Chapter 4 QuikTrip: Staffed by Passionate and Compassionate People After graduating from the University of Oklahoma and then completing a tour of duty with the Air Force, Chester Cadieux "endured what he describes as '10 months of frustration' as a printing salesman. He had no clear plan of how to escape from the printing business, but he knew he wanted to own and operate his own company. "1 To scratch his entrepreneurial itch, Cadieux, in collaboration with a long-time friend from junior high school, opened a small convenience grocery store in Tulsa, Oklahoma on September 25, 1958. Cadieux and his partner offered little product selection and had high prices—just like their competitors—and they barely eked out a profit during their first few years in business.2 For the next several years QuikTrip expanded the number of stores in its chain but continued with limited product selection and high prices. Meanwhile, competitors were springing up everywhere.
Some themes in this novel are alienation and isolation, coming of age, and the great journey. From the moment his mom says the words “I’ll be right back”(Burch 4) to the moment he is left standing in the playroom, Jennings experiences true loneliness. This is why the theme alienation and isolation fits this novel. Even though physically children are all around him, Jennings still feels alone and abandoned by the people he loves dearly. He is left to deal with hateful and abusive nuns all by himself.
Once all the main factors are evaluated, it becomes clear that the life of the peasants did not improve so it remained uniformly bleak throughout the period of 1855-1964. For majority of the period, the living conditions for the average peasant remained uniformly bleak. Especially when considering 1917, under Nicholas II, accommodation was often a low standard as demand outstripped supply following an influx to the cities, such poor living conditions had a detrimental effect in their quality of life which was also the same under the communist leaders, where living conditions remained in an equally bad, if not worse when compared to the Tsars. Some may suggest that Nikita Khrushchev did try to improve the living conditions by building more social housing but he was more interested in competing in the Cold War than improving the living conditions of the peasants. Therefore, lack of care led to his housing policy to be unsuccessful and proving that live of the peasants under Khrushchev did not improve.
The hitchhiker is actually twenty-four years old and claims to be named Alex and to come from South Dakota. Alex seems to be carrying a light load for someone planning to live off the land for a few months, as he says he will do in Denali National Park. As Alex elaborates on his plan, Gallien tries to make him change his mind. Gallien is certain that Alex is not prepared for life in the Alaskan outdoors. Gallien even offers to buy him some decent gear, but Alex refuses.
Ethan is influenced by his grim surroundings and becomes a bitter, melancholy man. A lot of his sad nature has to do with his surroundings, as the barren and empty characteristics of Starkfield have forced Ethan to become bitter and pitiful. At the beginning of the story the narrator clearly states Starkfield’s influence on Ethan’s appearance: “He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.” (Wharton 13) A character’s attributes depend on the location he grows up on. His face looks as gloomy as the night, cheerless and bleak.
And Pa was born here... Then a bad year came and he had to borrow a little money. An' we was born here, but we stayed and we got a little bit of what we raised"(pg45). In the beginning Grama and Grampa owned their land and they produced their product for themselves. The second stage is that of sharecropping, where Pa had lost ownership of the land but continued to farm and he
enThe novel ‘Of Mice And Men’ is set in America during the 1930’s and follows the occurrences of life for two migrant workers, George and Lennie. The two men are typical workers of that time, travelling to find work due to the depression with no set home or families, no money to buy nice clothes and no education so they mostly spoke in dialect. We learn these poor people each had their own different personalities regardless of the fact they were not very knowledgeable. We soon learn that George and Lennie’s friendship is very rare for migrant worker and why they stick together. We see from the very beginning of the novella that George and Lennie have it hard When Lennie is first introduced to us we gain an extremely strong impression of him when Steinbeck describes how he walks: “Dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags its paws” By comparing Lennie to a bear we get the impression that he is primitive, unpredictable and instinctive.”Dragging his feet” however makes him sound like a worn out child, but we know him to be a grown man, this is where we get the first hint that he may have some sort of impediment.
“Of the twenty-nine women who had made the voyage, all but five would die that first winter.” However, during 1621, the Pilgrims began to establish a true community and a better life for themselves. They built a village of approximately twelve homes surrounded by a protective fence. They also built a fort on a hill overlooking the village. The Pilgrims at Plymouth were not very successful at fishing, but they learned to gather clams and mussels, to farm the land and eventually to raise livestock. The men spent their days farming, hunting, and building.
The greatest problem the two face is loneliness. The pair may not have much, but they have each other. Even though they have each other, do they really have each other? Several characters in the novel experience loneliness through isolation as outcasts. Lennie, Crooks, and Curley’s Wife have all been branded as outcasts for the same reason; they are all different.
Throughout the story, we never really get a grasp of any sort of happiness in these people’s lives, so for these bleak men and women, an equally bleak ending seems almost unavoidable, if not expected. I agree with this statement in that just about every character that Steinbeck creates is in some way damaged. There are the obvious characters, such as Lennie and