for someone. The first moment we see this is when Cal gives gretchen a nut goodie candy bar before he leaves for christmas break. Cal gives the candy bar to her outside her work place in an alley when they are talking to each other about break and talking about her dad. In chapter 19 on page 115, Cal says to Gretchen “I brought you
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The one that stands out to me is that even though the slaves have to work very hard for the workers they are really just helping the owner of the field by doing a job for them. This came when Douglass was working in the field with four other people were working and assigned to fanning wheat where each one of them had a job in it. Douglass refers to the work as “The work was simple, requiring strength rather than intellect; yet, to one entirely unused to such work, it came very hard.” What Douglass meant when he said this is that him and his others workers work very hard everyday even if it is a simple task it is still difficult and do this everyday to help tend the owner tend the field even in harsh
In Stanley Gordon West's Until They Bring the Streetcars Back, Cal Gant, an eighteen-year-old high school senior that's going through a world of promises, cover-ups, love, friendship, family drama and a struggle to expose the horrible truths without exposing himself. Set in 1949 and 1950 in St. Paul, MN, Cal's high school innocence is broken by a revelation from a school peer Gretchen Lutterman. There are three elements that found interesting and character, conflict, theme were the ones that I chose.
1. The insight that each of these sources offers into slave life in the antebellum South is how slaves lived, worked, and were treated by their masters. The narratives talk about their nature of work, culture, and family in their passages. For example, in Solomon Northup 's passage he describes how he worked in the cotton field. Northup said that "An ordinary day 's work is considered two hundred pounds. A slave who is accustomed to picking, is punished, if he or she brings less quantity than that," (214). Northup explains how much cotton slaves had to bring from the cotton field and if a slave brought less or more weight than their previous weight ins then the slave is whipped because they were either slacking or have no been working to their
The first example of detail is, “The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration” (Douglass, Para. #1). The above quote explains his view point to citizens that he respects what they have to say but he doesn’t agree with their beliefs. The second example is when he showed his imagery, “Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful” (Douglass, Para. #3). This demonstrates the comparison of how he compared the slaves and the white and how they were treated very differently from each other. He used diction such as, “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me” (Douglass, Para #4). In this quote he describes the beliefs that's passed on to people and everyone believed the same things but he will not share the same opinion according to the celebration of July Fourth. Therefore, the idea to break down to his audience that are anti-slavery the way he feels July Fourth should be celebrated to
One question I asked myself while reading his autobiography is how can these ideas relate to all people? For example, in this piece Douglass told us that “Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, hired out on a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field work.” This quote shows that the slave owners did not care for the people they were hurting. Everyone knows what it’s like to care for someone very much, it’s in our blood. Now imagine having them ripped away from you, living a separate life forgetting your existence. That is exactly what slave owners did to people. Do we think that’s okay? No we don’t that’s why the readings apply to everyone because we all know what it’s like to love someone. Douglass also said that “There were no beds given the slaves, unless one coarse blanket is considered such, and one about the men and women had these.” Most people have gone camping, or have slept on the hard floor before, and it’s not ...
According to Douglass, the treatment of a slave was worse than that of an animal. Not only were they valued as an animal, fed like an animal, and beaten like an animal, but also a slave was reduced to an animal when he was just as much of a man as his master. The open mentality a slave had was ...
During the time of slavery, slaves were put to work on plantation, fields, and farms. They were considered property to their slave-owners and put under unfair living conditions. Growing up in this era, we can see the injustice between white and colored people. And one slave by the name of Fredrick Douglass witnessed this unjust tension. And because of this tension, dehumanizing practices became prominent among the slaves and in slave society. The most prominent of these injustices is the desire of slave owners to keep their slaves ignorant. This practice sought to deprive the slaves of their human characteristics and made them less valued. Fredrick Douglass was able to endure and confront this issue by asserting his own humanity. He achieved
The thought of not doing something or living a different way because of the perceived consequences could be a difficult thing to push aside, even more so for a slave. Thoreau surmises that the American work ethic is in many ways a form of self-imposed slavery and more detrimental than the life of a slave. With that in mind, Douglass, a slave who became free, could possibly give some context and disprove such a claim. The life of a slave is substandard of a free white man, which makes their life more controlled and their way of thinking of themselves is forced upon by the masters; thus, their release is prolonged and hindered which leads to a more trying life -- by being trapped and even when trying to escape being held back.
