Your favorite movie character an Example of the Topic Film Essays by

Your favorite movie character The females in the movies "Psycho" (director Alfred Hitchcock) and "The Graduate" (director Micke Nichols) are drawn as being very immoral. They could be easily charged with stealing money, adultery, incest, and even murder. Need essay sample on "Your favorite movie character" topic? We will write a custom essay sample specifically for you Proceed Marion Crane (actress Janet Leigh) is young and pretty, she works as an estate secretary. During her lunch breaks she meets her lover, Sam in cheep hotel rooms. He comes all the way from Fairvale only to spend a little time with her. She is obviously very much in love with him, but very unsatisfied with her current life. She considers the lack of money the reason why she cannot marry Sam. She lives with her sister, and seems to wish very much to have her own house. She is not pleased any more with their short escapades and she obviously wants more. After a brief afternoon with her lover she returns to the office. It is in the office where temptation occurs. A very arrogant, very pleased with himself, customer, Mr. Cassidy, enters the office. After a conversation, in which Mr. Cassidy, brags about how he kept her daughter happy all her life, Marion is entrusted to put 40.000 dollars in a safe deposit box at a bank. Observing the customer who talks to her so highly and praises himself, thinking that he can buy anything with his money, even his daughter happiness who is supposed to get married the fallowing day, she starts to think that maybe she is far more entitled to the forty thousand dollars than his spoilt daughter. Thus the idea of stealing the money is triggered by the loyal wealthy customer, Mr. Cassidy, who also flirts with her. When Marion's office colleague offers her a pill for her headache, her answer is: "you can't buy happiness with pills", but she is convinced that happiness can be bought with money. At home she packs a luggage. While she packs she thinks about the money, about how they will be a great help to her future wit her beloved. It seems she is analyzing whether to run away with the 40.000 $ or not. From this moment on, the character's actions are driven by the heart. Marion's love for Sam is a final point in her determination to steal the money and leave for Fairvale. It is a moment of madness, she seems very determined to start a new life with her lover. So, she grabs her luggage and starts her trip to Fairvale. On her way, she is spotted by her boss, while driving the car. He knew her in bed suffering from a severe headache. The movie is slightly filled with tension. Her mind slowly slips away. She imagines what Sam will say when she will reach him; she has doubts about her action. She knows it is wrong and immoral to steal, but she is desperate to gain her well deserved happiness. She is depicted as a "knight" on his way to save his love; she is out of control, not a ble to handle her apparently mentally ill behavior. The next morning she wakes up in her car and a policeman is bothering her with uneasy questions. Her soul is haunted by guilt and this fact seems to reflect into the policeman's dark glasses. Continuing her trip she imagines her being captured. Her face is illuminated by the oncoming cars resembling interrogation spotlights. The rain is pouring; her deteriorating mental state and self-destructive conscience lead her, unwillingly, to Norman Bates' (actor Anthony Perkins) hotel and eventually to her death. Mr. Bates (or Mrs. Bates as the viewer later on finds out) apparently is a likeable, peculiar and rather childish character. He delightfully welcomes his new client offering her a comfortable room on a rainy night. Marion is vulnerable, physically tired and she is not capable of reading the sings of a mentally ill person any longer. She turns into an easy pray for the young "hawk", Mr. Bates, whose conception is that "we all go a little mad sometimes". She overhears what was supposed to be a fight between Norman and his ill, old mother. It appears that Norman's mother, Mrs. Bates is not too thrilled about her sun taking dinner with a strange woman, or any woman. Yet, after a strange dinner with Norman Bates, Marion retreats into her room, alone with her thoughts, thinking about her next step. After carefully meditating and calculating her situation she decides to take a shower. It is not clear if she decides to give back the money, and repent for her crazy act, or continue on the road to Sam and maybe to gain her happiness. The shower was supposed to wash away her guilt. She feels reborn and full of energy as the water is coming down her body. Marion finds her death in the shower, stabbed several times by a figure that looked like an old fashioned woman. At the end of the movie the viewer finds out that the murderer is in fact Norman, influenced by the woman from his mind, his dead mother. The character of this female is depicted through her son, Norman. She probably was a very wicked, possessive woman, who loved to use the power she had over her son. Maybe not being capable of fully understanding him, she was the one who implied to Norman the fact that he was weird, instead of offering the love he urged for, from his own mother. He feels abandoned and unimportant when his mother decides to remarry. Her lack of love for him, her constant lack of satisfaction when it came to him triggers the matricide. Norman kills both her and her lover. The murder is unbearable to him, thus he resurrects his mother in his unstable mind. She