The nature of motivations that direct an individual’s course of action Throughout life, individuals are faced with decisions and obstacles that must be overcome. These decisions and actions are easily influenced by outside forces and motivations and the outcomes of our actions can have a drastic effect on one's destiny. The act of deciding a course of action is not always simple, but it is made even more difficult when we are faced with a time period and a negative outcome if we chose not to continue on our journey. In the short story “Winter’s Bone,” written by Daniel Woodrell, we are taught that throughout life people make choices between what they want to do and what they need to do. Sometimes those choices lead to unfavourable outcomes, …show more content…
Through his storytelling he shows us that the choices we make and the risks we take, when considering outside forces, may be the best course of action. Daniel Woodrell validates this by showing us Ree’s situation and how her course of action, which lead to positive outcomes. Throughout the story Ree is presented with a tough situation where she must decide a quick course of action. She must either wait and see if her father show’s up or take matters into her own hands and hunt him down herself. Deciding a course of action is a natural and necessary process of human life that can lead to either success or failure. We cannot avoid deciding a course of action especially when we have outside forces motivating us to do something fast. “Winter’s Bone” is a short novel that leaves us with an important life lesson. Putting our lives at risk for the ones we love allow us to feel good about our course of action knowing we are protecting them. If we decide courses of actions based on what we think is right for our loved ones, then we will make smarter and better choices that will lead to positive
When individuals face obstacles in life, there is often two ways to respond to those hardships: some people choose to escape from the reality and live in an illusive world. Others choose to fight against the adversities and find a solution to solve the problems. These two ways may lead the individuals to a whole new perception. Those people who decide to escape may find themselves trapped into a worse or even disastrous situation and eventually lose all of their perceptions and hops to the world, and those who choose to fight against the obstacles may find themselves a good solution to the tragic world and turn their hopelessness into hopes. Margaret Laurence in her short story Horses of the Night discusses the idea of how individual’s responses
Another instance of determination and ambition changing a life occurs when Dunstan is serving in the military. Having just wiped out a machine-gunner’s nest, he began the dangerous journey back to his own side. However, he is soon wounded in the leg by a stray piece of shrapnel. Quickly losing blood, and in copious amounts of pain, he continues the crawl towards his own side. A man with lesser motivation...
Winter’s Bone is a movie based off of a novel that revolves around seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly who looks over her mentally ill mother, her twelve-year-old brother Sonny, and six-year-old sister Ashlee. She basically plays the role of the mother by caring for her family day in and day out, making sure everybody eats, while at the same time, teaching them how to survive by teaching them how to hunt and cook. Their father, Jessup, is nowhere to be found after he was released on bail after being caught for manufacturing methamphetamine. After being told that if their father does not show up for the court date, they will lose their house (because it was put up for collateral as part of his bail), Ree sets out in search of her father on a path where danger is very common and drugs are very readily accessible. She began her journey by contracting her drug-addict uncle Teardrop before venturing off to the local drug lord: Thump Milton. The only information she receives here is that her father either died in a meth lab explosion or he skipped town to evade the police and avoid arrest. After, Jessup fails to appear for his trial, the bondsman informs Ree that she has about a week before they take hold over their house and the land and to avoid such an occurrence, she would need proof that her father is indeed dead and has not just skipped town. The end result is that she ends up getting saved by Teardrop after getting beaten up by a bunch of thugs when she goes to search for her father again. He tells her that her father was killed because he was suspected of informing on other meth manufacturers. One night, her attackers take Ree to where her father’s body is in a pond and she cuts off his arms and brings them in as proof t...
An example of the cycle followed by her father, his father, and his father before him is told when Blunt recalls a major blizzard in December 1964 that trapped the family and some neighbors in their small homestead. She unemotionally describes how her father simply proceeded to go through the motions of keeping the pipes from freezing, calmly accepting the fact that he could do nothing as the storm progressed and he could not prevent loss of a of their livestock. Or how when he first ventured out to check on the animals in their nearby barn and nearly lost his way back in whiteout conditions. Later, when the storm passed, she told of playing amongst the frozen corpses of the cattle, jumping from ribcage to ribcage, daring her older brother and sister to cut off pieces of the animals, all with the calm acceptance that this was so normal, nothing strange about it.
An individual’s meaning or purpose in life cannot truly be realized unless they are faced with a situation in which their course of action directly affects their future. In most cases, humankind is forced to face an extreme circumstance when something comes to an end, whether it be positive or negative, for that ending means that change is inevitable and approaching. Thus, life becomes more meaningful as something ends, for people are forced to realize what is truly important to them as well as the idea that nothing lasts forever. Individuals must choose which of the aspects and goals of their lives are the most significant and should be focused on as they approach a resolution, as can be seen in the Gawain Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Therefore, due to the finality of an ending and the uncertainty of the following events, humankind can reveal what they believe are the
Tobias Wolff is framing his story Hunters in the Snow, in the countryside near Spokane, Washington, where three friends with three different personalities, decided to take a trip to the woods for hunting in a cold, snowy weather. The whole story follows the hunting trip of these three friends. The reader can easily observe that the cold, hostile environment is an outward expression of how the men behave towards one another. Kenny, with a heart made of ice is rather hostile to Tub, while Frank is cold and indifferent to Tub and his pleas for help.The environment is matching the characters themselves, being cold and uncaring as the author described the two from truck when they laughed at the look of Tub: “You ought to see yourself,” the driver said. “He looks just like a beach ball with a hat on, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he, Frank?”(48). Near the beginning of the story the cold and the waiting surely creates an impact in the mood of the character. Tub is restless from the wait and the cold adds on to it. He complains about being cold and Kenny and Frank, his friends tell him to stop complaining, which seems to be very unfriendly. Wolff builds up the story on the platform of cold weather and the impact of the cold on each character slowly builds up.
