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Genre 1: Research Paper

Choices: Does it Really Matter?

Angelique Reynolds

Fate has always bewildered writers throughout history. As a result, each historical period
features a different treatment of and reference to fate. For example, for the Greeks and Romans,
man is predestined to lead either a good or bad life, no matter how hard he tries to reverse his
fate. These people blindly believe in predestination and the concept of hereditary sin. In the
middle Ages, however, fate takes on a different form. It is the church that is responsible for the
destiny of all people under its control. Anyone who tries to argue with the clergymen or who tries
to bring in new ideas is cursed and wrongfully executed. In the Renaissance, man is on his own;
he is the architect of his life. So man can be either happy or sad on account of his actions and
behavior. In the Victorian Age, society plays the role of fate. Or, it is society versus the
individual. Because the individual is almost insignificant in the face of the majority, he is
doomed to fail or collapse no matter how qualified he is. In the Modern Age, man's fate is his
own and nobody or nothing can be blamed for man's collapse but man himself (Different
Literary Approaches to the concept of Fate). This look into the history of the idea of fate shows
that it is ever changing and that there is no one answer to how fate is determined.
According to Webster dictionary, fate is defined as the preordained course of your life
that will occur because of or in spite of your actions whereas destiny is defined as a set of
predetermined events within your life that you take an active course in shaping. While fate and
destiny are often used interchangeably, the two are not as synonymous as one might believe. This
multi genre project focuses on primary literature Good People by David Lindsay-Abaire and
looks at the choices that we (as humans) make and how it has or does not have an effect on our
fate.
Choice is defined as making a decision when faced with two or more options (Webster).
In America, the land that prides itself on freedom of choice, there are always at least two options

which produces the idea that choice making is binary. In every situation, there is the presumed
idea that there is a good choice or a bad choice. This idea of having two options in a binary world
is evident in Robert Frosts poem The Road Not Taken. On the surface this narrative poem is
about a speaker who stands in the woods and ultimately chooses which path to go. After
analyzing the poem, the identical forks symbolize the nexus of free will and fate. This poem
suggest that our life is determined by an accretion of choice and chance as it's impossible to
separate the two.
Determining fate by looking at chance and choice is the driving theme of LindsayAbaires Good People. The entire play revolves around a decision that was made at an early age
by protagonist Margaret Walsh, a woman who claims to not be as lucky as her ex-boyfriend
Mike. She claims that she did not have the opportunities that he had or even a father to push her,
or help her out like he did. The drama plays with the idea of chance as the characters are often
making a choice to spend their last buck to play Bingo--a game based solely on luck. Life is a
constant stream of choices that can be overwhelming and sometimes downright exhausting. Fate
is shaped by the decisions, or lack of decisions that one makes. Decisions can be made carefully,
in a snap second or not at all but each decision, regardless of the thought put into that decision,
has an effect on one's life. Throughout the play, Margaret's choices all fall back to one decision
that she made at a young age that has inevitably forced her to make even more difficult choices
throughout her life.
A persons fate is decided by a complex combination of conditions and factors. Some of
them are already decided at the time of a persons birth and some of them come into play later
and shape the course further. Those predetermined factors can include where one is born, to
whom and in what social class however these circumstances do not hinder one from creating

their own fate. This lesson is one of the most important lessons as it will relate most to my
students and their lives. The idea of not letting your situations define or limit you can be seen in
The Other Wes Moore, but of course, it is all about the decisions that you make. The Other Wes
Moore is about two kids with the same name, living in the same city. Both grew up in similar
neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods, both were fatherless; theyd hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and both had run into trouble with the police. At each stage of their
young lives they had come across similar moments of decision, yet their choices and the people
in their lives would lead them to astonishingly different futures. One of the boys grew up to be a
Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other,
a felon, is serving a life sentence in prison for murder. The novel shows what happens when two
people are put in the same situation but make different choices, resulting in two vastly different
outcomes.
Shakespeares Hamlet is another text that looks at the complexity and consequences of
choices. In this canonical work, Hamlet is uncertain about how to deal with the loss of his father,
confused about what his actions should be, and angry at most of the adults in his life. Hamlets
entire demise can be traced back to two main decisions: the decision to believe the ghost which
leads to further repercussions throughout the play, and the decision to pretend to be insane.
Although rare, Hamlet's fate can be traced back to those two vital decisions that ended in his own
tragic demise.
On a similar note, take Willy Loman, the protagonist of Arthur Millers Death of a
Salesman, whose demise can be traced back to one sole decision. Willy belongs to the lower
middle class and has trouble making a living by being a salesman but the one choice that can
change his life, he fails to take. In hindsight and as readers not of the time, it is easy for us to tell

