Addiction (Coursework Sample)

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Addiction
This essay tends to compare two articles and identifies the various similarities and differences they both have. I will discuss three major issues outlined that include a type of addiction to the subject, the feelings portrayed by the family, and other people towards the addict and finally the outcome of the addict that is his death.
The similarities are the two articles tend to constitute a type of addictive behavior that the person being spoken about has. In the first article written by Ellen Goodman titled: The Company Man describes a man, who is addicted to his work so much, he barely has time for his family. Most of his family members do not even know him well at all as he does not spend time at home. It is evident where in the obituary it was said that he had passed on due to coronary thrombosis, but everyone including his acquaintances and friends knew he was a flawless type A workaholic. The second article entitled: under the influence: Paying the price of My Father’s Booze, describes how his father had an addiction, but his was that of alcohol. This addiction made his children fear him and his wife despise him. It is evident when he writes his father drank. He drank like a gut-punched boxer tends to gasp for breath, like a starved dog gobbles food secretly, compulsively, trembling and in pain. The phrase like a starved dog gobbles food shows the extent of his addiction.
The two articles also share a fact that the addiction of the party being referred to elicits various feelings from family members and other people. In the first article, his wife Helen who was forty eight years of age had given up competing with her husband’s work, when the children were still small, years ago, according to her daughter. Even a friend from the company had told her that he knew how much she would miss him, and she said she already had. We see that his eldest child, working in a manufacturing firm as an executive barely knew him. Moreover, he had gone around their neighborhood to search his father and inquire from them information about him. His second girl child had nothing to say to him when seated in a car as they were driving. In the second article, there is guilt, shame fear and rage along with the danger of abandonment and insanity. He writes that other people tend to have keener sources of grief like racism, poverty, war and rape. However, he was trying to comprehend the mixture of responsibility; helplessness and shame that he learnt to feel considering him being the son of an alcoholic. He writes that all evening, until their bedtimes they would tiptoe past their father and curl themselves in their sheets fearfully listening.
The two articles also show the two addicted people dying in the end. Mr. Phil, from the first article, The Company Man, dies from overworking himself. From the article, when he finally worked himself to death at exactly 3:00 A.M. Sunday morning no one tended to be actually surprised. In the second article, he no longer imagined, he could reason with the men whose names were found on the bottles, the likes of Jack Daniel’s. He claims to have been able to remember the statistics of alcoholism that were cold the likes of ten, fifteen and even twenty million victims. He says he failed of perfection and his father succeeded in dying. At the end, he had considered himself not sick but sinful, asked him whether he wanted to kill himself and was answered with a yes why not, why the hell not and what was there to be saved.
The differences in the two articles are on the type of addiction, in that in the first article, the addiction is of work and the second article, the father is addicted to alcohol. This can be seen above where everyone including his acquaintances and friends knew Phil was a flawless type A w...