Literary Essay :-|

In a Nutshell

When philosophers think about human beings, the race in general, many come to the conclusion that they have a good side and a bad side. Some of the good qualities may include generosity and compassion, while some of the worse characteristics are violence and discrimination. Those are just a few examples, of course, and every single one of those traits has evidence supporting their goodness and badness. One book that supports the wrongness of discrimination is the book Something to Hold by Katherine Schlick Noe. In this book, one of the big themes is discrimination; how it affects people, what people think about it, and what happens when it exists. This book has discrimination soaked into its spine, and it’s a really good representative text showing how discrimination affects people of all races - the bad ways and the “good” ways.

In this book, it is easy to see that discrimination is a big theme. For example, one of the characters, Linda, shows a lot of narrow-mindedness when she talks to Kitty about the Indians in her town after Sunday school. She says, ‘“We have Indians in Bend. All they do is drink beer by the river... I sure wouldn’t want to go to school with them.”’ (pp. 46) This is basically a girl voicing what many people believe, and it really shows what most people in this book thought about the Indian culture. Linda says this so casually, and so meanly, and yet Cathy, who is standing nearby, just stands there smiling. Kitty can’t grasp how horrid people can be; she just assumes Cathy didn’t hear Linda’s words. But she did hear, and the fact that she didn’t say anything or protest only strengthens the feeling of racism, how people are so prejudiced about these people who they don’t even know. And in addition to being just plain mean, discrimination also can affect the lives of all the people.

One of the ways in which the intolerance in this book affects the people - Indian and whites both - is that it makes one race feel above the other, and so they feel that they can do anything they want to the other people. There’s a lot of this shown in this book, like in the example of the Indian girl Jewel. At first when Kitty sees her she’s mean and silent and distrustful, but later, after Kitty buys the pomegranate for her and her cousin, she shows her nice side and talks to her. But when Kitty visits her house, she sees why Jewel was like that at first... “A [white] man in a baseball cap and jeans jacket bursts out of the car...he is angry...the man sees [Raymond]. He whirls around as Raymond rushes up from behind...He crosses his arms and stares at [him]... the man raises both arms. Káthla quickly steps off the stoop, her arms out. Calm down.” (pp. 129). The next day, when Kitty is talking to Jewel, she asks about that guy. “Jewel nods slowly. “He wants us back... Walter married mom. And he wants our checks,” she says.” (pp. 132) Jewel’s and Raymond’s stepfather is white, and he thinks that because of that he can do whatever he wants and he can take the checks and the kids without a second thought. This really shows how the discrimination works and how it really changes the characters’ lives.

Some very bad things can happen when there is discrimination in the community, including violence, rudeness, and even murder. In this book there is violence because of the prejudice against the Indians, and also the inequalities between the cultures. Raymond, for example, is among the most strong-minded of the Indians. One day he comes into the classroom looking really beat up. “His left eye is battered and raw, a vicious bruise sweeping across his cheek. I’m close enough to see the short thread of black stitches under his eyebrow oozes a bit of blood.” (pp. 131). Raymond was hurt because he was fighting for his people, to protect his culture, to fight against the discrimination. This is just an example of one of the ways that discrimination can negatively affect all those involved, and there are many more, most also existent in this book. And then Jewel even asks Kitty not to tell anybody because Raymond might be punished for fighting back. Indeed, this book can really show a lot about discrimination and the effects it has on all the people who are included in it or who experience it.
When you take a few steps back and look at the human race, you see a medley of miscellaneous aspects of all sorts. That’s what we are. And although we may have bad parts, like the fact that we make discriminating rules and thing discrimination-related thoughts and say very mean things about people who are different from us - although we do all that - we can also do the opposite, like Kitty does in the book, and try to understand the other cultures, take off our cultural blinders. We have a choice of what sort of person to be and what we will do in order to achieve that vision. Basically, this book is human nature in a nutshell, a conglomeration of kindness and nastiness that make up a whole book - or in other cases, human being.