continues to dominate his life long after her death. This might mean that she was a very cruel, cold, maybe even selfish person. Her voice seams to be brought back from hell. Anyway, the only hint of incest is in the words of Norman: "A son is a pour substitute for a lover". At this point the viewer is uncertain whether the mother was so immoral as to force her own son to fulfill the duties of a lover, or Norman was so mentally ill as to rape his own mother. Her possessive, bitter nature might be the reason of Norman's criminal actions. "The graduate" presents another type of immoral woman, the common type, this time; the one who commits adultery. Mrs. Robinson (actress Anne Bancroft) is married, and the Robinsons are very old friends with the Benjamins, a wealthy family. Benjamin (actor Dustin Hoffman) is fresh out of college and extremely confused about his future. Under these circumstances, back home he is faced with a brand new experience. The married Mrs. Robinson, not so young any more, but still attractive, tries to seduce him, and eventually succeeds. Mrs. Robinson is depicted as a very "sad" female character. First of all the viewer finds out that she has a drinking problem, and on top of it, she also smokes a lot. She is thus giving tributes to several vices. She doesn't have a happy marriage. She confessed that she got married after she found out she was pregnant with her daughter Elaine. She married the wealthy Mr. Robinson, but maybe she didn't wish for it at all. She plays the role of a victim very well, she makes Benjamin drive her home, where she lures him into the house under the pretext she is scared of the dark. She has the attitude of a very confident person, resembling a business woman. Very persuasive, she is very cool and firm in her tone unlike Marion, who is not very cool and determined in her actions. Benjamin is left inert and confused faced with Mrs. Robinson's sexual seduction. She is sexualy aggressive, obviously neurotic and cynical. She is very good in twisting Benjamin's words, and making him feel as if he is the one who flirts with her and not the other way around. This makes Ben feel very uneasy because clearly, not one moment did he intended to seduce a woman old enough to be his mother. Benjamin accepts his affaire with Mrs. Robinson as a symbol of his struggle to save himself from sinking in a materialistic society. Mrs. Robinson is interested only in the physical relationship; she is not willing to give away anything more than her body. She is miserable, and she can't bear to see the ones around her being happy. She is aware that, if Benjamin will meet her young daughter Elaine, they would fall in love. She is selfish; she doesn't want to see her daughter happy, marrying from love and not having an arranged marriage, like she did. Thus, when Benjamin in joking that he will invite Elaine out, Mrs. Robinson grabs his hair, becomes rather violent, and demands to be promised that he will never take Elaine out. She feels useless, the only thing she feels secure about is her beauty, and that is slowly fading away. Her fling with Benjamin supposes to compensate for her meaningless life. She admits that the only thing she is looking forward to is her hotel encounters with Benjamin. Mrs. Robinson obviously has a very low esteem herself, she considers herself to be a "sick and disgusting person". She feels pity for herself, but admits that her affair with Benjamin is pleasant. She is confused about her life; the only thing she feels confident about is her beauty. She is afraid of getting old and ugly and she doesn't want her daughter to be thought as more beautiful than her. She threatens to divulge her affair if Benjamin will date Elaine. Very scared of losing Benjamin, who is her "toy", and who obviously means very much to her, she is prepared to risk her marriage, and get Ben into a great deal of trouble. In contrast with her mother, Elaine is depicted as a very sensible creature. Very innocent, she has no clue of how mean her mother could be. She is nice and friendly although at the beginning she is humiliated by Ben who is very confused about how he should act during their arranged date. Elaine is a good listener; her inner purity sparks Benjamin's confession. Ben is capable of speaking to Elaine, about his worries and confusions regarding his future. In the end he realizes that Elaine is the only one he could talk to, that she is different from all the others, who are stuck in their materialistic, meaningless life. So he confesses his love for her. The women described in the two movies are winding through a bourgeois, rather sick world. The perfect word describing this society is provided by Mr. McGuire when he gives a piece of advice to Ben: "plastics", meaning an artificial society. These women might find an excuse for all their immoral actions. Marion steals the money because she wishes a better life with her lover; Mrs. Robinson seduces a twenty one year old graduate, old enough to be her sun, because she is unhappy and disappointed about herself and her marriage. In conclusion, the main theme of both movies could be resumed to the female inner struggle to regain a psychical balance and their strong influence on the ones that surround them. BIBLIOGRAPHY International Movie Database, "Psycho"; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054215/plotsummary Filmsite, Review by Tim Dirks, 1996-2007 ; http://www.filmsite.org/grad.html Filmsite, Review by Tim Dirks, 1996-2007; http://www.filmsite.org/psyc.html The International Movie Database, "The Graduate".

