Creative Writing: Analyzing the Memoir “This Boy's Life” (Essay Sample)

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Creative Writing Essay
Question
In the memoir “This Boy’s Life”, we see Toby and his Mother undergoing suffering in their lives. Their family seems much complicated. The situation of suffering makes them move from one place to another. The question is, what makes them shift from one place to another?
Quotations from Jane Kenyon
Quotation 1: “There’s just no accounting for happiness” (Jane Kenyon, line 1)
Quotation 2: “happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town, and inquires at every door until he finds you asleep mid-afternoon as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair” (Jane Kenyon, lines 13-19).
Quotation from David Brooks
Quotation 1: “But the big thing that suffering does is it takes you outside of precisely that logic that the happiness mentality encourages” (David Brooks).
Quotation 2: “Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefits. Difficulty and suffering sends you on a different course” (David Brooks).
Critical lens of Jane Kenyon’s article
In her poet “Happiness”, Kenyon attempts to illustrate how people consider and judge happiness. She argues that happiness comes to everything as well as everyone despite us not knowing it.
Critical lens of David Brook’s article
Brooks argues that people experience happiness after undergoing severe period of suffering. It implies that people suffer while attempting to look for hapy life.
The relation of Jane Kenyon’s Poem “Happiness” to the question
Kenyon is a former poet laureate of New Hampshire who, in her poet “Happiness”, says that “Happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town, and inquires at every door until he finds you asleep mid-afternoon as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair” (Jane Kenyon, lines 13-19). In this quote, I can argue that Kenyon attempts to illustrate how people consider and judge happiness. However, there is no significant way of describing it. According to Kenyon’s poem, it says that happiness comes to everything as well as everyone despite us not knowing it. Kenyon tries to offer the cup, boulder, and rain personification when she comments that happiness can come in them the same way people observe it coming to them. This implies that Kenyon, by saying “they”, reflects to other living things apart from people. That is, animals can also receive the instance of happiness.
The importance of living in this world is to become happy. Every person wants to be happy. Whatever the situation or the place we are, we all want to be always happy. Happiness does not exist in the future or in the past, but it only exists within the current condition of life. If we are in a suffering situation, we always do what we can for the importance of getting happy. This does not mean that happiness is the life with absence of problems; rather, it is the strength that is of significance in dealing with problems.
Looking at the question, Toby and his mother are undergoing suffering due to challenges they experience in their daily lives. The reason of them undergoing these challenges is that they are searching for happiness. The husbands of Toby’s mother are all considered to be violent people who do not recognize happiness. The two characters are trying their best to be happy. For instance, when they visited Utah to prospect for uranium, they met Roy, Toby’s mother ex-boyfriend, who stays with them for some time. In that period, Toby changes his to Jack for the reason that he thinks the new name will bring happiness to him. According to my point of view, that can be one way of Toby trying to look for happiness in his life.
Another situation that shows Toby and his mother are looking for happiness is when they headed to Seattle. Here they found a guy who seemed to be a good and cool. Therefore, they decided to settle with him thinking that they found a place to beginning their happiness from. Nevertheless, Dwight, the new guy they met in Seattle, turned out to be monster after few days of staying with Toby and his mother. From that, the two consider Dwight as being a disaster for them. They consider him making them unhappy again. Toby tries to bring happiness to him by making friends from bad group of boys. The reason behind this is that Toby wants to join a group that can make him happy and stay away from his new father, Dwight. Therefore, he does what he can for the importance of bringing happiness to him. On the other side, patience comes to an end to Toby’s mother, the moment she decides to leave Dwight and move to Washington DC. Her movement to Washington DC is to look for a better place that can make her happy and begin a new life. All these movements made by Toby and her mother is because they are searching for happiness. Everywhere they go, they find the situation making them unhappy. That makes their lives desperate and miserable. However, when they are provided with an opportunity of having happiness, they seem to live happily.
The relation of David Brooks “What suffering does” to the question
David Brooks says that happiness is but one part of the human drama; suffering in another. “But the big thing that suffering does is it takes you outside of precisely that logic that the happiness mentality encourages” (Brooks n.p). Brooks’ point on this argument is the reflection of what we learn and how we change from suffering (Brooks). Brooks’ argument is that our significant life goal is to have happiness at its maximum level. The fact that is brought about by Brooks is that each time, we keep talking about the good experiences we have been having, the good times and the good future we are expecting to have. No one among us wishes to have a frustrating or unhappy future. Nevertheless, Brooks goes on to argue that, when it comes to time of discussing about the past life we have been having, no one talks about happiness only. Everyone talks about passing through suffering in order to have happy moments. People experience happiness after undergoing severe period of suffering. Most of the time, suffering is considered to be very destructive. It makes our life look miserable. It makes us feel desperate and disappointed. People do critical things in order to escape from suffering and look for happiness. As earlier said, no one wants to live a life full of suffering. Everybody wants a life that is full of happiness. “Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefits. Difficulty and suffering sends you on a different course” (Brooks n.p). This quote implies that suffering is a lesson that we should often learn from it. Suffering drags us deeper into ourselves. Suffering also offers us with a great sense of our own limitations, what we can ...