The Long Goodbye: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat
1542 Words7 Pages
Oftentimes, adults refuse to educate children in the hopes of not depriving them of their innocence and naivety. How many times have we heard “She’s just a child, she doesn’t know any better. Stop pestering her about things that she doesn’t need to know about now – it won’t matter until she gets a bit older.” This denial of information, more often than not, leads to uneducated actions, which lead to momentous mistakes early on the children’s lives, like teenage pregnancy, drug misuse, and alcohol abuse. Ignorance is not bliss. Naivety should not be celebrated. Being knowledgeable in the things that matter, matters. Awareness, particularly social awareness, should be upheld and be taught to children at an early age. Well-informed citizens are…show more content… In “The Long Goodbye: Mother’s Day in Federal Prison,” Amanda Coyne, a sister of one of the convicts, emphasizes the unjust conviction of women by narrating the events that occur during Mother’s Day in prison, allowing the reader to make their own deductions as she makes her own. In “The Man Who Mistook” and “The Long Goodbye,” both authors increase social awareness by developing anecdotes that support their claims, by analyzing the events that happened to connect their narratives to their arguments, and by having different but effective strategies in creative narration to emphasize the urgency of social…show more content… Sacks and Coyne both increase social awareness in those who have read their respective pieces. Sacks educates his readers through a narrative of a man diagnosed with visual agnosia, which he then analogized with humans becoming computer-like in the way we scrutinize while using a creative dialogue. While Coyne educates her audience using a narrative of Mother’s day in prison, which she uses as the basis of how she views laws about women convicts – how they are unjust and serve as a reason why feminism is an issue today – and she narrates it with a significant amount of compassion, which only helps her increase the credibility of her opinion. Moreover, the stylistic choices of Sacks and Coyne – dialogues and analogies, respectively – show the different ways of spreading social awareness, implying that there are a myriad of ways of improving society. With social awareness, there is more room for development and change in society. If people were more aware of the things happening around us, it is easier to find solutions to the problems – both potential and present ones. Keeping one’s eyes open can make a