"So It Went!" Malena Marcase 12th Grade

We see playful children - giggling, laughing, not a care in the world - and envy their innocence. Their spirits have not yet been hardened and jaded by the world around them. Our lives are made up of a series of moments, big and small, that continuously shape who we are as individuals. Each day we live out different experiences which at some point we will consider our ‘past’. As a society, we have accepted the fact that each of our lives will most likely include its fair share of emotional burdens, and it is up to us how we deal with those burdens and let them affect our future. In The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, cowardly and sensitive Amir bottles up his past inside of him, and allows his mistakes to define him well into adulthood. Tim O’Brien, author and protagonist of The Things They Carried, tactfully utilizes his metafictional novels to relieve daunting memories of the Vietnam war. Lastly, Billy Pilgrim from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five simply chooses to be unaffected by any events from his past. Much like the characters from these fictional novels, many of us carry so much emotional baggage from dark times in our lives, which we all deal with in different ways. However, the question still remains as to why the...