To Help or Hinder

To Help or Hinder


The role of a mother or parent in the life of a child is one of the most important relationships that a child will ever have. With the confusion of adolescence surrounding today’s youth, teenagers are torn between following the path of their parents or breaking free and experiencing life for themselves. In Janice Mirikitani’s “Suicide Note, the parents are completely involved in their child’s life to the point of dominance. The daughter feels that if she doesn’t life up to the parent’s expectations, that life is not worth living. In William Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning” Ab Snopes, the father, is a poor sharecropper and onetime horse thief who takes out his frustrations against the post-Civil War aristocracy by burning barns. Sarty, his adolescent son, detests his father’s destructiveness.




Sarty must make a choice between loyalty to his family and his own beliefs. He cannot live with his father’s expectations for life ...