Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Explain ways in which risk is an important part of life
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Would you take a risk, knowing that there could be potential consequences? Taking a risk is the exposure of a loss and even harm. The subject of risks are a tricky. Most people aren't daring enough, and they wouldn’t gamble with their safety. On the other hand, sometimes the reward is greater, and it makes the risk worth it. Risk is a strategy that is prevalent in Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut uses the strategy of risks to show the conflicts and decisions that characters in his stories had to make. The use of conflict and decisions are used in the stories A Long Walk to Forever and Next Door” Doing this reveals an aspects of the characters identity and shows if they are willing to take any chances.
Love has the power
…show more content…
to make you do crazy things. When you're in love with someone it makes your head go crazy, and it makes you act irrationally. Leading you to take risks, and make difficult decisions. The theme of conflict and risk is prevalent in Newt and Catherine's actions in A Long Walk to Forever. Newt and Catherine both had to make a choice and take a risk to be with each other. Newt was sacrificing his position in the Army. Newt exclaimed “I’m what they call A.W.O.L.” (Vonnegut 52) This means that Newt left his position to go back to their town to see Catherine. This is a major risk for Newt to be taking. Leaving you position in the Army and not taking a leave of absence can lead to a very serious punishment. “Thirty days in the stockade, that's what one kiss will cost me.” (Vonnegut 56) Newt said to Catherine. He was telling her the risk of him coming back to town was a major punishment back in the Army. Newts love for Catherine was so strong, he was willing to take any punishment as long as he got the chance to confess his feelings for her. Newt did not know how Catherine was feeling, he could only hope that she had feelings for him back. Newt showing up at her doorstep was a surprise to Catherine, and once he confessed his love for her she had to make a choice. The choices were to stay with her current fiance, or to switch her life around to be with Newt. “What a crazy time to tell me you love me.” (Vonnegut 53) Catherine exclaimed. This shows how confused Catherine was, and how she realized she had to make a choice. Catherine is adamant about staying with her husband at first, because she doesn’t want to change her life. But, she knows she has strong feelings for Newt but is reluctant to admit them. The risk of leaving her fiance and starting over is frightening to her. Both of the characters were risking something to be with each other. In the end, there risk was worth the reward. The choices that you make can significantly affect the lives of other people.
Even though the intention is to try and help, it might make the situation worse. The theme of taking chances is prevalent in the story Next Door. The main character Paul, was left with a tough decision. He heard his neighbors fighting, and he wanted to help. So, Paul had to make a choice to either leave the situation alone, or to try and fix it. He came up with an idea to try and make the couple stop fighting by calling in the radio station. “And you're trying to pull’ em back together again with this dedication?” (Vonnegut 128) said Sam the radio host. This quote shows the decision that Paul made to try and fix the situation. Paul saw no harm in doing this, and he thought that it could only help them. It was worth for Paul to take the chance to try and solve their marriage. This plan backfired on paul when he heard more shouting coming from the neighbors house. Paul did not realize that Mr. Harger's wife had already left, and the women he was having an affair with came over. “You want your wife back?” (Vonnegut 130) the mysterious blonde woman shouted. Paul didn’t intend for his call to make things work, he was hoping to fix it. It wasn't in Pauls control that the other woman heard this message. He took the risk of trying to save their marriage, but in the end it only made things
worse.
The author Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado and went to Stanford University. He volunteered to be used for an experiment in the hospital because he would get paid. In the book “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, Kesey brings up the past memories to show how Bromden is trying to be more confident by using those thoughts to make him be himself. He uses Bromden’s hallucinations, Nurse Ratched’s authority, and symbolism to reveal how he’s weak, but he builds up more courage after each memory.
There are many similarities between the war experiences of Kurt Vonnegut and the character of Billy Pilgrim in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Several similarities between them are shown in the letter from Kurt Vonnegut to his family dated May 29, 1945 (Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect 11-14).
“Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.” Stated Abraham Lincoln. That quotes applies to Slaughterhouse-Five because even when you think you have conquered something and achieve the victory doesn’t mean that it will last long. Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim is non-heroic in the anti-war novel which makes the theme of the book Slaughterhouse-Five a man who is “unstuck” in time.
In his opinionated book, From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe describes his views on the way architecture has framed our modern world. He frames his book long essay with an excerpt from America the Beautiful, "O Beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today? . . . Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution warehouse . . . Every new $900,000 summer house in the north woods of Michigan or on the shore of Long Island has so many pipe railings, ramps, hob-tread metal spiral stairways, sheets of industrial plate glass, banks of tungsten-halogen lamps, and white cylindrical shapes, it looks like an insecticide refinery." (Wolfe 1) This quote, in short, is the premise of his critique. He does not like the way modern architecture
I chose the subject about “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” written by Ken Kesey in 1962 for my research paper because my mother told me years ago of the accompanying film and how interesting it is. Two years ago a friend of mine came back from his exchange programme in the United States of America. He told me that he and his theatre group there had performed this novel. He was and still is very enthusiastic about the theme and about the way it is written. Although I started reading the novel, I didn’t manage to finish it till the day we had to choose our subjects at school. When I saw this subject on the list, which we were given by our English teacher Mr Schäfer, I was interested immediately. So I chose it.