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe”( Douglass). This famous quote epitomizes the philosophies of Frederick Douglass, in which he wanted everyone to be treated with dignity; if everyone was not treated with equality, no one person or property would be safe harm. His experience as a house slave, field slave and ship builder gave him the knowledge to develop into a persuasive speaker and abolitionist. In his narrative, he makes key arguments to white abolitionist and Christians on why slavery should be abolished. The key arguments that Frederick Douglass tries to vindicate are that slavery denies slaves of their identity, slavery is also detrimental for the slave owner, and slavery is ungodly.
Until They Bring The Streetcars Back is a novel written by Stanley Gordon west. The book centers around a high schooler named Calvin Grant, who faces all sorts of obstacles, during his senior year at Central High School. Despite the fact that Cal is a jock, and a popular kid, he does everything in his power to help Gretchen Lutterman, the weird girl at their school, escape her abusive father, and remain her sanity. The author enhances the story by using different elements of literature. He uses characters to describe their physical features, personality, inner thoughts, and explains the reasoning behind their actions. He describes the multiple themes, that are the center/ many focus throughout the book. He also created many conflicts in the
Until They Bring The Streetcars Back is a novel written by Stanley Gordon West. The story takes place in 1949 here in Minnesota St. Paul. The main character’s name is Calvin and the story revolves around him and the people he encounters. It is a sad and complexed story. It allows the readers to relate what is happening in the book and connect it to real life situation. So far there quite few conflicts that rose up in the in the book and although they are not solved yet, they bring some excitement and eagerness to the readers. One of the main conflict in the book is that a person Calvin knows named Gretchen is going through physical and sexual abuse by her father and Calvin has to figure out a way to help her. After realizing helping someone
America in the mid to early nineteenth century saw the torture of many African Americans in slavery. Plantation owners did not care whether they were young or old, girl or boy, to them all slaves were there to work. One slave in particular, Frederick Douglass, documented his journey through slavery in his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Through the use of various rhetorical devices and strategies, Douglass conveys the dehumanizing and corrupting effect of slavery, in order to show the overall need for American abolition. His use of devices such as parallelism, asyndeton, simile, antithesis, juxtaposition and use of irony, not only establish ethos but also show the negative effects of slavery on slaves, masters and
To start, Douglass tries to give people an example because he wants to change their minds of the quote, "All men are created equal." For example, Douglass explains how the slaves had a lack of clothing. In chapter 2, paragraph 3, it states,
Happiness plays an important and necessary role in the lives of people around the world. In America, happiness has been engrained in our national consciousness since Thomas Jefferson penned these famous words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (Jefferson). Since then, Americans have been engaged in that act: pursuing happiness. The problem however, as Ray Bradbury demonstrates in his novel Fahrenheit 451, is that those things which make us happy initially may eventually lead to our downfall. By examining Guy Montag, the protagonist in Fahrenheit 451, and the world he lives in we can gain valuable insights to direct us in our own pursuit of happiness. From Montag and other characters we will learn how physical, emotional, and spiritual happiness can drastically affect our lives. We must ask ourselves what our lives, words, and actions are worth. We should hope that our words are not meaningless, “as wind in dried grass” (Eliot).
The philosopher Aristotle once wrote, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” This famous quote compels people to question the significance of their joy, and whether it truly represents purposeful lives they want to live. Ray Bradbury, a contemporary author, also tackles this question in his book, Fahrenheit 451, which deals heavily with society's view of happiness in the future. Through several main characters, Bradbury portrays the two branches of happiness: one as a lifeless path, heading nowhere, seeking no worry, while the other embraces pure human experience intertwined together to reveal truth and knowledge.
...a lot of atrocities at the hands of their owners, who were successful in using ignorance as a tool of slavery, besides treating them as personal property. However, the slaves struggled to gain education on their own, ultimately knowing their rights and questioning some of the heinous acts. Slave owners ensured that slaves worked tirelessly so that they do not get time to idle around and gather in groups that would shake the administration. The narrative, through highlighting the experiences of Douglass himself, painted a true picture of the type of life slaves were undergoing under the surveillance of their slave masters in the United States, a picture that the slaveholders did not want to be brought to the limelight.