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Essay money can provide happiness
Essay money can provide happiness
Essay money can provide happiness
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“Money doesn’t buy happiness.” Most children learn this proverb and immediately try to disprove it, or simply do not believe it. However, age allows one to see the truth in this phrase. In My Antonia, a novel by Willa Cather, the protagonist, Jim Burden, reflects on his childhood in the American frontier. Despite achieving wealth and an elevated social position, benefits most associate with attaining the American Dream, Jim Burden eventually realizes that true success, and happiness, is found in strong emotional connections.
Jim Burden’s early years follows the structure of the idealized childhood of the American West, one where he can run freely in the country and is surrounded by the natural world. However, prejudices are still prevalent in his community, and have a noticeable effect on its inhabitants as they mature. From a young age, members of the Black Hawk, Nebraska community are instilled with the idea that daughters
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He is apprehensive about seeing Antonia, fearing that she will no longer be the idealized person who exists in his memory. Jim is not let down when they meet, as even though she is now a “battered woman … but she still had that something that fires the imagination, could stop one’s breath for a moment” (226). Age has not dampened the spirit that Jim was drawn to throughout his youth and now his adulthood. He speaks about her through a lens of true love and respect, telling her children that he “couldn’t stand it if you boys were inconsiderate [towards Antonia] … I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there’s nobody like her” (222). Jim refers to Antonia as a “rich mine of life,” and it is clear that Antonia’s type of richness is more valuable in Jim’s eyes. Through her, he is able to realize that tangible fiscal wealth is far less precious than the impalpable beauty of emotional connection and
I think Antonia would really believe in this. I think Antonia is more about trying to be happy and really forcing the issue and Jim just does what he does and just hopes for the best. Thats why I don’t really think that Antonia would fully agree with Jim’s statement. I think Antonia would agree that sometimes happiness is easy but i think Jim is also implying is that you can’t just force it or fake the happiness. Antonia always tried maybe too hard to be happy and one example is when she married Larry Donovan. I don’t think that Antonia thought about it long and hard even though Larry was known to be a pro Ladies man and people were telling her. It basically seems like she chose Larry in a fast attempt to be happy and basically it just ended badly and made her unhappy for a long period of time. Jim on the other hand took decisions with more caution and didn't try to rush or prolong happiness and just lived life slowly one step at a time. Also it almost feels like Jim really learned to appreciate happiness when it came and just basked in its warmth well like in his college moments in Lincoln with Gaston Cleric. In those moments Jim was just naturally happy in that state of learning and growth. Jim in the end did find happiness and so did Antonia which was a wonderful thing to read in the
Jim was also impacted by the death of Mr. Shimerda. He was not so much impacted emotionally but he was impacted in a way that he felt he had to keep an eye on Antonia and make sure she didn’t lose her way. Jim is in possession of Mr. Shimerdas gun and in a way this hold Jim responsible to keeping the memory of him alive in Antonia. Jim didn’t want Antonia to stray from the gentle teachings of her father. He begins to see this when she starts working with Ambrosch and even worries that she is becoming like her mother. A boastful and insistent
Antonia and Jim became very close friends and went through many childhood experiences together. Their friendship was soon torn apart when Ambrosch and Jake engaged in a quarrel which separated the two families for quite some time. But once again, the families resolve their differences and become close again. (Chapter 1)
At the time when Jim and Antonia are growing up, a rigid social structure exists in Nebraska. This social difference contributed to the creation and alteration of their friendship; in part, it is responsible for their behavior toward one another.
Leo Rosten once said, "Money can't buy happiness." Janie from Zora Neale Hurston's, Their Eyes Were Watching God, would agree with this famous quote. Janie's first husband is financially stable and her second husband is powerful; but it is with her third marriage where she finally experiences happiness and receives respect. Through the first two marriages, we see how worldly desires and pride can ruin a relationship. Ultimately, Hurston portrays that equality in a relationship truly nourishes a bond far more valuable that materialistic possessions or reputations.
At the beginning of this century, ships docked in American ports with their steerages filled with European immigrants. Willa Cather’s My Antonia, contains characters that immigrate to the country of America in search of hope and a new future in the Midwest prarie. This novel can be considered an American tale because it holds the American concept of the “melting pot,” the ideal of America as the “land of opportunity,” and the character’s struggles could only have occurred in America rather than their own country.
Money can buy happiness for a short amount of time, but after a while, they will require even more. The Great Gatsby shows a great example of money cannot buy happiness and portrays this very well. F. Scott Fitzgerald in the novel, The Great Gatsby, implies that money cannot buy happiness.
