Parallel Poverty

Some people are fortunate to be born into wealth and acquire its privileges.  Others, like Jeannette Walls and Sherman Alexie, are not. Although both authors come from different backgrounds, they both encountered traumatic poverty during their childhoods. Walls travels around the country with her family, including her drunken father and deranged mother. They manage to scrape by on the mysterious earnings her father obtains, and encounter conflicting scenarios. Alexie also lives in destitution on an Indian reservation, where education and moral values are inconspicuous. Like Walls, he faces problems at school and with hunger. He even says, "And it is this: the sons in this book really love and hate their fathers"(Alexie xxii), which completely relates to Jeannette's feelings for her father as the creator of her family's poverty. Both authors want to escape the drudgery of poverty and create a better life for themselves. So, Walls moves to New York City as a writer and eventually works for NBC. Alexie also finds opportunity in New York and becomes very successful as a poet. They remove themselves from their past environments in order to release any negativity associated with their previous poverty. The upheaval these authors pursue portray the motivation poverty can instigate. They depict how the drive, independent of the situation of destitution, can initiate a want for success, and a want to possess what they've been rejected of.