He fig-ured that the normal half hour walk home might take as long as two hours in snow this deep. And then there was the wind and the cold to contend with. The wind was blowing across the river and up over the embankment making the snow it carried colder and wetter than the snow blanketing the ground. He would have to use every skill he’d learned, living in these hills, to complete the journey without getting lost, freezing to death, or at the very least ending up with a severe case of frostbite be-fore he made it back to Ruby.
Everyone has deeply desired to have something before, but some people take their desires to far and quickly become blind to how they affect everything and anyone else. Both the novel Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo, and the short story “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury, use this thought in both of their stories. In Shadow and Bone, the Darkling has forever been forced to serve under King’s that weren’t worthy of his time. In “All Summer in a Day”, the children of Venus long to see the Sun again. In both Shadow and Bone and “All Summer in a Day”, the authors reveal how a desire that one has can quickly change a character for the worst, making them forget about what they do and how their actions are affecting other people.
(6) The suddenness of the winter storm caught people by surprise. A roar “like an approaching train” was all the warning the storm gave. (130) The roaring wind and snow brought darkness and dropping temperatures. The people who were inside when the blizzard struck faced a dilemma. Staying inside and doing nothing seemed “heartless,” but going into the storm “on a rescue mission was likely to be fatal to the rescuer and useless to the lost.” (143) The people who were unfortunate enough to be away from home, whether they were at school or working with their livestock, had to make a difficult decision. They could either risk trying to make it home or chance it out and stay where they were. Schoolteachers had to decide whether to send the children home or keep them at the school. If anyone ventured outside, he or she risked frostbite, hypothermia, and likely
Clock, winter, and bones, three words that share no common interactions. A clock remains used to tell people the time every day, even through the freezing winter temperatures. These freezing winter temperatures remain so cold that they will chill one’s bones. Throughout the cold winter times, while an individual’s bones are chilling, a clock remains there to help tell the time every single day.
Many people make decisions or perform certain actions throughout their lives striving to produce a specific outcome or control their fate. Sometimes this outcome is not achieved. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, an ambitious soldier commits horrible deeds in order to rise through the ranks and establish his kingship, which turns into a tyranny. Throughout the play, almost all of the choices Macbeth made were to help him reach the specific outcome he wanted for his life. Through the decisions Macbeth makes to try and change his fate, Shakespeare is able to portray the message that free will does not truly exist, rather every choice made in life leads to a predestined end.
While you are walking in a park and you come into a fork in the path, how do you know which one to take? How do make the decision of which one to take? Do you make the decision based on the mistakes you made or that you just want to see where it goes? Many of us wants to make the decision so quick that no time is wasted, but others want to look back and see what they have learned and make a decision based on related events. George Shaw once said that “ a life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” In that quote he meant that it is better to make a mistake other than trying to be perfect all of the time. Through all of the valleys in life you are going to make mistakes but that is not the important part of the aspect. The most important part is how they rise from within themselves to conquer the mistake they had made.
Many of Shakespeare's later plays broke with customs of genre. The Merchant of Venice has all the elements of a comedy, but deals with very grave matters and ends ambiguously. Pericles foreshadows the novel in its romantic plot and use of narration. Such plays challenged prevalent Renaissance literary theory which demanded fairly strict adherence to classical values of realism and unity. The Winter's Tale is a self-conscious violation of these expectations, and a jibe at the assumptions behind them. Shakespeare uses the play itself to present his argument against what may be termed, "the mimetic theory of art." It was the established opinion of Elizabethan literati that art ought to imitate life (Kiernan 8). Shakespeare not only rejects this "ought,"1[1] but shows the absurdity of what it entails.
In the novel, Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, the character Teardrop is a raggedy, violent meth head. He initially poses as an antagonist in the novel due to the fear he brings upon Ree, although as the novel progresses, Teardrop evolves into the sole ally of Ree. In the novel, the character, Teardrop, develops into a character of care and trust, as he grows beyond his drug ridden life.
Debra Granik, producer of “Winter’s Bone, successfully produces the thriller of a decade with this chilling film. Ree Dolly, the protagonist, adventures out to find her useless father, who is wanted by the law for cooking meth. The film explores many interrelated themes of family, poverty, drugs, and feminism. Reviewers, like A.O. Scott, Phillip French, and David Denby, all evaluate the significance of the strong female role. For instance, French writes, “Winter’s Bone is one of the great feminist works in film.” Even though other critics focus on all the other predominant themes, I believe violence and decay strikes as the most accentuated theme. Granik repeatedly captures the lack of trust even in ones