Sunrah Jones Response to Literature English block 1
Turnabout
Have you ever wondered what gives humans the mental stability to make it through life’s unpredictable obstacles? Is it hope that tomorrow will bring something better? Maybe it’s a belief. You believe something ‘bigger’ put you on this earth for a reason. Who are you to take yourself off of it? Or maybe it’s love; someone depends on you and adores you enough that you feel needed. But what would happen if you were immortal and everything you knew was taken away from you, would you still have the will power to stay alive.
In the novel Turnabout by Margaret P. Haddix, the life of two divergent women are brought together by one very unorthodox connection, they are both going to die. This may not b unordinary to hear because as you well know, everyone dies eventually, but for these two women and fifty other unfortunate participants, they get more youthful as time passes.
As far as ideas go, Unaging is one of the more unrealistic ones. Besides the fact that it challenges the christian faith and almost every grasp of time that we’ve ever had, it also raises questions about morality. I mean its simple enough to say that it is just unnatural. As stated in this book, the human race is not meant to live forever and the fact that our body shuts down on itself after a specific amount of time just proves that fact further. Who would think of becoming immortal, but then again, who would want to be?
While reading this book I found that the most common reason human beings stay alive as long as they do is because we feed off of each other. Immorality may sound like an amazing thing to start
with but unless everyone lives forever, you risk spending the rest of your life watching other people get closer to death. You lose any ability to form close connections with people around you because the pain that comes with that person dyeing is too much to bare. At the same time, even if everyone did become immortal, it would only eliminate the human races ability to adapt.
If you think about it, the reason most people want to live their lives is because the thought that it could be over at any given time is always in the back of their minds. That is why, out of the fifty elderly men and women that were patients in this unaging experiment, only two survived.