Free Essays on What Is The American Dream

What is the American Dream? It is my opinion that the American Dream can be slightly different for each person but that there are many commonalities between people’s dreams within the American culture. I feel that though our schooling and upbringings, we are influenced as to what the ideal of life is within this culture should be. I feel that television, magazines, and the many other forms of media condition us to believe in a similar structure of how life should be lived. The first thing that comes to my mind is that each family should live in a cookie cutter track home surrounded by neighbor’s houses that are nearly identical to their own. Ideally, there would be a white picket fence surrounding the house and a dog in the back yard. There are two to three children, at least one boy and one girl, who go to school every day and do there home work. The husband leaves for work early in the mourning and does not return until late at night because he must be the breadwinner and take care of his family. He would typically work in some kind of office and would be wearing a suit and tie. He would be the disciplinarian while the wife is the sensitive and more loving figure of the family. The next part of the dream that I have in my head is now a little confusing. In the past, wives were supposed to stay home and cook breakfast, clean house, take care of the kids, and cook dinner. Now in days, with so many women in the job market, it is hard for me to generalize what the American dream is in regards to the responsibilities of the wife. I would still say that the ideal is still to have the stay at home mom and the breadwinning dad. My conclusion is largely based on the fact that if the man makes enough money at his job, the wife usually still stays home to fill the traditional roles of the stay home wife and mother. Another aspect of the American Dream is that an individual family should be nuclear, that is, living sep... Free Essays on What Is The American Dream Free Essays on What Is The American Dream What is the American Dream? It is my opinion that the American Dream can be slightly different for each person but that there are many commonalities between people’s dreams within the American culture. I feel that though our schooling and upbringings, we are influenced as to what the ideal of life is within this culture should be. I feel that television, magazines, and the many other forms of media condition us to believe in a similar structure of how life should be lived. The first thing that comes to my mind is that each family should live in a cookie cutter track home surrounded by neighbor’s houses that are nearly identical to their own. Ideally, there would be a white picket fence surrounding the house and a dog in the back yard. There are two to three children, at least one boy and one girl, who go to school every day and do there home work. The husband leaves for work early in the mourning and does not return until late at night because he must be the breadwinner and take care of his family. He would typically work in some kind of office and would be wearing a suit and tie. He would be the disciplinarian while the wife is the sensitive and more loving figure of the family. The next part of the dream that I have in my head is now a little confusing. In the past, wives were supposed to stay home and cook breakfast, clean house, take care of the kids, and cook dinner. Now in days, with so many women in the job market, it is hard for me to generalize what the American dream is in regards to the responsibilities of the wife. I would still say that the ideal is still to have the stay at home mom and the breadwinning dad. My conclusion is largely based on the fact that if the man makes enough money at his job, the wife usually still stays home to fill the traditional roles of the stay home wife and mother. Another aspect of the American Dream is that an individual family should be nuclear, that is, living sep...

Role of dividend signalling in corporate finance Dissertation

Role of dividend signalling in corporate finance - Dissertation Example as a major role in corporate finance. The study also provides a detailed research on the impact of dividend announcement on shareholder. Dividend is an important parameter to evaluate investment decision by the investors. So, there is a substantial role of dividend signalling on corporate finance as companies share value of organization through dividend payment.Thus, annual dividend announcement by a company always remains the most awaited news for its shareholders. This paper provides a clear understanding ofthe impact of dividend signalling on corporate finance in theoretical aspect and its impact on shareholders in practical aspect. Chapter 1: Introduction Motivation Firms communicate value and financial well-beings through payment of dividend to its shareholders. Investors generally practice a common activity i.e. â€Å"dividend check in mail† at each quarter when their invested firms declare their quarterly financial results. Dividend is a way of sharing or distribution o f companies’ earnings to the shareholders at a regular basis. Companies distribute dividend quarterly, half yearly or on yearly basis. Regular payment of dividend by a firm shows its sustainable financial growth and it also determines a firm’s future performance and prospect. Dividend payment record of a firm is one of the most important factors for investment decision making for the shareholders and shareholders always expect regular payment of dividend from the companies where they invest. So, a company’s ability and willingness to pay regular dividend payout determines the strong financial condition of the company. Concept of dividend payment was not there in business practice before Securities and Exchange Act was introduced in the year 1934. Companies required a law for mandatory disclosure of financial information. Since the initial time of dividend payment by the limited companies, it has become one of the most important parameter of financial health and also remains one worthwhile yardstick to evaluate a company’s current and future prospect. Mature profitable companies generally pay dividend to its shareholders. However, if a company do not pay dividend that does not mean that the company is not able to generate substantial earnings. Growth companies generally pay dividend. If management of a company thinks that growth opportunity of the company is much better than its investment opportunity available to the new investors or the existing shareholders then the company pays dividend to enhance the investment opportunity of the company (Lonkani & ratchusanti, 2007, p.4). So, dividend is one of the mos