Within the real world individuals constantly ask: Does money actually equal happiness? Money doesn’t equal happiness, money equals superiority or privilege and happiness equals desire. Similarly, in Scott Fitzgerald's’ The Great Gatsby, Tom, Daisy and Gatsby portray money equals superiority and happiness equal desire by the actions they chose to make as well as their deep sentiments.
In a survey conducted by psychologist and professor Ed Diener he found that there was limited to no connection between wealth and happiness. The professor found that out of the Forbes’ 100 wealthiest Americans and lottery winners had only the smallest bit more happiness than an average citizen and that their money only brought temporary delight. Willa Cather expresses the relationship between wealth and emotion in her short story, “Neighbour Rosicky”.Cather believes that the idea of a more common American Dream of wealth and prosperity contrasts with a farmer’s more refined and simple American Dream of being completely satisfied with being happy and working on a farm, despite suffering financially by doing so.
Jim tries to model himself after a man who is crushed by the yoke of caring for his family. Since he has no paternal figure in his life, Jim is unable to decipher the emotional pain of Mr. Shimerda. At this point, Jim first starts to contemplate his romanticized view on life. The irony of this is when Mr. Shimerda promises to give Jim his gun after he becomes a real man. Antonia translates it into, “My tatinek say when you are big boy, he give you his gun” (Cather 32). Mr. Shimerda defines being a real man as being able to provide for your family, which he has been unable to do since they migrated to Nebraska. This causes a chain reaction in Jim and Antonia. Mr. Shimerda's death causes Jim and Antonia to sort of diverge paths with their decision making, and as Antonia begins to age. She takes on the parental role, or catalyst, that Jim needs to develop as a character.
Happiness is a feeling adults experience when they receive a gift, win something, and various other reasons, but does money buy this happiness everyone experiences? Don Peck and Ross Douthat claim money does buy happiness, but only to a point in their article which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (252). Throughout their article, reasons on why money can sometimes buy happiness are explained. While some of the reasons given are effective, not all are satisfying answers for adults working diligently to make a living. Money is a part of everyone’s life, yet it is not always the cause of happiness.
Willa Cather’s “My Antonia” is a collection of fictional memories loosely based off Cather’s own childhood. Throughout the novel young Jim Burden encounters several characters and befriends men and women alike, but two female characters become very close; Antonia Shimerda and Lena Lingard. Antonia and Lena both aid Jim throughout his life; one through childhood and the other through adulthood. While both characters have minor similarities, the differences between them are pronounced.
Sitting in his room at night, writing about her, must have taken a major part of his day out, but he believed it was worthy enough of his busy life as a lawyer. In Antonia’s life, Jim was just her best friend, which she had no other feelings about. She was oblivious to Jim’s interests in her. IF the two of them confronted each other and expressed their feelings either they would have stayed friends after, or Antonia would have lived her life with Jim. Jim would have liked the second one, and Antonia would have, most likely, preferred to stay friends. Though WIlla Cather does not allow for Antonia to tell the reader her feelings on the inside, it is concluded that Antonia did not express the same feelings for Jim. If she did, she might have wrote letters to Jim, or visited him. Because of their different opinions on their friendship, Jim and Antonia’s relationship stayed as a
The Nebraskan prairies are beautiful and picturesque and set the scene for a memorable story. Big farm houses and windmills placed throughout the graceful flowing golden yellow grass become a nostalgic aspect of Jim as he leaves his childhood life behind. The frontier includes destructive and depressing winters and luscious summers that affect Jim's family and the immigrants. The gloominess of winter and the suicide of Mr. Shimerda provide memories that associate Jim's recollections with nature's seasons. The Christmas season provided faith to persevere through winter and the exchanging of gifts made happy memories, which Jim could not experience if snow darkness did not exist. The summers were most unforgettable though. The smoldering sun and fertile land made growing crops easy. The immigrants references of roads lined with sunflowers as opportunity inspired Jim to appreciate the splendor and bountifulness of the land. Later Jim encounters these pathways, now concealed because of erosion, remembering that "this was the road over which Antonia and I came when we got off the train . . . the feelings of that night had been so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. For Antonia and me, this had been the road of Destiny" (Cather237).
These girls embody life, wilderness, adventure, and goodness. To Jim, they represent all that is beautiful and romantic about life on the prairie in a way that no well-respected Black Hawk woman can. The “hired girls” had lived trying lives. They had grown up in the hardest times of their families. Because they worked to support the family, most had not received any type of formal education.... ...