UNDER THE INFLUENCE

Question

Answer the following questions in as much detail as possible. Remember to analyze, and not summarize.

  1. Why does Sanders conclude his essay with paragraphs 53-55? What effect do they create that would be lost without them?
  2. Scott Russell Sanders frequently punctuates his memories of his father with information from other sources – dictionaries, medical encyclopedias, poems and short stories. What function do these sources perform? How do they enlarge and enrich Sanders’s essay?

Sample paper

UNDER THE INFLUENCE

Question 1

Having witnessed his dad quit living not because he liked it, but because he could not fight the urge of drinking alcohol; the narrator emotionally narrates his story with his father and now his ten-year-old son and tries to draw a comparison.  The concluding paragraphs clearly show his determination to avoid alcohol or rather the fight between self-consciousness and alcoholism, so that his son cannot end up like him where he lost his father to alcoholism. Moreover, they help to summarize the entire message of the story to remind the readers the primary reasons for why he is writing these pages. They also show that he is ready to forgo everything to ensure that his son .and all his children are spared and live a better life as well as offer them what he was not offered by his father. It is a reminder of why h has to undergo all the sacrifices in life.

Question 2

Most of the explicit sources used by the narrator are to justify as well as supporting actions of his father as well as of all the characters in the story. Moreover, these sources have also been used to emphasize on a message that the narrator wanted to put across to all his readers clearly. Although the actions may be wrong, with a supportive quotation or source seems to be right in the eyes of many. Moreover, they tend to bring a new dimension to the Sanders essays by indicating that these issues have been in the society for ages and that they will still affect the generations to come. As a result, there is the need for individuals to fully understand them in the right perspective and context to avoid catastrophes in future.

Related:

Maya Angelou’s “Graduation.”