Barclays Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

Barclays - Essay Example Any partner can go out through a defined process and even a new partner can be admitted to an existing partnership. Partners are fully liable for any debt due in the name of the firm. A company is a legal entity having the status of an individual. This means that a company can sue and can be sued on its own name. A â€Å"private limited company† is for small business setup but the entrepreneur may offer some of the shares to the investors in return for capital, while retaining the major shareholding. Only a â€Å"public limited company† can offer its shares to general public through stock exchange. A well-designed business plan focuses on various factors including budgets. It figures out all the expected costs and revenues that are expected to be incurred and generated respectively. All the planning about how the business is to be carried out, how the sales are to be made and how the funds are to be raised to meet up the expected costs, all are laid down in that plan sheet. While making budget, Tim ONeill must have kept in mind that how much money is needed and for what purposes. Assumptions should also be considered for some variable factors like interest rates, volume of sales and cost of goods. Cash flow is another important factor to be considered so that one can foresee if the business’ income will cover its expenditure. It is very rare that a business starts earning profit from its maiden year only. Difficulties do arise to establish a business and goodwill. Any business that needs to be set up requires a large amount of finance to arrange premises, equipments, stock and other essential items. After bringing in the capital by the owners, partners or shareholders, the owners of the business seek different sources to obtain finance to meet their day-to-day expenses and payment of bills. Some sources are given below: This service enables the account holder to go beyond its available funds up to a certain

The Actual Meaning of Being Educated Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The Actual Meaning of Being Educated - Essay Example The essay evaluates the question regarding the actual meaning of being educated. There has always been a debate on the topic regarding classification of people as educated and otherwise but such debates have not yielded a consensus yet. The most common perception regarding being educated is having knowledge of different subjects that are taught in schools, however in accordance with different philosophers, being educated is just not having knowledge of certain subjects but it has a greater meaning. Theories regarding education have been presented by a number of philosophers and the theories presented stretch over a vast lapse of time. The ultimate goal of the educational philosophy is to get students interested in the subject and cause them be on familiar terms with it as well. To achieve it a teacher is to set several goals such as: to be persuasive, to make students respect the teacher, to know the subject well, to have friendly relations with students, to create a perfect learning environment, and to create a proper curriculum. â€Å"Education - like democracy, free markets, freedom of the press, and "universal human rights" - is one of those subjects whose virtue is considered self-evident†.   â€Å"A successful education process embraces the notion of a proper curriculum.† Reece & Walker considers a Scheme of Work to be â€Å"a series of learning experiences, sequenced to achieve the course aims in the most effective way†. Thus it is vital to set the course goals, the length and the system of total evaluation.   

