It is difficult to describe life's changes when you have only been alive for seventeen years. I have yet to reach a point in my life where I can look back and think, "Wow, I've been through a lot, " and be able to compare the different stages. Tim O'Brien's quote from The Things They Carried is an interesting look into the future. One must wonder whether they will feel the same way or not at that age.
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I disagree with O'Brien and his assertion that humans do not change in the important ways. One example comes from Elie Wiesel's memoir Night. "The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered my soul and devoured it" (Wiesel 34). In tragedies such as the Holocaust where people lost their families and friends in the most horrific ways, it is understandable how they would lose themselves. Being denied so much and offered only work and coldness, many felt their old selves dying with those in the gas chambers and the fire. Starting a new life once they were liberated seemed the only way to forget what happened. In many ways this is a good thing. By losing the person who suffered so greatly, they are able to rebuild a life unaffected by the memories. O'Brien states that after all he experienced he was the same boy in the photographs. I question how he was able to live after coming back from Vietnam, the sound of gunfire and screams always in the back of his head.
One does not need to be involved in or witness a tragedy to lose their essence. Some are transformed by the people around them. An example of this would be William Golding's Lord of the Flies, in which several of the main characters join together against several others after they are marooned on an island. Rather than focus on themselves, they grouped together and became a savage gang. This mob mentality completely erased who each of them was and replaced it with one communal identity. This way, they could protect one another and not have to worry about themselves as individuals. Even today there are gangs that focus more on what's good for the group then what's good for you. Like the victims of tragedies, these groups feel safer than before with the new life.
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4 comments:
I agree with your statement. It is very challenging to assess our lives when we are only seventeen or eighteen years old. I do like your approachof including the example of The Lord of The Flies because those boys killed each other and brutally treated each other. They lost their innocence as children and traded it in for savageness. They obviously could never be the same children they used to be because of their irreversible actions.
But I do have a question. Do you think internally a person can change throught the intangibles such as the heart, spirit, soul? Can that too change with time?
Very good reference with great support from textual references! Kabunky
Sweeny Todd- I loved how your related your works to other works read previously. It helped clarify your point, and made it more accesible to someone reading your blog. I do agree on some level that people lose themselves in times of hardship, and they become different people, but I do feel that some of their truth and existence as a person does stay with them throughout their whole life, some traits and characteristics are ever present. I did like how you made your point however! =]
Have you studied Jonathan Edwards, particularly his essay, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"?
http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/sinners.htm
Must we change to save ourselves? Does this essay support your thesis?
sec and kabunky!, thanks for the comments. It's hard to defintively determine whether or not a person changes and I'm sure many of us could not make a clear-cut decision. I believe that there are some peices of ourselves that do not change, I just did not add that to the analysis. Thanks again for taking the time to read my post!
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