Tracy Letts, Superior Donuts (2008) introduces us to a Polish American donut Shop owner named Arthur. As the play begins, an ex-employee has vandalized Arthur’s shop. Arthur is somewhat distraught over this incidence but does not seem to show his emotion to anyone. He seems to be almost disengaged in the incidence as the police and neighbors stand there in awe of what has happened. Throughout the play, Arthur has had many people in his life leave him. This play argues that when someone has endured abandonment, he or she becomes accustomed to people leaving and becomes emotionally detached from the world. Forsaken is a kind of feeling that is generated when someone of importance has left. When someone loses a person that he or she considered important to his or her life, the void of that person can create a feeling of abandonment. Consequentially, feeling this way can keep an individual from forming any type of emotional attachment to anyone else. In other words, the person would fear losing another person so he or she would not let his or herself grow close to anyone. In Superior Donuts, Arthur feels forsaken …show more content…
because people close to him has left him. Therefore, he had a hard time showing emotions or making any change in his life. Arthur endures abandonment from several people from his past including his parents, wife, and daughter. We become aware of this as we read Arthur’s conscience about his past. Such as, how his father forces him to leave his family and join the Vietnam War. Arthur remembers: “He just drove me to a recruiting station, parked the car, got out, and walked away” (28). The essence of this quote is that Arthurs father took it upon himself to choose what Arthur needed and dismissed what Arthur wanted to do. In other words, Arthur’s father overlooked the fact that he was forsaking his son and forcing him to be someone he did not want to be and leave his life in Chicago. Most likely, this was the first time Arthur felt forsaken. Eventually, Arthur’s parents passed away. By the tales of his life story, his parents were very important people to him. He was unable to attend his father’s funeral because he was away at war and this possibly could have made him feel even more forsaken. In addition, he got married and had a daughter. However, his wife and daughter would ultimately leave him also. Arthur reminisces on this event: “Magda and Joni got into the station wagon. Joni stuck her head out of the window, tears streaming down her face. I told her I’d see her soon” (70). The essence of this quote is that Arthur’s wife leaves him and takes his daughter with her. In other words, every person Author has loved is no longer with him and this could have been the ultimate feeling of abandonment. Due to everyone he has cared about leaving him, he eventually attaches himself to the one thing he still has in his life, his donut shop. Arthur hires a new employee at the shop, Franco.
At first, he is distant from Franco and really does not show much emotion to him. However, as time goes by he grows a closer bond with Franco. After a heated disagreement they have in the shop, Arthur becomes worried when he thinks Franco may have left him also. He calls Franco, and expresses his worries and apologies to him. Leaving a voicemail, he states to Franco: “Sorry for all the messages, but I’m just getting a little worried here… I guess you’re not coming in today. I wish you’d at least call me.. I’m feeling like we had an argument and maybe, I don’t know…you know the number” (70). The essence of this quote is that Arthur quickly realizes that he might have possibly lost another friend. In other words, he has created an attachment to Franco and fears going through the feeling of forsakenness
again. In comparison, Author was initially emotionally detached. However, he now seems to understand how it is important to put effort in a relationship in order to make it work. Arthur finds out that Franco is in trouble with some people that he had gambled with and these guys have beat him up pretty badly. Arthur decides to help Franco and sells his donut shop to the neighbor in order to get the money to pay the people what Franco owes them. He also engages in a physical altercation with one of the men. He provokes the man: “I’m going to fight you. And I’m going to win. I’m going to beat you up” (79). In this quote, Arthur is provoking the man that hurt Franco. He is making him aware that he wants to hurt him as he hurt Franco. In other words, he want this guy to understand that he cannot hurt Franco anymore because Franco has people that care about his wellbeing. It seems as if Arthur is trying hard to keep from losing his newfound friend and goes to the extreme to help him. It seems as if he has begun to understand how to keep from losing a friend. He realizes in order to keep someone from abandoning him he has to put in effort in order not to lose him or her.
In “The Weekend,” George cheats on Lenore with Sarah, and she still chooses to stay with him and work out their issues. The story by Ann Beattie can relate to “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin because Edna cheats on Leonce with Robert and Alcee Arobin. After learning Edna cheats on him, Leonce decides to stay with Edna to work their relationship out. While nothing is wrong with their significant others, they cheat because something in them is unfulfilled. Lenore knows George cheats because he spends much of his time with the other women, but she never acknowledges it, until she talks with Julie one day; “she’s really the best friend I’ve ever had. We understand things—we don’t always have to talk about them. ‘Like her relationship with George,’
For anyone who has ever worked in healthcare, or simply for someone who has watched a popular hit television show such as Grey’s Anatomy, General Hospital, House or ER know that there can be times when a doctor or health care provider is placed in extremely difficult situations. Often times, those situations are something that we watch from the sidelines and hope for the best in the patient’s interest. However, what happens when you place yourself inside the doctors, nurses, or any other of the medical provider’s shoes? What if you were placed in charge of a patient who had an ethically challenging situation? What you would you do then? That is precisely what Lisa Belkin accomplishes in her book “First Do No Harm”. Belkin takes the reader on
protagonist postulant Mariette Baptiste. Hansen’s challenges readers to explore beyond his descriptive narrative to find further meaning in the themes of suffering, power, and gender. Mariette Baptist represents a prideful, young woman who challenges and undercuts the Priory of The Sisters of The Crucifixion through her eccentric faith. Mariette’s piety generates discourse within the convent about the sincerity in her disposition for a religious life. The sisters are challenged to see Mariette’s faith as real and pure. Her religious practices involving self-inflicted penances disrupt the conventional ways of the priory. Furthermore, Mariette implores herself
I am used to living a very busy life style, so I never paid close attention to where my food was originating from. Usually when I look at my food it is more to find out its nutritional value rather than its origins. After reading Kelsey Timmerman’s “Where Am I Eating?”, it has opened my eyes to some of the horrors of the food industry. Regardless of what I have learned, changing my eating habits would be very challenging, and I do not believe it is entirely necessary. Yes, there are many negatives in the global food economy, but it is not totally corrupt as Timmerman suggests. I believe it would be very difficult to change because of the many misleading food labels, the United States has become unfamiliar with how to produce for the entirety
Madeleine Thien’s “Simple Recipes” is a story of an immigrant family and their struggles to assimilate to a new culture. The story follows a father and daughter who prepare Malaysian food, with Malaysian customs in their Canadian home. While the father and daughter work at home, the mother and son do otherwise outside the home, assimilating themselves into Canadian culture. The story culminates in a violent beating to the son by his father with a bamboo stick, an Asian tool. The violent episode served as an attempt by the father to beat the culture back into him: “The bamboo drops silently. It rips the skin on my brothers back” (333) Violence plays a key role in the family dynamic and effects each and every character presented in the story
This whole play by Arthur Miller shows how our community will turn on each other to save ourselves no matter if it’s right or wrong and it’s true in our society today. It also shows how a good man regained his happiness and holiness by standing up for what’s right against the lies and sacrificed himself for the truth.