Tristram Shandy: Postmodern texts

Tristram Shandy: Postmodern texts Does Tristram Shandy demonstrate that there can be postmodern texts before Postmodernism? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy dominated the London literary marketplace during its serial publication from 1759-1767.   Like his contemporary writers, Sterne engages in debates concerning what we would now regard as the disciplinary boundary between literature and philosophy which has established its canonical status as a work of postmodern fiction.   It is difficult to ascribe, as many scholars have, to Tristram Shandy the title of ‘postmodern’.   To characterize this novel through a future literary movement which defines itself through the rejection of the principles of the previous movement is incongruous.   How can a novel which precedes postmodernism by over a century and a half reflect the cultural and political formations which sparked the movement itself?   However, Tristram Shandy does contain fictional and narrative elements which clearly invite comparison with the fiction of the postmodern movement. Born into the Augustan Age, Sterne’s discordant writing makes him seem out of place in his own era   Differing drastically from the contemporary imaginative literature of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding and the philosophical writing of Johnson, Tristram Shandy has been explained by critics as an example of ‘process writing’, a text presented in the very act of creation and change.   This analysis can be applied to Sterne himself; moving away from the Augustan poets and the sentimental writers, Sterne’s writing is termed postmodern because it is a rejection of realism, turning from the objectivity of external truth to examine inner states of consciousness.   Sterne’s novel clearly exhibits the postmodernist theory of metafiction, in which the writing self-consciously points to itself as an object in order to question the relationship between reality and fiction.   Sterne was certainly not alone in critiquing methods of narrative construction an d exploring the fictionality of the external world, but what sets Tristram Shandy apart from its contemporary fiction is the use of language as an arbitrary system.   The elements of Tristram Shandy which inspire comparisons with the postmodernist movement are clear: questioning the relationship between text and the self, and an argument for the constitutive power of language.   Postmodern scholars question the fundamental representation of identity and history itself, that is, history as what ‘really’ happened as opposed to history as an objective ‘narrative’ of what happened.   Sterne has a clear understanding of how some element of self-definition and identification is involved in the fictional writing process, and freely admits the element of autobiography in his writing.   ‘Tis †¦ a picture of myself’ he tells David Garrick in regards to Tristram Shandy (Letters 87).   The autobiographical element in Sterne’s writing suggests multiple definitions of the same reality, which depend upon perspectives rather than objective truth.   This comes across as a convoluted and fragmented narrat ive that confuses fiction and reality, narrative and truth. Tristram himself says of his father’s masterpiece, the Trista-paedia, ‘My father spun his, every thread of it, out of his own brain, or reeled and cross-twisted what all other spinners and spinster had spun before him’ (Sterne 93).   Sterne, like his character Tristram, spins his own narrative in an intricate and complex web, so convoluted and transparent that it is difficult to tell where it ends and he begins. Tristram Shandy clearly embodies this ambiguity between reality and representation through language.   James Swearingen writes that in Tristram Shandy ‘language does not just facilitate communication: it establishes the phenomenal horizon in which speakers and things spoken about are constituted’(Swearingten 117).   Tristram constructs his biography through textual language, which reveals itself to be an ambiguous rather than a concrete medium.   He admits that he is better associated with the text itself than the subject to which it refers.   Tristram’s escape from his inevitable death is described as a journey in which ‘life follows the pen’ (Sterne 754).   Once again returning to the autobiographical element of Sterne’s writing, if Tristram’s journey follows the pen, then he, like Sterne, is creating and documenting his own existence, shaping his narrative according to his liking rather than according to objective truth. At the same time that Sterne celebrates the constructive power of language, he reveals its ultimate failure.   Sterne was ‘concerned almost exclusively with the problem of communication among men’ wrote John Traugott, illuminating both the genius and failure of Sterne’s text.   When words fail, as they sooner or later do, communication becomes the business of sensibility.   ‘My uncle Toby looked brisk at the sound of the word siege, but could make neither head nor tail of it’ (Sterne 312).   Traugott concludes that Tristram Shandy seeks to re-establish a community where reason, in the form of language, threatens to destroy it (Traugott 15).   Rather than basing a notion of community upon concrete notions of order and hierarchy, the Shandy world is built on the unstable base of subjectivity.   ‘In Sterne’s world, each individual consciousness establishes itself at the centre of a universe of feeling and ignores any such thing a s objective reality, until the subject of Tristram Shandy finally seems to be the nature of fiction itself’ (Byrd 59).   Virginia Woolf has noted Sterne’s unexpected prose as a means of exploring a materialist critique of the conventions of the novel itself.   The jerky, disconnected sentences are as rapid and it would seem as little under control as the phases that fall from the lips of a brilliant talker †¦ The order of the ideas, their suddenness and irrelevancy, is more true to life than to literature †¦ Under the influence of this extraordinary style the book becomes semi-transparent.   The usual ceremonies and conventions which keep the reader and writer at arm’s length disappear (Woolf 79) Stylistically, Sterne’s novel deconstructs the narrative and linguistic form of the novel in favour of multiplicity and ambiguity. Indeed, the author’s preface is found in volume three, chapters are disordered, and symbols and blank pages are found throughout the book.   Playing with novelistic conventions, Sterne draws attention to the instability of the written form itself, paralleling the ambiguity of the text with the ambiguity of the self. Sterne uses reflection to expose the constructedness of his narrative, encouraging the reading to approach it not as subjective truth but as an aesthetic.   This is clearly apparent in the treatment of various forms of madness within the novel.   Madness figures prominently in Tristram Shandy.   The metaphor of madness appears in many critical discussion of the novel because helps to underscore the link between Sterne and his contemporary Augustan satirists, for whom the classical idea of madness as supernatural inspiration is missing.   Indeed, Sterne seems to anticipate the Romantic poets who, by contrast, represent madness as a sign of alienation, in which the faculty of imagination is the source of anxiety rather than creative freedom. In Tristram Shandy many kinds of madness are manifest.   Characters such as Toby and Walter serve simply as the necessary comic eccentricity, similar to the figure of Yorick to whom Tristram refers throughout his story.   Tristram, howe ver, cites John Locke as an explanation of why ‘my poor mother could never hear the †¦ clock wound up, but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head’ (Sterne 39).   The ‘sort of unreasonableness’ which Locke describes is, ironically, the driving force behind Tristram’s unorderly pattern of narration.   Tristram clearly expresses Sterne’s own narrative technique: ‘By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other.   In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, -and at the same time’ (Sterne 95).   Sterne questions what it means to live in a world in which the boundaries of the self and the body politic are redefined.   Challenging the conventions of body narrative form and philosophical notions of the self, Sterne questions, ‘is a man t o follow rules or rules to follow him?’ (Sterne, 583) One bibliographer described Tristram Shandy as ‘postmodernist in every sense except the moment in which it was written,’ and most critics have agreed.   However, despite the similarities between Sterne’s own engagement with philosophical and literary critique in his novel, it is impossible to call Tristram Shandy a postmodernist text, if purely for semantic reasons.   It is tempting to explain instances of extraordinary forms of artistic and critical reflection with the tools of the present, but this is a fallacy.   Sterne’s novel engages with the epistemological, philosophical and literary crises of his time, and cannot possibly be explained with a theory born out of the crises of the twentieth century.   As Tristram’s mother exclaimed, ‘L—d! †¦ what is all this story about? –‘ It is, and will remain, ‘A COCK and a BULL, †¦ And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard’ (Sterne 615). Works Cited Byrd, M. (1985) Tristram Shandy London: George Allen Unwin. Swearingen, J. (1977) Reflexivity in Tristram Shandy: An Essay in Phenomenological Criticism New Haven: Yale University Press. Sterne, L. (1967) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, London: Penguin Classics. -(1775) Letters to his Friends on Various Occasions, London. Traugott, J. (1954) Tristram Shandys World: Sternes Philosophical Rhetoric. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. Woolf, V. (1932) The Common Reader: Second Series. London: Hogarth Press.

