The Disappearance Of Carries And Carrie By Steven Millhauser

An average human being makes 35,000 decisions per day. What one says, eats, does, etc, are all decisions that they are faced with on the daily. These decisions are not made as the product of their free will, but are instead made by outside forces, based on the experiences that the individual has had throughout their life. However, outside forces does not solely affect the decisions that individuals make, they affect the individual 's “self” as well. The question to ask, is how strongly these outside forces affect the “self”. Carrie by Stephen King and short story the Disappearance of Elaine Coleman by Steven Millhauser are literary works that explain the two extremes in which outside forces can affect an individual’s “self”. Through my experiences of moving from Japan to America and having …show more content…
Through my personal experiences, I came to a conclusion that the degree of outside influences change constantly, and that I am able to change the amount it affects my “self.” Moving from Japan to America at the age of 7 with no knowledge of the English language or the culture, the personal identity that I had taken 7 years to create in Japan dissipated. I began to rely on others to create my identity, and how I dressed, what I said, and the daily actions I took became influenced by those around me. In a sense, this allowed me to assimilate into the American culture fairly quickly, but at the cost of losing my Japanese identity. I became too focused on the process of assimilation that I had to undergo, and with the lack of outside forces which influenced me to maintain my Japanese identity, that aspect of myself began to experience the “Elaine Coleman