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Sacrifices are commonly made for love, by love, when someone does what they know is right. Many people make sacrifices and show that they love someone very much and lessons can be learned from making sacrifices. In A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’ Engle, Meg Muny must sacrifice her life to save her father. She must risk her life to also save her youngest brother, Charles Wallace.  Mr. Muny has gone missing has gone missing while working for the government and Meg and Charles Wallace must travel through time and space to save Meg’s father. Meg learns patience and perseverance through love and the sacrifices she makes for her father, and she learns sometimes doing the right thing is difficult.

 

By Amanda 7th grade

 

If thrust into an unknown land, and almost everything is different, humans must adapt to survive whether they like it or not. Some might be foolish and try to stay the same, compared to the new and perhaps even barbarous culture; but if they want to survive, they change and adapt. This is the theme of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. An English traveler, Gulliver, is thrust into new lands where beings are six inches tall or giants, or where the inhabitants are intelligent horses and humanlike beasts, and he is forced to adapt many times. When Gulliver travels to different lands, he is pulled in many different ways, but he resists to adapting to an unfamiliar, barbarous nature. However, all humans must adapt to survive.

 

By Steven 7th grade

 

            In the novel, Wolf by the Ears by Ann Rinaldi, Harriet Hemmings, the protagonist, is dealing with a person vs. self conflict in which she must make a decision for herself.  Harriet is about to turn 21 and must make a choice about choosing freedom or remaining a slave forever.  As the time comes nearer, her mother and friends insist that she would be a fool not to take her freedom.  As they do this she begins to despise freedom and wishes never to have it. 

 

By Basmah  7th grade

     In, The Kitchen God’s Wife, by Amy Tan, Winnie, the round and dynamic protagonist, experiences a person vs. person conflict of her husband not divorcing her. Over time, she attempts many times to get a divorce from her husband but he always does not. This is illustrated in this quote, “He did it to show who was boss.” (279) This shows that Winnie’s husband wants control over her. Divorce will cause him to lose control over her because she would then be free to go wherever and do whatever she wanted to. The sense of control made her husband feel powerful and dominant. However, Winnie wants so much to get away from her husband but what keeps her from running away is the shame that she will feel because in China at that time, women who were divorced were looked down upon. This can also relate to all people through a universal experience of being uncertain of doing something because of what others will think. Winnie over time tries to stay in her marriage to find the positive traits of her husband instead of focusing on the negative. Yet as time progresses, she gets more motivated to leave the marriage by not being able to find any positive traits with him being a flat static character. The cultural background had a lot to do with the conflict. In China, husbands were allowed to do what they pleased with their wives. Women were to be obedient to their husbands and were the lower class gender. The view of divorced women was negative because it showed that those women were defying the society’s rules and what the expectations of them were. This view is what kept Winnie struggling with her conflict and how to solve it.

 

By Caroline 7th grade

 

     In The Chosen, by Chaim Potok, the protagonist, Danny Sauders deals with a person versus person conflict, which affects his relationship with his father, the antagonist. The main influence of this conflict has to do with the setting, which is in a Hasidic community, because Danny has to live up to his Hasidic traditions.  Danny’s father, being a Hasidic rabbi, expects Danny to take his position, and in result, raises him in silence, which affects their relationship immensely.  “He doesn’t like to talk much…” Because Danny’s father, Red Sauders, raised Danny in silence, Danny grew up confused, and had differently figuring his father’s personality out.  Over time, this conflict affected Danny’s life, as he secretly wanted to become a physiologist, while his dad expected him to become a rabbi.  Since Danny and Reb Saunders only communicated while studying, Danny was too afraid to tell his father what he truly desired to be.  Throughout this experience Danny Saunders learned that in order to forge a successful relationship, communication is essential. 

 

By Carly  7th grade