Samaritan by Richard Price - Essay Example

Number] Samaritan Ruby Mitchell is Ray Mitchell’s teenager daughter. She had grown into her teenage years without the support and love of her father and she has longed for it. Ray had been a very generous, busy, and caring person but only for everyone else. Ruby always felt left out and started to believe that her father doesn’t love her but everyone else. Ray is known to be a generous man who struggles with his goodness as it costs him much. Ruby, as a daughter, understands him and loves him but at the same time she is often disturbed and upset by his decisions and actions. She wants a father like most of her friends who would spend time with her and love her dearly, but Ray fails in doing so. Ruby has been away from her father since her childhood because he was a drug addict at that time. Later, her mother had kicked him out of the house due to which he rarely saw Ruby. Ruby’s disturbed family life made her more emotional and sensitive. She always dreamt of being with both her parents and spending a happy life together as a family. She also wishes to spend more time with her father and to share her life experiences with him. However, her wish comes true when Ray returns to her after he has sorted his life but things are not the same. Both of them are highly awkward around one another and this makes Ruby even more disturbed (Price 130). She is just a teenager and fails to understand her father’s gestures towards her. Ray tries to buy her presents and is overly caring towards her which she finds abnormal. She wants her father to act normally around her and not make her realise that he had been away since a while. Ray, on the other hand, is determined towards her and tries to impress her. Ruby is rather an emotional girl and these things don’t matter to her. Her father’s gifts are not important to her as his time is. She fails to understand why her father is buying her gifts and rather gets disturbed when he tries to impress her by donating funds for his childhood friend’s son’s funeral. She feels the real reason of this was to impress his childhood friend Carla. She feels disturbed on her father’s associations with people around him and his urge to help everyone despite the fact that they like it or not. Ruby is young and emotional; she is a child of a broken family and thus expects her father to be supportive to her. Her expectations and dreams are big as she has planned a life with her father ever since he went away. He remembers him from her childhood but the memories are blurred. She grows up believing her father to be an ideal person in her life but Ray’s actions and motives of helping everyone and being overly generous leaves her disappointed and disturbed. Ruby’s dreams are shattered and she is unhappy by her father’s behaviour towards her. She finally starts realising that her life can never be as she wants it to be and she can never feel satisfied with what she wants. As much as she is disturbed, she is also emotional towards her father and loves him anyway. She is willing to accept him and keep him around her always. She believes her love can change him one day and make him more comfortable around her and for that they need to spend more time together. Ruby’s heart sinks when she learns that her father wants to move back to LA, but she is happy knowing that he decides to stay. She then decides that she is ready to face every challenge until her father is around her and with her. This book has been really valuable as it teaches us some very important lessons. Most of the books teach us how it is always good to be caring, loving, and generous but this book showed a different yet true dimension. It showed how people pay the price of being good. It showed how Ray struggled due to his nature of being generous and kind towards people around him. It also showed how being nice can be perceived differently by people around us such as how his daughter perceived it and how the confident lady Carla perceived it by being hurt and considering the help a loan to be repaid. Not all people have the tendency to understand and take thing the way they are. People think differently and thus what is good for one person may be perceived as something negative for the other. Ray’s endless desires to help everyone have also been portrayed in this book which tells the reader how people have the subconscious desires and motivation to help other people out whenever they can and this goodness can sometimes lead to certain consequences. A person must, thus, think before acting in a certain way and not blindly trust everyone around him. This book has taught many practical and emotional lessons. It was a good use of my time as for me it included many aspects such as the father-daughter relationship, a love affair, an investigative story, and much more. It was a complete novel about Ray’s life and it was executed and written very well. I would strongly recommend this book as it is written very well by Richard Price and gives the insight into the reality of life. I believe being all good and generous is only a fantasy as in practical life it means that the person has to pay the price of its consequences. No matter how good a person is, he can never keep everyone happy and this is what this story tells us. Thus, it doesn’t direct the readers to be unkind and unhelpful, rather it directs us that a person must think from all aspects before acting and must be prepared for the consequences. Work Cited Price Richard. Samaritan. NY: Random House, 2004 Read More