It a hard enough life...

The pain that the story's we read explicate create situations for our own learning. At some point in all of our lives we will experience pain, suffering and the like. Perhaps not every day, or every month or even every year, but inevitably we will ALL experience pain. In Invisible Man, the main character experiences pain of a lack of identity. Although he experiences many painful situations in his life they all stem from his initial blindness which coincides with his invisibility. You could also say that the pain that Grendel feels comes from a sort of personal identification problem. In his situation he is a monster (physically) in a purely human accepted societal area. This lack of control and comfort in his own body (lack of acceptance from others) leads to his demise and ultimately his suicide. In Memoirs of a Geisha the pain she feels comes from the losses she experiences as a child and the losses she begets in her own skin as an apprentice geisha. She loses her parents and her only sister. She loses the men she loves and she seems to be constantly taken from. It reminds me of the foo fighters song "best of me." In the song it says "has someone taken the best of you, the hope, the not, the broken hearts, the pain you feel, the pain it's real." Sayuri is plagued by those around her. The baron, Hatsumomo, the chairman, her father, mameha and everyone else pushes her and pushes her but she proves that she WILL NOT be broken. I find that most of the characters in the other novels we have read and beaten by their weaknesses but Sayuri is not. Why is this? Memoirs of a Geisha is a slightly true story. Although molded by Arthur Golden it is an actual human life. In real life, although we are plagued often, our "downfall" is not always accomplished so easily. Always looked for, novels are always trying to push our mental limits. Otherwise, why would we read them? There would be no point. Generally the most memorable novels are the most magical ones or the ones that hit life on the head. The ones that show people out there, raw, exposed. Both of these are ideas that cannot be grasped "generally" in modern life. People are just not that open. Imagine how ahead everyone would be if we were that open? We could really help eachother.