A Handful of Optimism Essay -- Eliot Maddy Waste Land Essays

A Handful of Optimism Despite race, religion, sex, or age the world can be divided into two different groups. Those who see the glass as being half full and those who see the glass as being half empty. In other words, being either that of an optimist or a pessimist. Though a simple question, often times people find it difficult to answer. Just when one thinks they have decided that they are one or the other, they come across a song, poem, or an experience that makes them reevaluate the mind frame from that which they have normally embraced. T. S. Eliot’s famous quote from The Waste Land, "I can show you fear in a handful of dust," is one that has been the trigger, for many, in this self-evaluation process (1.30) Quite often, people do not participate or embrace this process of self-evaluation. Yet, it is these people who throw around phrases like ‘carpe diem’ and ‘don’t put off tomorrow, what you can do today’ when they are doing just the opposite. In the mind frame of a pessimist, one gets so wrapped up in the fact that they might die, that they miss out on living. The bottom line is that death is inevitable. A topic that Eliot discusses when referring to Phlebas’s death by water: "Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you" (4.319-321). In short Eliot was trying to say that one needs to learn from those who have gone on before them, and know they too will take a similar journey in life and death. It is this knowledge that is probably the driving force of the optimist. They know that they are going to die and choose to make the most out of their life. Though most people have at one point or another have had a fear of dying and been p... ...if one spends their whole life being jealous of others, then they will have lost the opportunity to live their own life. So, as the Beatles once said "Let it be." Maddy provides an example of this when Ade turns out to be the successful one while Santigie fails his exams and is envious of Ade. Whether it be in school, with friends, or in sports, it matters not what exams one passes in life. The truth is that one does not linger in the past or anticipate the future, but rather one lives in the present and accepts life as it comes for the good and the bad with a handful of optimism. Works Consulted Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land, Prufock, and Other Poems. New York: Dover, 1998. Life Application Study Bible. Trans. New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Maddy, Yulisa Amadu. No Past, No Present, No Future. 1973. , Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann-Reed, 1996.