"It's all about respect": Blog 8

“So many of his [James’s] protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these character’s depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole…What James’s characters gain is self-respect” (225).

     So many people are searching for happiness, their goal in life is to be happy. The problem with this is that happiness is an emotion and it is not lasting. The Webster’s Dictionary defines happiness as, “The quality or state of being delighted, pleased, or glad, as over a particular thing.” We can all remember happy moments in life such as a birthday, buying your first car, weddings, ect., but did that happiness stay with us continually? Did it last up to this point? No, it drifted away and was replaced with depression, frustration, or some other emotion; this is part of life. Happiness is based on circumstances or possessions. Circumstances change and possessions get old and overused. The fact that happiness is not a lasting state shows why people are always seeking it. Perhaps there is something better in life that we can not only seek but obtain.

     Nafisi says that most of James’s protagonists end up unhappy, but the reader can be satisfied with the ending of his stories because the protagonists are victorious despite their unhappiness because they gain self-respect. It is hard to live with ourselves if we have no self-respect. As a child I often played the game “would you rather” where a friend would give me two options and says would rather ’this’ or ’that’.  In the prompt for this blog I was given two choices: happiness or self-respect. If I had to live with only one of these, I would take self-respect over happiness. I choose this not only because I think that self-respect is more important, but also because I could not be happy if I had no self-respect. When one can esteem himself or herself, that is a lasting state that is not swayed by constantly changing emotions, like Nafisi points out it is a sort of victory in life.

     When I was waiting to get on a bus in Oahu I observed two local guys in line who appeared to have just met each other. When they were ready to enter the bus they turned around and said to me and my friend, “You ladies get in first” and the other replied, “Yah, that’s how to show respect, it’s all about respect man”.  I remember those two guys sitting in the back of the bus together, talking about respect for the next three stops. They kept repeating the phrase, “It’s all about respect”. In a way they were right. When people are searching for happiness they can do so by dishonest means and hurt people along the way, but when a person can live his or her life in a way that they can respect and that others can respect, that is a state of being that no one can take away.