Walls And Senghor: A Literary Analysis

Everyone is born into different circumstances and face different obstacles over the course of their life, yet just because some may be born into worse circumstances, doesn’t mean that should determine how they end up in life. Philip Bartlett said “I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant; it is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.” However, trying to go past what one’s been taught in their entire life couldn’t be an easy feat. A prime example would be Jeannette Walls in The Glass Castle and Shaka Senghor in his TED Talk Why your worst deeds don’t define you. “As soon as I finish classes, I'm getting on the next bus out of here. If the buses stop running, I'll hitchhike. I'll walk if I have to.
They both grew up in a dysfunctional environment where it led them to many hardships, yet that didn’t stop them from trying to achieve their goal. Family played an important role in their upbringing: Senghor’s son coming to the realization that his father is a murderer, and Jeannette realizes the toxicity of her unorthodox parents. Even though Walls and Senghor’s families played a part in their upbringing, it was up to them respectively to decide their future. After Senghor was released from prison, he later became a teacher and author, and Jeannette went to New York in order to pursue her career in writing. Although some people believe that a person’s origin dictate what they will become later in life, of course, on the grounds that many people don’t usually leave the place they feel more familiar in. Yet I would argue, based on Walls’s and Senghor’s experiences, they decided to go past the confining walls of their traumatic experiences. In addition, they were able to successfully move pass from their struggle, not looking back on it. Given these points, Walls and Senghor proved Bartlett’s quote correct with the transformation of a poor upbringing to overcoming those obstacles and accomplishing what they once thought were their “wildest”