Where is the best place to live?

An analysis to Oates life in the country and Danticat life in the city as they recollect their memories

Jose A Vargas 12/6/2013

What is a better way of life? Living in the city or living in the country. The question will always be an important topic for many. For some it is irrelevant where they live and for others the contrast from the city to the country and vice versa makes all the difference in the world. After all is just a matter of personal choice. Edwidge Danticat recalls her childhood memories from an apartment in the middle of Brooklyn NY. There are many insights of the type of apartment she lived in. To begin with, obviously they were a family of low income; they live as a poor family. That was an area habituated mostly by immigrants and people with low paying jobs. A cab driver was one of her neighbors and a Nigerian man was killed in front of her building. Clearly she states some of the conditions she was dealing with as she was growing up in Westbury Court. Graffiti on most of the walls, hills of trash piled up, an elevator that was more of a tragedy waiting to happen, abandoned burned up vehicles on the side of the streets and heat and hot water not always available. Obviously her living conditions were not the best suited for a child but that was all her parents could do for the time being. They moved out of Westbury Court three years later. As with most living places in the city that are small, overpopulated, filled with noises all day long and in some instances not the best and most appealing to the eye. Life in the city has always the same picture and contrast doesnt matter what city it is. The scenery is about the same year round, with no or little change to the panorama regardless which way you look. Always surrounded by concrete or brick walls, the never changing color of concrete around every structure, the never ending vehicular traffic and the ever present and constant sounds of emergency vehicles, then you can see people having conversations and the familiar sound of footsteps leading to nowhere.

To the contrary, Joyce Carol Oates pictures a very different frame set of memories. She asserts that during her story timelines those were her most intense and happiest times as she would go on long and endless walks throughout the country side across creeks, desolated fields and the woods while living in a farmhouse located in Millersport, upstate NY. She could disappear for hours into places of total desolation and after endless hours of wandering into once considered sacred places she would return home and not many questions were to be asked. Obviously she was from a more financially and stable family compared to Danticat. Her father working for a reputable company and her mother will be the one taking care of the Home. As Oates stated, her family was happy, close-knit, and extraordinary given the time, place and economic status. Peaceful and quietness was all she would encounter whenever she would adventure into the unknown fields and every so often she would stumble into a once standing proudly homes that now were just barely standing as a big pile of trash. Her memories are all happiness and filled with adventures that still so vivid in her mind, the only difference is now as an adult she has a more complex knowledge of what is a home with a family and why so many of those old houses ended quietly and empty. The only aspect that bothersome Oates is the profound memories her neighbors (the Weidels) had casted in her. That troublesome family filled with infamy, violence, physical and mental abuse, alcoholism, possibly sexual abuse and the attempt to commit murder. A family that succumbed so apart that most of the members of it were not to be heard nor seen ever again. An alcoholic father that constantly abused everyone in his family, a mother with a mental trauma or such low self-esteem that could not put an end to the violence or just could not get away from it. Only to come in contact years later with one of their daughters (Ruth). Many questions were to be asked (from Carol to Ruth) only to be followed by silence or by empty and dead end answers.

I can relate to both style of living either in the city or the country. I was born in the country and my first years were spent living in the country. Later on I moved to the city and that is the place that transformed and prepared me into adulthood. As I have become an adult and given the many places where I have lived, I found out that both lifestyles are in such contrast to each other in every possible scenario. In the city you could be so busy and involved with so many and sometimes senseless activities that it is fairly easy to forget time and place even though time and place in the city is valued as much as gold. In the country you want to live a style in which time and place is irrelevant and meaningless. For the most part you have plenty of time available, in which many people start to look for things or chores to do. Neither place is better or worse than the other, it is all about the priorities in life and what really is most important to you. In closing, two stories filled with memories and tragedies that were forged in two different environments. Two opposed backgrounds only to be marked with a tragedy at one point or another and that event being the one changing everything from one point of view to a perspective in life of what if What if the fire in Brooklyn would have never occurred? Would she be still living in Westbury Court? And what if the fire in Millersport was never started by the father of the family? Could the dysfunctional family would be together today?

Reference Danticat, E. (n.d.). Westbury Court. Retrieved November 7, 2013 from, http://plaza.ufl.edu/lacy.hodges/WestburyCourt.pdf Oates, J. (1995, October). They all just went away. Retrieved, November 7, 2013 from, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/10/16/1995_10 16 178 TNY CARDS