Contemplating Truth

As a human, it is impossible to know the entirety of a truth. Due to stress, experience, or position, we are extremely biased in what we determine to be honest. Tim O’brien questions this topic very thoroughly through his works including his book Going After Cacciato. Based on the high stress levels and split seconds made by anybody in a war zone, nobody can be completely sure of what truly happened or what was simply a false truth.

How Do We Measure Maturity?

There is not an existing measure of maturity, yet it is a concept used daily to evaluate whether or not somebody is capable of being thoughtful, acting in an acceptable manner, or accomplishing a general task.  As a society, we commonly look for young children to reach an age where they become mature as if it is something that is switched on overnight. However, this is not truly how maturity works. Maturity is created through both experience, circumstance, and biology.

Influence of Adolescents on Children

As young children, our social beliefs are direct reflections of the elderly influence imposed upon us. These reflections can cause dilemmas because ideals exist that may be extremely controversial to society as a whole. Controversial reflective ideologies were represented in Persepolis, a book narrated by a young girl during the Islamic Revolution. Reflected beliefs are not the true reflections of someone’s beliefs, but rather they represent the influence of a culture or an elder upon another person.

Pursuit of Success

Each person is on the pursuit of one type of success or another at every point in time. Our varying opinions on personal success equates to our aspirations. By this, I mean that depending upon our specific goals, we reach success when we accomplish or receive one thing or another. Whether this is money, fame, happiness, or contentedness, success is achieved by many different means in respect to our aspirations. The Poisonwood Bible shows the struggles and accomplishments of young ladies reaching various personal successes in a time of gender imposed limitations. Throughout The Poisonwood Bible, we see the ladies aspire for various things in order to achieve something greater than what they have ever experienced. Their experiences follow trends in America despite being located in Africa.

Betrayal's Influence on Decisions

The feeling of betrayal plays a key role in the choices that we, as humans, make to better our circumstances for both the present and the future. We can use our emotions to drive our actions to be both powerful and cowardice. Whether we use our emotions to provoke us to ‘fight back’ or we use them to be unresponsive to the situation, our emotions encourage and enforce ourselves to make choices to be represented in our actions. The emotion of betrayal is evident throughout the movie Hotel Rwanda and the book Poisonwood Bible. Through these mediums, we can conclude that betrayal plays a key role in our psyche and the choices that we make under that psyche.

Evaluation of Money and Trade

The Poisonwood Bible shares the role of marxist power and dominance to people and cultures as a whole. We understand through the text that the characters consistently compare their new society to the society and advanced culture in America. Through this, we can evaluate the role of money in trade and bargaining in third world countries like the Congo, and the stereotypes against these cultures created by first-world civilians.

Conversion of Culture

Acceptance plays a major role in one’s assimilation to one culture or another. Without the willingness to convert and adapt your culture or ideology to fit the needs of the culture surrounding you, it becomes extremely difficult to assimilate and to be truly productive and immersed in another culture. We can see this concept throughout daily life in communities across the world and throughout Poisonwood Bible. The true conversion to a new culture and its ideologies is not easy, as it requires an open mindset that not everybody holds.