I Can Only Be Me

An identity is defined as a person's conception and expression of their own self but what does that mean? Richard Wright poses many questions of finding ones else in his stories. The main question is who is Bigger Thomas? He has a name, a family and a house but what is his identity? The funny thing is is he does not even know the answer to that question. Throughout Native Son, a bildungsroman by Richard Wright, Bigger struggles to find himself in an oppressive white society. We know he is a black and that he hates his family. He hates his family because he cannot help them. Bigger cannot succeed  in the world that he lives in because he is a black man and the whites only see him as what his stereotypes are. Eventually, Bigger became his stereotypes and bottled all his anger from years and years of being oppressed. Many say that an identity is what someone makes for himself but I do not think that is the case here. Bigger is product of his environment. This environment is the source of his fear. Bigger is afraid to be anything other than the stereotypes the whites set because he was told his life that he could not be anything else. People are what society wants them to be. Society influences people more than we realize because there are so many aspects to it. Teenagers are influenced by social media. Parents are influenced by bills and so on. Bigger has so much fear in his life that his only outlet is violence. Everything he does is because of how he grew up. He grew up being told that he was had to be and never given the opportunity to show any other side of himself. That is not a real identity. That is not a choice. The audience does not know the real Bigger Thomas because Bigger does not know who he is. We all have an identity but is it our own or the one society made for us? My mother used to tell me that I could only be myself in this life but I do not really believe that is the case. There are so many influences in the world around and society creates the people that are "needed" in the world. In Bigger's world, someone had to be the person everyone hates and could be a scapegoat for things not going as planned and unfortunately that scapegoat was Bigger. Society created the monster we all saw him as but he did not start that way. Monsters are created not born. People start out good but when society touches them, everything is changed.

Making a Change One Book at a Time

What is literary merit? It is lesson or a value that a reader takes away from a novel. This value is something the author intended on the audience learning and it is usually a subtle lesson. Not a moral but something similar to it. Literary merit is something the reader can apply to the world around them but it does not come from every single book. Books like Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief are fun to read but their sole purpose is to entertain the reader.

 

A reader could pull lessons out of the adventures and disasters the protagonists face but there is no concrete evidence and these books are fantasy fiction. However, Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee is a high achievement of literary merit. This book is a continuation with the beloved characters from To Kill a Mockingbird and I have never read a better book. Scout has finally grown up into a young woman and goes by her birth name Jean Louise. When Jean Louise returns to her childhood home, she finds that Maycomb has changed. But no real changes have occurred because Jean Louise is the one that has changed. she grew up thinking her father, Atticus, was a god and he never made a mistake. She comes to find that her father is no god but he is human and he has made a lot of mistakes. Many of his decisions she does not agree with. Harper Lee uses Jean Louise's struggles to create a theme of one may find it difficult to find reality when they are still holding on to the past. This book can be considered literary merit because Harper Lee creates a protagonist that is so wrapped up in the past that she cannot see how her world as it is now and that was a lot of people are like. Many people do not see the reality of the world but only what they want to see. This is why this kind of books gets taught in school because the students analyze what the authors are trying say about the world and the students are the ones who try to make a change.

Every Road has a Beginning

Hi guys, my name is Sam. Well, really it's Samantha but Samantha is too long to say. I am a student athlete and emphasize on athlete because you name it and I have probably played it. But I am not all brawn. I secretly love to read. It is a hobby of mine that I sadly do not have time for anymore but when I was ten, I was reading 3 books a week. The book series that really peaked my reading interest was Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series. That series was absolutely amazing. I stayed up until 3 in the morning finishing each book. At the end of book five, I did not know what to do. I legitimately cried my eyes out because I felt like a piece of me was missing. I moved onto another series he had written called the Kane Khronicles  and that was a trilogy. I flew threw those books and was on the search for another series. A couple years ago, Riordan wrote a sequel series to Percy Jackson called the Heroes of Olympus and I have yet to read all the books so that is my goal for next summer. These books is where my road began. My love for reading blossomed from these books. My favorite book I have ever read was To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I thought that book was just fantastic. I was so sad that Harper Lee was not going to write another book until I had heard she wrote one a couple months ago. There was so much controversy so obviously I had to read it, and this is the path that I am on right now.