The Importance Of Worldviews In American Literature

A person can only know who they are based on their interests, and how they help guide us through the daily problems of life. One thing we have to pay attention to is the point that each of our unique worldviews, is in its simplest state a way to reduce and solve issues in our lives. After taking The Art of Being Human class, my personal worldview has changed to a belief in having compassion for everybody in the world according to classic Buddhist teachings. This mindset goes beyond those teachings, however, to almost a natural way of thinking that if humans care for everything on earth a lot of our man-made problems would go away. One of the ways we can do this is to read literature and enjoy entertainments from the past, in able to learn lessons

One of the best examples of this is Walden by Henry David Thoreau, which was a treatise about how the author lived in a cabin near Walden Pond in Massachusetts (Foster 50). Another story about people exploring the wilderness is set several decades after Thoreau’s memoir, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Twain’s tale was not only about childhood freedom, but also an exploration of what freedom means in a world ruled by flawed characters (101). The final novel that we can use in American literature to underline the highlights of achieving a pure way of living is The Great Gatsby. Aside from his lavish lifestyle, the novel’s main character of Jay Gatsby can illustrate to us how planning your future and actually achieving it are two very different things. At the end of the classic story Gatsby ends up dead for his efforts while the narrator for most of the book, Nick Carraway, gets a chance to learn from him the lessons of living too fast (144). All of these books show that slowing down and enjoying what is around us every day (including our family, friends, and nature) leads to a fulfilling place, and the belief that fiction can imitate subjects in real life (Aristotle 5; ch.