Preview

Analysis Of Mitch Albom's 'Tuesdays With Morrie'

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1451 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Analysis Of Mitch Albom's 'Tuesdays With Morrie'
We are all very focused on our occupations and the money we make. However, this does not, and can not, make us truly happy. Mitch Albom represented this idea in his non-fiction book, “Tuesdays with Morrie.” In this novel about a true story, Morrie Schwartz, a former college professor and friend of Mitch’s, who is a busy and hard-working sportswriter that is focused on his job, is diagnosed with ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. This disease would slowly shut down his body, and would take his life. Mitch, who is a busy sportswriter that is focused on his job, hears about Morrie’s fatal condition by chance through a news interview on television. Mitch, concerned about his old professor, goes to visit him for the first time in sixteen years on a Tuesday. …show more content…
Learning how to find authentic happiness is a difficult lesson to learn, but an important one. It’s a lesson that Morrie taught to Mitch, and one that Mitch wanted to teach to all of us through his writing. We need to have those moments in our lives that give us a real purpose among our neighbors, because no amount of money could buy the feeling that comes when speaking with a long-lost friend, and no status in your occupation can equal giving assistance to a loved one in need. Focusing on the people we love and the kindness we can give to them, instead of the wealth we enjoy temporarily, will bring us far greater happiness than money and power. If we all applied to our lives what Morrie knew and believed in, this world be a much happier place, with a much brighter

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Tuesdays with Morrie

    • 1334 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Tuesdays with Morrie, was based on a true story about friendship and lessons learned. It’s about a sports writer, Mitch and former sociology professor, Morrie, who is in his last days of life after being diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and their rekindled relationship after many years. They first met on the campus grounds at Brandeis University. This never forgotten relationship was simply picked back up at a crucial time in both Mitch’s and Morrie’s life. After seeing his professor in an interview on the show “Nightline”, Mitch is reminded of a promise he made sixteen years earlier to keep in touch. Since the airing of that show, Mitch met with Morrie every Tuesday to learn and understand all the wisdom and lessons of life. These discussion topics included: death, fear, aging, marriage, family, forgiveness, a meaningful life, and so on. This story took place in Morrie’s study in West Newton, Massachusetts. Overall, this book was about Morrie’s and Mitch’s final class: The Meaning of Life.…

    • 1334 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Charlie’s limited intelligence has made him a trusting, ingenuous and friendly man, as he assumes that all the people in his humdrum existence — mostly his co-workers at Donner’s Bakery are as well-intentioned as he used to be. However, as the neurosurgery stimulates his brain centers and rapidly increases his ability to learn, thereby elevating his mentality, Charlie gains perspective on his past and present. He founds himself becoming aware of a hard-hitting fact that his associates have constantly taken advantage of him and have treated him roughly just for sport, knowing that he would never understand. What is worse, he recovers that even if some people have shown a kindness to him, it usually came out of compassion or condescension and out of attitude to him as an inferior.…

    • 640 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Morrie’s ideas raise up a lot of questions. What makes an emotion? How are we able to feel emotion? It makes me think of The Giver by Lois Lowry. In The Giver is a society where all emotion is eliminated, meaning that humans cannot feel emotion. It’s very interesting to compare how emotion plays a huge role in both stories. Morrie is someone who has felt sadness, pain, and grief, yet people in The Giver never get to experience those emotions. I think Morrie is trying to tell Mitch to detach himself from his emotions because he wants Mitch to accept that life is short and that nothing is permanent.…

    • 609 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    As the story progressed Morrie taught Mitch lesson after lesson about how to change his life. For example “The little things, I can obey. But the big things-how we think, what we value- those you must choose yourself. You can't let anyone or any society determine those for you.” Mitch did not see eye…

    • 408 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Love is how you stay alive” (Albom 133). This was a quote in Tuesdays with Morrie. It was one of many that I made connections with people in my own life. People that I have looked up to for wisdom and relief that everything is going to be okay. Morrie was a man with good morals, and he believed that people need to devote themselves to their community and their self in order to have a meaning of life. Throughout the book, I believed the theme was about knowing what is important and learn to love one another.…

    • 425 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In planning her Happiness Project, Rubin turned to the wisdom of the ages, scientific knowledge, and lessons from pop culture all aimed at creating happiness. She uses this book to set down her adventures and discoveries along the way. She learned a number of things, including that novelty and challenge are important sources of happiness, that while perhaps money can’t completely buy happiness it can help in its purchase when it is spent with fore thought, that ordering and organizing her external environment contributed to a sense of inner peace, that treating herself could make her feel worse, that venting negative emotions didn’t get rid of them, and that sometimes it was the smallest of changes that could make the largest differences in her world and her happiness.…

    • 873 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Before Mitch Albom began talking to Morrie, his perspective on life was fallacious. He believed that a bigger house, a better car, and more material things would make his life better. Morrie quickly points out that this is a bad way to go about life. By doing so, you end up wanting more things than you can afford. People with this viewpoint end up leading miserable lives due to the fact that they are not content with what they already have.…

