Selfishness In The Life Of Oladauh Equiano

This past semester we read a great deal of works with many different ideas behind them. We read poems of love, war, and death. Short stories of life, hope, and slavery. In all of this literature I found it interesting how similar the minds of humans today and the minds of the humans of the past are. Although the circumstances are different the drive is the same. What makes selfishness, pride, and careless live within us today have the same causes as in the past. Money and ego. That is what is important to humans. How they look to others and how much green they have locked away. In the eyes of a mortal, without the material things in life one would be nothing. Every day we have to make hundreds of decisions. From the moment we choose to …show more content…
This is a word many of us know called selfishness. Often in the world we live in it is influenced greatly by money. In the world we live in people are often willing to stomp on others for more money, but it isn’t just nowadays that the world has been influenced by money. Think back to the slave era. Many people all over the world were willing to trap and enslave humans for the everyday dollar. A good example of this is a work we read called “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oladauh Equiano”. In this story a young boy is stolen from his tribe and shipped across the globe like live stock. One part of this story I would like to draw upon is when he was on the ship. It was a horrible time in his life and all he wanted was to die so he decided he wouldn’t eat. When those who were shipping him realized he wasn’t eating, they beat him. They did this because they knew that they would not get as much money for the slaves if some of them died. Another work that includes putting money before a human life is “The Chimney Sweeper”. In only the first few lines it is mentioned that the speaker’s father sold him for money. Now he is to sweep chimneys with …show more content…
One work that I felt truly captured this thought was the story “The Death of Ivan Ilych”. In the story Ivan is suffering from an extreme illness that causes him much pain. Everyone knows that he is going to die and they fear it. Death, to them, is something they do not accept as something that happens to people and Ivan being sick disrupts this idea. Since death does not truly exist in there minds they have a very hard time being around him and helping him. Only the butler, who has accepted death as a part of life, is truly able to be there for Ivan in his time of