Kurt Vonnegut is the author of Slaughterhouse Five and he was a soldier during World War II. Slaughterhouse Five is a fictional story of what a man named Billy Pilgrim went through as a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II. Vonnegut experienced the bombing of Dresden in Germany when was a prisoner of war. Vonnegut's prison in Dresden, Germany was a slaughterhouse that the Germans forced the prisoners of war to live in. He relates some of his experiences during World War II to help him create the fictional story about Billy Pilgrim. Billy Pilgrim is a fictional character that Vonnegut created in order to somehow tell his store of Dresden. Most of Billy Pilgrim's experiences are similar to what Vonnegut actually experienced as a prisoner of war during World War II. PTSD is a disorder that disrupts someone's life keeping them from having an normal life because of a traumatic event that they experienced. PTSD is very common among soldiers returning from war because they went through many traumatic events during their deployment. It is very obvious to see that Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim are suffering from PTSD after their deployment in Germany during World War II.
Rosen portrays our society as completely exposed, giving up all privacy to join, and fit in with the “naked crowd”. Rosen claims that we willing give up all power of privacy in order to fit in with society and be accepted as someone that can be trusted through exposure. He claims that image is the key to establishing trust, not through a relationship or conversation. His thesis presents his views on the subject, “has led us to value exposure over privacy? Why, in short, are we so eager to become members of the Naked Crowd, in which we have the illusion of belonging only when we are exposed?”(Rosen) he states that we value exposure over privacy, and will give away privacy to fit in.
Analysis of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five Section One- Introduction Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut Junior, was published in 1968 after twenty-three years of internal anguish. The novel was a "progressive work" after Vonnegut returned from World War II. Why did it take twenty-three years for Kurt Vonnegut to write this novel?
Everyone has taken risks whether they be big or not, they will lead you down the path you choose in life. In the short stories Beowulf, Black Heart, and The Deep taking risks was a big part in all three. In Beowulf, there is many risks that he took, but the main one was that he risked his life to save the people that he loved. In the second book Black Heart by Mark Brazaitis, the girl risked her life to make friends with something she knew could kill her because she was so lonely. In the final book, The Deep by Anthony Doerr the main character made risks every day because he never knew if he was going to wake up to see the next.
By looking at Billy’s condition during the war, we can see that the war was not as glorious as the countries wanted you to think which at the time was not obvious. This adds a critical and significant point of view on the war to Vonnegut’s anti-war book. During WWII, the fighting countries didn’t want to show how terrible war really was, instead they showed images of patriotic men fighting in the war. In reality, these “men” were just kids out of high school and some from college, not ready to fight battles in a war. Vonnegut tries to show this in his book by inserting passages throughout Slaughter House Five, to help explain this to his readers. By describing Billy’s poor body structure and inadequate clothing and tools, one can clearly see
“Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge,” verbalizes Andrea Dworkin. Gender-roles have been ingrained in the every-day life of people all around the world since the beginnings of civilization. Both One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Hamlet portray typical female stereotypes in different time periods. Due to the representation of women in literature like Hamlet by William Shakespeare and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kessey, and pop-culture, evidence of classic gender-based stereotypes in a consistently patriarchal world are still blatantly obvious in today’s societies.
Baruch Spinoza once said “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” He compared free-will with destiny and ended up that what we live and what we think are all results of our destiny; and the concept of the free-will as humanity know is just the awareness of the situation. Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five explores this struggle between free-will and destiny, and illustrates the idea of time in order to demonstrate that there is no free-will in war; it is just destiny. Vonnegut conveys this through irony, symbolism and satire.
Everybody wants to be accepted, yet society is not so forgiving. It bends you and changes you until you are like everyone else. Society depends on conformity and it forces it upon people. In Emerson's Self Reliance, he says "Society is a joint stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater." People are willing to sacrifice their own hopes and freedoms just to get the bread to survive. Although the society that we are living in is different than the one the Emerson's essay, the idea of fitting in still exists today. Although society and our minds make us think a certain way, we should always trust our better judgment instead of just conforming to society.
Fred Wright, Lauren's instructor for EN 132 (Life, Language, Literature), comments, "English 132 is an introduction to English studies, in which students learn about various areas in the discipline from linguistics to the study of popular culture. For the literature and literary criticism section of the course, students read a canonical work of literature and what scholars have said about the work over the years. This year, students read One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey, a classic of American literature which dates from the 1960s counterculture. Popularized in a film version starring Jack Nicholson, which the class also watched in order to discuss film studies and adaptation, the novel became notable for its sympathetic portrayal of the mentally ill. For an essay about the novel, students were asked to choose a critical approach (such as feminist, formalist, psychological, and so forth) and interpret the novel using that approach, while also considering how their interpretation fit into the ongoing scholarly dialogue about the work. Lauren chose the challenge of applying a Marxist approach to One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Not only did she learn about critical approaches and how to apply one to a text, she wrote an excellent essay, which will help other readers understand the text better. In fact, if John Clark Pratt or another editor ever want to update the 1996 Viking Critical Library edition of the novel, then he or she might want to include Lauren's essay in the next edition!"
To take a chance, one is accepting the possibilities of what could happen from the choice they have made.