Throughout Rajiv Joseph’s play, Gruesome Playground Injuries, the two characters, Doug and Kayleen, sporadically meet throughout the course of 30 years due to injuries ranging from getting “beaten up pretty badly” (Joseph 31) to going into a “coma” (Joseph 27). The play starts out with the two characters first meeting in the school nurse’s office with injuries of their own. This is the start of a relationship that is full of pain and healing throughout the years. Told in a very unique structure of five year increments, the play shows how injuries, a reoccurring image that may be self-inflicted or inflicted upon one, bring the pair together when either is in a dire situation.
Abandonment is a feeling known to many people. There are different types and levels of abandonment. In The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, many characters have been introduced to the feeling of abandonment. Abandoning or being abandoned is constant in the novel and Kingsolver uses it to link all of the characters together.
The love triangle of Arthur, Lancelot, and Guenever is a constant theme throughout every account of the Arthurian legend. Geoffrey Ashe's The Arthurian Handbook states that "We may say that these knights are expected to serve their King..."(81). The revelation of the affair finally comes when Sir Agravaine shouts, "'Traitor Knight! Sir Lancelot, now art thou taken'"(White 569). Lancelot was summoned to Queen Guenever's bedroom, and Sir Agravaine is finally exposing the affair and gaining revenge on Lancelot for unhorsing him many times in the past. The two people that Arthur trusts most are Guenever and Lancelot. Arthur is well aware of the affair between the two, but chooses to pretend that nothing is going on. Due to this naivety, Arthur earns the disrespect (and even hatred) of Agravaine and Mordred, who eventual...
In the novel Things Fall Apart and the play King Lear, both have presented stories of tragic endings. And both stories have presented some degrees of societal changes, societal conditions and personal changes. Both showed that sometimes the forces of societal change and condition, and the personal changes and situations, can affect each other. All four factors are related to each other.
Someone who has poor mental health has symptoms that are also known as depression. People feel that without forgiveness they will never be good enough in life. The study showed that self-compassion and the relationship between lack of forgiveness and depression drastically changed. The relationship was stronger for those who had low self-esteem. “Globally, depression is a common mental illness and one of the leading causes of disability at all ages (World Health Organization (WHO), 2015.)” (Halvorsrud 170). This article is related to Death of a Salesman because Willy believed his family would always be there for him regardless of his actions. At the end of the play when Willy passed away no one showed up to his funeral. At the beginning of the play he was cocky. Willy told his sons about all of the friends he had and how much he was appreciated. Throughout the play he slowly becomes confused and depressed throughout the play driving his family away. Today, medicine has been developed in order to help this condition, but during this it wasn’t as common. Historical criticism plays an important role in this article because during the time period the play was written in affects how Willy’s depression was handled. If Willy would have had the medicine we have today his life might have been
The play “Everyman” is about a complacent Everyman who is informed by Death of his approaching end. The play shows the hero’s progression from despair and fear of death to a “Christian resignation that is the prelude to redemption.” Throughout the play Everyman is deserted by things that he thought were of great importance portrayed by characters that take the names of the things they represent.
Arthur is Ronnie’s father. He believes that Ronnie is innocent because he knows his son better than anybody and can tell when he is lying or not. On page 34-35, Arthur asks Ronnie,
An overall theme of isolation permeates through both Wole Soyinka’s The Strong Breed and David Henry Hwang’s The Dance and the Railroad. Every character in these two plays suffers from some form of isolation from the rest of their society. Although Hwang’s Lone and Soyinka’s Girl are isolated for markedly different reasons and take opposite roads in their character growth, they share many similarities including often mirroring their society and some of their treatment of other characters.
The role of abandonment in The Glass Menagerie can best be described as the plot element that underlies the overall tone of despondence in the play because it emphasizes the continuous cycle of destruction and hardship that the Wingfield family experiences; indeed, abandonment in the play is a reiterative element that strips the excesses from the three main characters in the play and leaves them in their barest forms, united by a sorrowful reality and clutching each other through the ever-present need to sink into a self-constructed oblivion. The first, and perhaps the most notable and most frequently discussed, example of abandonment in the play would be that of Amanda Wingfield’s husband’s abandonment of his family; he left them at an unspecified time in the past because “he fell in love with long distances,” and evidently forsook any obligations and emotional affiliations that he may have had with his wife and offspring (Williams 5). Having been abandoned by a man who was both husband and father affected Amanda, Tom, and Laura in that it established many of their familial dynamics...