Journal Entry #11

For today’s prompt, identify two important passages from the text. Why are they central to the text? What might we say about these passages in relation to themes from our class so far?

One of my favorite lines of this whole book comes from page 84 and states, “Then he says a loser knows things about this world that a winner will never know and is better for it.” And I feel that from this it illustrates to the audience that even the people of the Appalachian region have these doubts in themselves that make them feel as if they are beneath other people. What makes this even worse is the fact that Dillon is telling this to Jackie, who is just a young girl and in a way and is basically planting this piece of information in her head. The second passage that really stood out to me was the way that gender roles were portrayed for Rachel and her husband at the time. I understand that these were different times but the fact that that man could not pack his own suit case and he had to have his wife do it for him drove me crazy. He was perfectly able to pack his own suitcase but apparently doing something for yourself at this time was super weird and out of the ordinary, I mean that’s what women are definitely for right? I found it funny that people found men to be so incapable of the little things but now it is definitely something that they can do on their own. At least I hope.