The Search for Identity and Meaning - Admission/Application Essay Example

The stories of Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man, Kenneth Lonergan’s This is Our Youth, Ann Patchett’s What Now, David Wallace’s This is Water, How Tracy Austin Broke my Heart and Matthew Dickman’s book of poetry All American Poem are signposts we should follow in finding American values and our place in today’s society. Discussion Can we as Americans today say that we are truly self sufficient? Decidedly not, I would think. We have lost touch with nature and the elements, with the realities of life and what really matters.

The best things in life come free, it is always said, and who can know that better than Elizabeth Gilbert’s real life hero, Eustace Conway, who she portrays in her 2002 book as The Last American Man. Is she describing the last American cowboy, one asks, as he pores over her book? It appears so, for she is besotted with his masculinity and reserve and 19th century values. He can survive in the wilderness and the mountains and jungles, no matter what the terrain- even in Alaska, living off the land and its resources.

The message of her book as I see it is that we need to get back to the ideas of self sufficiency and self respect. . We can learn much from this Davy Crockett type of frontiersman in her opinion, although he has problems relating to modern intellectual women. The story of Zeitoun is about Abdulrehman and his wife Kathy in the aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina. Abdulrehman originally hailed from Syria, and after enduring a life of hardship he eventually managed to land in the USA in 1988.

While Kathy and their four children moved to Baton Rouge to escape the wrath of Katrina, Abdulrehman decided to stay put in New Orleans and look after the family property, websites and other rental properties. After the storm made landfall, he helped rescue stranded friends and neighbors, even strangers in the community and also looked after pets left behind. Imagine their surprise when in September 2005 he and three friends were arrested by the National Guard and local police. Although no formal charges were levied, they were kept in detention for up to 40 days before being released without any explanation.

They assume that it is their being Muslim that is the culprit. Added to this, Kathy’s family did not approve of her converting to Islam, and her style of dress has been ridiculed many a time in public (Eggers, 2009, 35). Are these the values we are trying to uphold in America? Ann Patchett’s What Now is a succinct and absorbing tale of her adolescence. She is today an accomplished writer but started out as undecidedly as us all. She was mainly concerned about whether she will get accepted into any college at all, and is relieved when she makes it to Sarah Lawrence College.

However it required that she move from Tennessee to New York. Lost at the airport, a man who is a member of the Hare Krishna sect offers to help her with her