    • 419 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    One of the biggest factors in our lives are our families, same with Morrie. While Morrie and Mitch are discussing things he says something that may or may not make you think. “Death ends a life, not a relationship”(www.goodreads.com). Even though somebody dies doesn’t mean they aren’t your husband or wife anymore. If somebody is still alive and their best friend dies that doesn’t not make them their best friend anymore. This is Morrie’s opinion on any relationship that he has and sort of relates to the topic of love.…

    • 475 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the book Tuesdays With Morrie, Morrie tries to make the world more humane. He stresses the importance of relationships over the importance of material things. Material things will not matter when one’s time is up. Morrie quotes, in the book Tuesdays With Morrie, “Love each other or perish” (Albom 91). Loving someone means that you will go out of your way to do something for others. He wanted Mitch to realize that he needed to focus on…

    • 509 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Morrie Research Paper

    • 1541 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Mitch feels the need to his his activities from Morrie to hide what kind of person he is now. Mitch is a workaholic and always feels the need to be working and this wasn’t how he was when…

    • 1541 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Journal Entire

    • 432 Words
    • 2 Pages

    As I was reading these chapters, Morrie talking about regrets had me start thinking about my regrets. A feeling I was getting that my past choices I made were very poor. My life could have been so much different if I had made better choices. I think that Morrie is right, today society does not encourage us to think about our regrets and that we need someone to point us to the right direction. Someone that will guide us along, advising us to not make the mistakes they made in their lives. Mitch already has this person, its Morrie. My prediction is that by the end of all Tuesday visits, Mitch will be a whole new person. Morrie will help him and make him realize that success in life is not just about making a lot of money. Morrie will explain to him how it is like to be on you death bed knowing you will die any day. Looking back on your life and realizing how everything turned out and that your life still is not over.…

    • 432 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Morrie sometimes knew what Mitch was thinking about or how he feeled just by the way he acted and how he talked. As Morrie become sicker Mitch started to help out more so that he could connect with him better. As Mitch worked all he could think about, was what are they going to talk about the next visit on tuesday. “If you really listen to that bird on your shoulder, if you accept that you can die at any time then you might not be as ambitious as you are” (Albom 25). What Morrie means when he says this is that once you find out how to die, you figured out how to live life to the fullest; by noticing the the littlest things in everything that you have never noticed about before. Morrie didn’t seem like a emotional person on the outside, but on the inside he cared very much about some things. Even though Morrie was very wise he didn’t always give the best advice; which makes him even wiser in some sort of way.…

    • 589 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    (Kahlsa 1) Morrie learned to not just accept death, but understand why, he as a person, goes through the process of dying, then that is when he would benefit from life more than ever. That is one of many lessons Morrie taught Mitch on those Tuesday afternoons. Morrie was able to realize that “ most of us all walk around as if we’re sleepwalking, [that] we really don’t experience the world fully, because we’re half-doing things we automatically think we have to do” (Albom 83). Morrie Schwartz, diagnosed with ALS, a illness trapping his body, but never his mind, helped him to truly understand and capture the ideas behind life and death. Morrie passes on his knowledge to Mitch Albom, a former student of his at Brandeis who he sees more so as a son, that people take life for granted, living life with the concept that there will be a tomorrow to fix things or to try harder the next day, however forgetting that life is a gift not to be foolishly toyed with. In one of Morrie’s lessons with Mitch, he proposes that Mitch reject society’s interpretation of modern take on popular culture, instead that he should follow self interest; rather the aim to follow someone’s else hopes of interest. Morrie expresses his opinion on popular cultural fathoms to be focused solely off of superficial concepts of greed and selfishness, characteristics that will never lead people to true happiness; just an image of what appears to be happiness. Cultural fathoms in society creates a false image of happiness which Mitch first blindly chosen to follow; “naked [is how Mitch] came from [his] mother’s womb, naked [is how he] shall return” (McHugh 8). If Mitch, coming into the world empty, chooses to not to live and not learn from his life’s actions, he will in return leave life - empty. Following the common path of popular culture does not lead to understand the ideas of life and…

    • 1730 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mitch Albom’s, Tuesdays with Morrie, is a book about compassion and the reality of life amongst a college professor and one of his students. This story is about an older professor teaching and informing his younger student about the crucial lessons of life as he is facing death. “We’re involved in trillions of little acts to just keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?” (64-65). Throughout the book Morrie Schwartz tries to share lessons with Mitch Albom that he had to experience the hard way. Every Tuesday, both Morrie and Mitch would get together and have several deep discussions about love, forgiveness, marriage, and money. The…

    • 1141 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Death

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages

    “Tuesdays with Morrie” and “The Death of Ivan Ilych” both portray a character who is dealing with a serious terminal illness and advance knowledge of their deaths. One story is based on the realistic life of an American professor with the story’s characteristics tone from the 1990’s while the other is set during nineteenth century Russia. Even though Morrie Schwartz and Ivan Ilych both suffered from the illness, their dissimilar lifestyles and beliefs led to different perspective on facing death. One views the knowledge as a blessing and an opportunity to share his life experiences before making his final good-byes, the other agonizes in pain and begs for an end to his vicious sentence of suffering. These two men show contrasts in their identical fates, but only one of them was able to find a way to love.…

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays