Themes of Guilt and Desperation in The Red Bow and Passing Essay Sample

“The Red Bow” by George Saunders,  is a story about a father and mother that lost their child to a rabie bite which results in them killing all animals that got  close to the rabies. “Passing” by Langston Hughes” is about a boy who is white passing. He leaves his family and pretends he doesn’t know them so that he could live an all white life. In the story “The Red Bow” and “Passing” we can see that two reasons people do bad things is because of guilt and desperation.

To begin with, George Saunders expresses that Ed, the father, is doing everything in his power to make up for what happened to his daughter. He holds himself accountable.We see that Ed feels guilt and wants to redeem himself when he says “Had I simply risen from my computer and walked upstairs and gone outside and for some reason, any reason, crossed the schoolyard, then, believe me, there is not a dog in the world, no matter how crazy”(Saunders 4)Ed tells us that if he had gotten up and checked on his daughter then nothing would have happened to her. Based on this, the reader can infer that Ed is blaming himself for his daughter's death. He is grabbing at straws trying to explain why this happened even though we know that it was a tragic conquincidence. 

Likewise, Narrator Langston Hughes establishes that Jack does bad things because he is desperate to fit into a community with more rights. He believes that leaving this African American side of him in the past will make his life better and make him happy. We can see that Jack is feeling desperate to fit in somewhere when he says “You remember what a hard time I used to have in school trying to convince teachers I was really colored… Since I’ve begun passing for white, nobody has ever doubted that I am white.”(Hughes 1)This illustrates that because Jack was never accepted as a black man when he was younger and as he grew up he chose to be accepted as a white man. Trying and pushing to be accepted in a community where you get less rights seemed useless to Jack.  So he moved on and did everything he could to disconnect himself from his origin community which included him ignoring his family and not being a part of them.

To sum it up, desperation and guilt are two very powerful motivations that help people make the wrong choices in life. In “The Red Bow,” Ed feels responsible for the death of his poor daughter, Emily, which makes him make irrational , poor decisions. In “Passing,” Jack thinks of himself before his family which is why he chooses to completely take them out of his life. Doing bad things is sometimes just an instinct, but making it up in the end is what really matters.