Willy to just ask for help as we can see that if he would just remove his pride and ask for help, he
would be fine. But he decides not to. While his struggles are both internal and external, Willys
circumstances and fate depended solely on the choice that he make.
Sophocless Oedipus the King represents the classical treatment of human action as
determined by fate or free will, or a convergence of the two. Oedipus, a prince of Corinth who is
led to doubts about his parentage by a stray comment from a drunken man, goes to Delphi, where
he consults the oracle, which tells him that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Shocked
by this prophecy, Oedipus immediately flees Corinth to evade the oracle, the illogic and
inconsistency of his actions never occurring to him. Regarding the unresolved question of
parentage, he is fleeing the king and queen of Corinth, who might not be his parents. Regarding
his contradictory attitude toward the oracle, he believes in the oracle enough to react to its
admonition but not enough to realize that he cannot evade his foreknown fate. His fate, however,
is not necessarily predetermined by the powers above. Rather, his foreknowledge makes him act
irrationally to fulfill his fate. Ironically, Oedipuss foreknowledge drove him to fulfill the very
prophecy that he was trying so hard to evade. He broke the two cardinal rules of Greek ethics
that would guide one toward good fate: know thyself and nothing in excess. In his version of
Oedipus, Sophocles turns the standard story of the futility of trying to evade an inevitable fate
dictated by the gods and transforms it into a veritable tragedy of a human agent through his own
character flaws and actions.
Similarly, Liz Murray is an American women who went from growing up homeless to
graduating from an ivy league. Having two drug addicted parents, being homeless at the age of
16 and not attending school regularly for years, all odds were against Murray. However Murray
made a decision at the age of 17 to change her life by overcoming the obstacles that she could

not control. While she pledged to graduate high school, she ended up doing more than that. Liz
Murray ended up winning a scholarship to Harvard and is now an American Bestseller. Liz
Murrays life choices exemplifies what can happen when people make a choice and stick to it.
While these works influence one to make choices that will lead to a happier and freer
future, it is important to take into account all Americans and the common preconceptions of
choice. Americans live in a political, social, and historical context that values personal freedom
and choice above all else, an emphasis that has been amplified by contemporary psychology.
Research Journal, Does Choice Mean Freedom and Wellbeing, shows that in non-Western
cultures and among working-class Westerners, freedom and choice do not have the meaning or
importance they do for the university-educated people who have been the subjects of almost all
research on this topic. Since this unit topic is aimed for high school students in a low SES
community, we cannot assume that choice, as understood by educated, affluent Westerners, is a
universal aspiration. The meaning and significance of choice are cultural constructions and that
must first be developed in order to understand how to make a choice.
In conclusion, these diverse representations of cause and effect throughout canonical
works and non-canonical works, and even works of different genres and periods demonstrate the
universality of choice and its effect on fate. All of these text would be valuable in a classroom,
especially for high school students as they begin their choice filled journey into adulthood.
Having students engage with these texts will enable them to engage in an in depth analysis of the
intersection between choice, chance and fate in both a general sense and in their own lives.
Exploring this theme and connecting it to the real world increases student engagement thus
making it worth the effort. Lastly, students gain knowledge of a multitude of text and the skills
needed to comprehend different genres of literature.

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References
"Choice." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 15 Oct. 2015.
<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/choice>.
Frost, Robert, and Louis Untermeyer. Road Not Taken. New York: Holt, 1951. Print.
Jabak, Omar. Different Literary Approaches to the Concept of Fate. N.p., n.d. Web.
Kim, Hyeongmin, Katina Kulow, and Thomas Kramer. "The Interactive Effect of Beliefs in
Malleable Fate and Fateful Predictions on Choice." J Consum Res Journal of Consumer
Research 40.6 (2014): 1139-148. Web.
Lindsay-Abaire, David. Good People. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2011. Print.
Markus, Hazel Rose. "Does Choice Mean Freedom and Well-being?" PsycEXTRA Dataset
(2011): n. pag. Web.
Miller, Arthur, and Gerald Clifford Weales. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Print.
Moore, Wes. The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
Murray, Liz. Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless
to Harvard. New York: Hyperion, 2010. Print.
Shakespeare, William, Tucker Brooke, and Jack Randall Crawford. The Tragedy of Hamlet,
Prince of Denmark. New Haven: Yale UP, 1947. Print.
Sophocles, Frank McGuinness, and Ciaran McGrogarty. Oedipus. London: Faber and Faber,
2008. Print.