Revenge is Self Destructive

While reading the story Wuthering Heights, I noticed the story’s subject of love, but more importantly than love, is the subject of revenge. Revenge started from the very beginning of the story and continued until the very end. Heathcliff is the character that demonstrates the showing of revenge the most. However, Hindley, I believe, started the cycle of revenge and was the cause for all of the times that Heathcliff took revenge on others. Hindley was the only male child of the family until Heathcliff was adopted in. When Heathcliff was adopted in, Hindley felt his empowerment being taken away. Mr. Earnshaw started to pay great attention to Heathcliff, taking some of the attention of Hindley away. Catherine also spent more time with Heathcliff and Hindley became jealous of that.  So after Mr. Earnshaw died, Hindley began the revenge cycle by taking revenge on Heathcliff. Hindley made Heathcliff act as a servant and degraded him so Hindley could take back his place of power in the household. As the characters grew older, Heathcliff began to take revenge on Hindley by encouraging Hindley’s drunkenness and gambling habits. Heathcliff made Hindley indebted to him by knowing Hindley could not repay the loans and Heathcliff then takes Wuthering Heights away from the person who harmed him. Heathcliff takes revenge on Edgar by forcing young Catherine, Edgar’s daughter, to marry Linton. After Linton dies, Heathcliff inherits the Thrushcross Grange property. Heathcliff took revenge on so many people just because of the harmful childhood events he was put through. Heathcliff could have chose to stop the revenge cycle but didn’t and ended up dying because he put all of his energy into taking revenge on everyone. Heathcliff took revenge on everyone to try to justify himself, but in the end it just wore him out and it didn’t make him any happier than he was before.

            The theme of revenge being self-destructive is very prevalent in present day life. Often times people hold grudges on other people and spend ways trying to take revenge on the other person. Many of those times, the person taking revenge still is not satisfied. People would be happier if they let the past times go and forgave the other person. Revenge is not always harmful to the victim, but also to the culprit their self, as Heathcliff demonstrates in the book. If people forgave others and did not focus on the past and on ways to get back at the other person, they would become much happier and could move on and improve their life. By trying to take revenge on other people, a person cannot move on from the past. In order to live a happier life, a person must not focus all of their time on revenge and must focus on letting go of past hardships.

Can a Person Control Their Fate?

People are fascinated with the unknown. Fate is one of the aspects of life that is a mystery to human kind. People have different views on fate. Some people may think that their fate is set in stone, while others believe that life is filled with chaos and whatever happens, happens. While people have their own opinion on fate, nobody positively knows how fate works. The real question that many humans are itching to find the answer to is “Can a person control their fate?”

The story of Oedipus is focused around fate. Oedipus proves that a person cannot control their own fate.  Oedipus goes to an oracle and finds out that his future will consist of killing his father and marrying his mother. Oedipus has good intentions and tries to escape his fate but the oracle came true anyway. In order to avoid this prophecy, Oedipus leaves Corinth and travels to Thebes. On the way to Thebes, Oedipus kills a man who made conflict with him on the path. That man he killed was his father; however he did not know it at the time. After he gets to Thebes, Oedipus answers a seemingly unsolvable riddle and becomes a hero and a king in reward. Oedipus married his own mother, fulfilling the prophecy. He, like not knowing it was his father who he killed, did not know that it was his mother he married either. Oedipus left his hometown and his family to avoid his fate, but the oracle came true anyway.

Oedipus, however, was never told that the parents who raised his were not his real parents, putting Oedipus at a disadvantage. If Oedipus would have known that the parents he grew up with were his adoptive parents, could Oedipus have been able to avoid his fate? Possibly. Since Oedipus had no idea that he was adopted in the first place, he assumed that those parents were the parents he was going to kill and marry. Oedipus did not know that the man he killed was his biological father and the woman he married was his biological mother. His adoptive parents almost controlled his fate by not telling him the truth. I think that if Oedipus would’ve known beforehand that he was adopted, he wouldn’t have left Corinth in the first place, so he couldn’t have done any action to make the oracle come true. Oedipus could have also avoided his fate though by deciding not to marry anyone and refraining from killing anyone as well.

I believe that there are things a person can do to control their fate. Like in Oedipus, he had a decision to leave. If he wouldn’t have left, his life could’ve been completely different. That happens in everyone’s life. Every decision a person makes will affect their lives in some way, maybe not in a drastic way like the decisions Oedipus made, but it will in some way. Currently as a high school senior, I am facing the decision with what to do with the rest of my life. I plan on going on to college to expand on my education. My life can change depending on which college I choose to go to. Depending on which college I choose, my life could be completely different compared to if I chose to go to a different one. I believe that people influence their fate by making their own decisions.

            Nobody knows for sure and everyone can think what they want about fate, but I believe that every decision a person makes affects their future and their fate. I therefore think that people do have a say in their fate and can slightly control it with the decisions they make.

Individuality

Growing up is stressful. Not only having to stray away from holding your parents’ hands all the time, but also trying to find yourself. Kids, especially in middle school, have difficulty finding and staying true to themselves. Kids are so influenced by their peers and the need to be accepted by others that they will change themselves to meet the criteria of the group. The kids are under so much peer pressure that any strand of their true selves is lost. The kids at this age are losing what they do not even have yet. They do not know who they are and everyone around them is trying to tell them who they should be. Children are so conflicted by adults and other kids their age that they get overwhelmed.
The book Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison portrayed the struggle of finding yourself really well. This African American adult living in a primarily white society shares the same conflict as children in our society do today. All throughout the book, the narrator remained nameless. We never learn his real name because he doesn’t know who is really is. The narrator is trying to find his true self throughout the entire book. He feels invisible to everyone because of his skin color. When he tries to be himself and stand out as an individual through his African American heritage, many people think of him as unimportant and don’t pay any attention to him. When he blends into society, he loses his real identity to the rest of the group.
The narrator slightly finds his identity in when he joins an organization called The Brotherhood. The group even gives the narrator a name, but the audience is never told the name the narrator was given. The name is significant because the narrator finally found belonging in a group. However, the group turned out to not be what he expected or wanted and the narrator opted out. The book ends with the narrator going underground in his secret home to find his true self and identity, since the identity he was given in the group turned out to not be whom he individually is at all.
The children in our society mirror the invisible man by remaining nameless in the sense that they do not know who they are yet and are still looking for themselves. Our children search for belonging and often fall under peer pressure to feel important. When our children fall into peer pressure, they blend into society and lose their real identity to the rest of the group. The Brotherhood in the book stands for different cliques that children face today. The cliques make the children feel a sense of belonging, but the children often have to change their selves to feel the group’s acceptance. Sometimes children can recognize that the clique is not what they expected and leave the clique, like the invisible man with The Brotherhood. Children then continue to search for themselves like the narrator did when he went underground.
Children today should not have to be faced with so much peer pressure at such an early age. Children fall under peer pressure without even having a chance to stand up for themselves because they haven’t had enough time in life yet to find themselves. If peer pressure wasn’t such a strong, persistent factor in life today, children would have a stronger foundation in knowing and staying strong in who they are. Children are not given enough time to realize that their individual self is more important than the self that the group and rest of society tells them to be.