Each person would define what is worthwhile to society and themselves differently, however one question one rarely has to confront is if anything is truly worthwhile. For something to be considered worthwhile, it must be something that gives some kind of return equal to what have been put in, at the very least. The question that arises however, is how to quantify what was returned and compare it to what was put in, a difficult task with such unquantifiable terms as emotion, thought, and even time, as time is rarely spent on a single task. However, the ultimate goal is to answer if it, whatever was put in, made the result worthwhile. A persistent answer to all events is no. The rationale behind such an answer is that no matter intention or …show more content…
Dudley Randall, in The Ballad of Birmingham, contrasts the security of maternal love with a harsh event resulting from maternal concern, the death of a child, to bring into question if those concerns truly matter and if any place is sacred. In “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson tells the story of a community that takes part in a ritual killing, but in dialogue addresses the resistance to the idea that tradition could be not worthwhile and abandoned. The fact that death will come no matter what one’s path in life is is forced into the consciousness of the reader in Margaret Atwood’s “Happy …show more content…
He begins to think about everything he has thought about or done in his life. The most obvious thought being that his death in this war means no life afterwards, and all the hopes, dreams, and plans would be for naught. He feels they are wasted because they will never occur, so there was never a reason to consider them in the first place, and making such plans is now worthless. He then moves on to consider everything he had done in his life. This depressing realization that if nothing in the future matters, as it will never come to be, continues into his past. It is all wasted and worth nothing, if the culmination of all he has done is to die in a war he has no strong commitment to, even though he knows that he does not want England to lose, then everything he has done ultimately had no meaning, as he does not want to nor chose to fight in the war, so ultimately none of his choices matter. The final line he states is that all that happens in the end is that a life is balanced with death, and therefore whatever was done in between his birth and his death will not matter as he had no choice in his