Comparing The Running Dream 'And Remember The Titans'

Summer Reading Analytical Essay Final Draft

This summer I read The Running Dream and watched “Remember The Titans.” The protagonists in these stories both overcome huge challenges. The protagonist in ”Remember The Titans” is the football team as a whole. Their antagonist was the whites not wanting blacks and whites together. In The Running Dream the protagonist was Jessica. Her antagonist was a thing rather than a person. Her new leg and learning how to walk again was her antagonist. Jessica’s challenge was the fact that she had to learn how to walk agin and that she can’t run any more. At first she was hopeless, as was her family, but slowly more and more people joined together to give her confidence and maybe even a chance of running again. Once she saw the light at the end of the tunnel, she grabbed on to it and didn't let go until she succeeded. By the end of the novel, not only was she using the light she now had to push herself forward, she was spreading that hope and light …show more content…
In both of these stories the protagonists have to teach themselves and those around them to accept their new circumstances because what has happened is not going away. In The Running Dream, Jessica must learn to live without her real led and she must also teach her parents and friends to accept it as well. In “Remember The Titans," the black and white football players must learn to accept each other, and once they, had done so, they teach their parents and the rest of the community to accept the other race. While these problems were dealt with in avery similar way, the context of the problems were very different. For instance, in The Running Dream, the problem is a personal once which effects only Jessica. Whereas in “Remember The Titans," the problem was much larger than just that small town in Virginia, this was a Nation wide problem that they helped to shed light