American Literature

Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Young Goodman Brown was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and presents a story of a man who is pulled between the choices of good and evil. The story starts out without giving the reader the motive because of which the protagonist, Goodman Brown, sets out from his house to join the Devil (Hawthorne, 2006). However, it is apparent that Brown is there is there without his own free will. He accompanies the Devil in a walk into the depths of a forest and continues to accompany him in what he at first considers his lone journey with no companion other than the devil beside him.
However, his formerly suppressed desire to resist continuing the journey becomes weaker when he sees that the people who brought up his faith and nurtured his trust in all that is good are also joining the Devil in the walk. As the walk into the depths of the forest continues, more people join the Devil and we see that Goodman recognizes most of them as his townsfolk (Hawthorne, 2006). He sees people who he considered to be of immaculate moral character and those to whom he looked for inspiration and motivation to good. The thought that they too are now engaged with the Devil repulses him and in what appears to be an act of vengeance, his resolve to accompany the Devil on the journey grows stronger. However, we see that Goodman is influenced by the one entity that he missed when he set out on his journey his wife. When he sees his wife join the procession, he finds that the matter has become more personal to him than it formerly was.

Goodman chooses to react to this new development by initially letting the shock of seeing his wife carry him into sorrow and letting himself carry on with the journey towards initiation into the evil (Hawthorne, 2006). However, we see that Goodman moves from experiencing sorrow into desperation since it is not until he and his wife are called upon the altar that he shouts out to her to repent the way of the Devil.

Even though his desperation was for the sake of his wife, he finds himself alone in the quagmire of evil that surrounds him once he returns home (Hawthorne, 2006). He is perplexed and chooses to adopt a cautious approach until the day he dies.

We can see that Goodman chooses to face the developments in his life with little concern for his own being and rarely comes close to carry out an action until he is faced with the ordeal of seeing his wife follow a path that he regrets to have followed to begin with (Hawthorne, 2006). His desperation encourages him to take defend his wife. However, faced with the complexity of ambiguity, he chooses to keep to himself and he lets his former desperation and resolve take on the form of a strong desire to ostracize himself from the people who he once trusted but then saw taking their oaths to the devil.

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradburys The Veldt is an extremely rare kind of story in which the author gives the reader hardly any preface to the characters (Bradbury, 2006). Any and all characteristics of the characters can only be surmised through the brief expressions of the environment around the characters.
Considered from the perspective of the parents, it is evident that the parents choose to relinquish all their desires to the will of their children (Bradbury, 2006). They begin by installing the Happy-life Home system in their house and carry out renovations to augment the highest level of technology into their house. The parents give special consideration to the childrens demands and a virtual reality setup is put into place in the nursery. However, the parents begin to get increasingly concerned about the children when they realize that the children have become somewhat addicted to their virtual reality enabled nursery.

When the parents decide to call in a psychologist to acquire an assessment of their current standing, their doubt is confirmed and they are convinced that it is indeed the house that is causing the ruptures in the relationship between them (Bradbury, 2006). The parents choose to take a defensive stance and make plans to go on a vacation, the children refuse to leave the house and it is then that the parents realize the true degree to which the children have become addicted to the modernizations of the house. However, the parents, out of their desperation to end it, eventually agree to come with the children on one last visit to the nursery where they are slain by the deadly lions manifested.
When considered in the perspective of the children however, it is clear that the children begin to submit to the temptations of the Happy-life Home system and begin to prefer it more than they would desire the affection of their parents. They grow to despise their parents when the parents demand that the family goes on a vacation (Bradbury, 2006). They begin to wish that their parents would no longer be a part of their lives and their preference for the virtual reality equipped nursery grows. Upon the parents insistence, the children resort to the most extreme of measures to maintain their relationship with the house and the nursery and have the parents slain by the nursery.
They choose to remove their parents from their path and continue to lead their lives as if no change had taken place. They allow their relationship with the nursery grows to such an extreme that they never feel the loss of their parents and never regret having to live without them. The children choose to replace their parents with the nursery (Bradbury, 2006). While their initial concerns were seemingly completely natural when the parents insisted to go on a vacation, the absence of the parents appeared to have no affect on them once the parents had been slain by the nursery and the children were free to indulge themselves in it.

It is extremely necessary to note that the Veldt was written in the 1950s at a time when the television was steadily and gradually replacing parents in the day to day lives of children. Children would remain riveted to the television and the desire to follow Sci-Fi based stories was stronger than the desire to be loved by their parents.

The Things They Carried by Tim OBrien
For Lt. Cross, an individual can never remain devoid and oblivious of the tangible and non-tangible weights that he carries. There is a considerable degree of influence of these weights upon the lives of men. Furthermore, from the mannerism of Lavenders death and the subsequent reaction of his fellow soldiers, it is evident that men choose to base their decisions upon their observations of their peers and their respective weights (Updike  Kenison, 2000). It is necessary to highlight at this point that the weights carried by an individual, in the eyes of the author Tim O Brien, are the responsibilities and emotions that an individual chooses to keep upon his shoulders. These weights can either weigh a person down under responsibility or they can motivate a person through inspiration from the memoirs of times that were far better than the present.

Tim OBriens, Lt. Jimmy Cross engages the world around him in a manner that seems to come in a series of stages. At first, it is evident that he chooses to create a shell for himself out of Marthas letters and good-luck pebble. Even when his fellow soldier gets shot, Cross remains captivated in thoughts of Martha. However, it is evident that Crosss thoughts about Martha steadily continue to become more controversial and critical. From thoughts about whether or not Martha will ever return his love, his imagination moves to question Marthas chastity (OBrien, 2006). We observe that Cross attempts to tackle his train of controversial thoughts by letting himself submit to what comes forth as peer pressure when the soldiers choose to shoot dogs and chickens in the village of Than Khe. However, it is evident that he reaches an extreme and his protective shell breaks, forcing him to realize the intensity of the denial he was living in. It is also clear that it was indeed Lavenders death that led Cross to relinquish hold of his self sustaining memories of his girl Martha and her chastity (OBrien, 2006). He eventually refuses to let his life be influenced by thoughts and memories of his past. He begins to feel guilt for Lavenders death and that guilt exposes him to volatility of the circumstances of his present.