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The Happiest Refugee

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The Happiest Refugee
English Essay

A journey is a common everyday occurrences. It can be defined an act of travelling from one place to another, and it usually involves the nature of physical and emotional hardship, and choices. These natures of a journey are shown in the book The Happiest refugee (2010) by Anh Do, and the poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost.

The Happiest Refugee demonstrates that journeys can have many physical hardships, such as appalling living and weather conditions which would cause obstacles in one’s journey. Anh uses descriptive language to convey this idea. He writes, ‘forty people had transformed this tiny fishing boat into living, seething mass of human desperation floating in the Eastern sea’. The use of words such as ‘seething’,
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What choices made will have significant impacts on one’s journey, and will affect their remaining life. Anh from The Happiest Refugee is an example of the nature of choice in one’s journey, as he has to make many decisions. The author uses interior monologue to show what Anh was thinking when he was choosing whether he wanted to be a lawyer or not. He wrote ‘On one hand I wanted to jump for joy; I knew my family would never be poor again…. On the other hand I knew I was going to hate it.’ This shows us the two important aspects when making a choice-its benefits and detriments. The Road Not Taken also illustrates the ‘choice’ nature of journeys. Frost uses symbolism in the quotation ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…. To where it bent into the undergrowth’. The diversion of the two roads represent two possibilities of a choice that the narrator has to make. The path bending into the undergrowth symbolises that the path becomes unclear and unknown. The author also communicates to the reader that . Frost also expresses the importance of choice by saying “I shall be telling this with a sigh….I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference’. Frost uses a slightly sombre tone (the sigh) and a first person perspective to convey that the path he has chosen will have a significant impact on the rest of his

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