The Other Wes Moore Literary Analysis

People in our society today face numerous challenges throughout their day. Some might crack under pressure and others will thrive off of these predicaments. Most of these challenges are minor, nevertheless some people face major challenges every day, and soon one crisis will defeat them. This situation occurs in The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore, two people face many difficulties and they either will form a poor decision and their future will be ruined or they will become a better person for it. The novel introduces the hardships these young men have faced and how their decision will have an effect on them their whole lives. Wes Moore and the other Wes Moore lived their lives in a situation where it was best for the children in the family …show more content…
The Other Wes Moore, along with the Scarlet Letter contain direct characterization to prove the theme of how one decision will decide your fate. The Other Wes Moore has a plethora of characters that all face the same dilemma because of their living situation. In Baltimore many young children are forced to turn to the drug game to generate money and help support their family, all of the community expects for every black teenager to turn to drugs. While Wes Moore did not turn to drugs, the other Wes Moore turned to drugs and it led him down a path where one choice decided his fate. While explaining the Other Wes’s life the author is extremely direct with how he is involved. His mother looked through the other Wes’s room, “ Inside were pills, marijuana, half an ounce of powdered cocaine, and half a dozen vials of ‘ready rock,’ or crack cocaine” (Moore 73). Moore describes the Other Wes as a drug dealer, once his mother decides to look into where all this new money was coming from and from this direct characterization the audience is now able to comprehend what is going on in the other Wes’s life and how he is getting money. Soon this drug path leads him to more extreme crimes and his last crime made his future clear. The other Wes was going to spend his life in jail because he was involved in a robbery where an ex-cop was shot. On …show more content…
The Other Wes Moore was written from Wes Moore’s memories and the memories of the other Wes. While he might have added exaggerations to the novel, the author definitely added diction along to improve the writing of the novel. The children in Baltimore had significantly low education as the crime rates kept increasing, thus there was a demand for police. In some cases the police would help, in others they would form a bad judgment call. The society in Baltimore knew that, “You could see it in the people in the neighborhood, [...] harassed by the petty crime of the crackheads, and frightened by the sometimes arbitrary and aggressive behavior of the cops themselves” (Moore 81). Wes Moore uses significant diction to describe how the society and neighborhood felt about Baltimore and what was happening during this time of crisis. One bad decision and everyone in the neighborhood acknowledged that the police could take someone out of their element and force jail time upon them. The other Wes Moore knew that, and still decided he could outsmart the police and ended up in jail for a robbery gone wrong. The one decision the other Wes had made to be in possession of more money, caused him his freedom. In The Scarlet Letter diction is used prominently as the book was set in the early seventeenth century, where people talked in an older form of modern