In our world today, there are a handful of concepts upon which our lives are concretely built. Unfortunately, not all of these concepts are pleasant. Our lives are saturated with these concepts, whether in our daily lives, in the books we read, in the media we are exposed to. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay For this essay, I will address a concept that I have found to be extremely important and recurring throughout the readings we read in class. The concept under study is called unhappiness. In all the texts we familiarized ourselves with this semester, it quickly became apparent that unhappiness was present and imminent as a concept; be it the unhappiness of the characters, the unhappy atmospheres and situations, or a combination of both. For my analysis, I chose to study 2 of the texts we completed during our course; "Wild Thorns" by Sahar Khalifa and "Chicken with Plums" by Marjane Satrapi. The reason for my choice for both of these texts is that within their characters I was able to unlock a deep well of resonance of emotions, conflicts, revelations and events, in which the concept of unhappiness was intertwined. series of interesting events and happenings in Wild Thorns, which clearly demonstrate my analysis. I found both questionable protagonists Adil and Usama applicable to the theme I chose. First of all, Usama, right from the start, is a real mix of emotions and passion, which later make up much of the motivating reasons for his actions and the story's climactic events. Usama, from the beginning of his adventure, has very high expectations of everything; his people, his family and friends, the situation under the occupation and, ultimately, himself. Throughout the novel, we are subjected to numerous times in which Usama explicitly expresses his disgust and disappointment with those things, be they mental thoughts, verbal discourse, or actions. One way or another, I believe this is Usama's main source of unhappiness; the fact that he comes home and finds that so many things have changed in ways he never expected. He returns to Palestine after a long period of living abroad and the like, to find that the occupation has taken hold stronger than before. While perhaps this is not what disappointed him, he was shocked, disgusted, angry and disappointed by the state in which his "people" had accepted the occupation and surrendered. The first example we have of Usama's intense range of emotions is while he is in the taxi taking him to his town from the border (p.23). In this scene, Usama gets into a heated argument with one of the men in the taxi. He expresses his feelings of disappointment and disgust at the state of affairs. The second, and perhaps most important, passage within the book lies when Usama and Adil are in a bar where they deal with a childhood friend named Shehadeh. He worked in Israeli factories and for this reason he proclaimed himself better than others. The third passage I chose in the novel to describe his unhappiness is the climax (in my opinion) which lies in pages 180-185, where Usama and Zuhdi are both killed during the bus bombing. Here, Usama perhaps realizes that his emotions were blinding him from the true beauties and truths of life, and perhaps he wakes up from his coma of unhappiness and disappointment. Since I am restricted for this essay, I felt it best to move on from Usama and delve deeper into his counterpart, and cousin, Adil. Adil is Usama's cousin and has a long and painful history of unhappiness and discontent. So much forbegin, Adil has been in Palestine since the occupation began, he never left; unlike Usama. Upon inspection I found it useful to compare the two cousins ​​to each other using different aspects for different purposes. In cross-referencing their comparisons for the purpose of this essay, I found that they are extremely similar, yet extremely different at the same time. They are equal in the sense that both Adil and Usama share a deep, emotionally driven, and strong feeling of unhappiness, which can also be interpreted as other emotions, such as disappointment or dissatisfaction. Both have a sense of duty; they both hate the state of occupation their beloved home country is in. However, this is where their differences matter. The one, main, big difference I have found between them is their level of belief, which in turn influences their level of willingness and motivation to do what they believe is right. Adil's unhappiness is more or less similar in nature to Usama's, however, he is more verbal about it, rather than expressive through his actions. Living in this situation has certainly made his existence miserable and sad. This can be seen very clearly throughout the novel, especially in a few select passages. One of the clearest moments where we see Adil's unhappiness is on page 61 of the novel, where Adil has "had a few drinks." It is quite a logical concept that when a person drinks alone, he is usually trying to escape from something. While under the influence, Adil begins to monologue, scorning life and talking about his horrible conditions until an equally unhappy Usama confronts him, where they later have another argument. Personally, I found it extremely difficult not to delve into Adil's nature of unhappiness, as it is extremely complicated and intricate. He has so much pain and emotion inside him, yet for much of the novel he hides it and pretends to be almost careless. For this particular reason, I decided not to include more specific passages, rather to comment on his personality and character as a whole. The third and final form of unhappiness comes in the form of Nasser Ali Khan, the main protagonist of Marjane Satrapi's "Chicken." with plums'. I decided, however, to base my analysis on the film adaptation of Satrapi's illustrated novel, which we saw in class. This is because I felt that Nasser Ali's character was better presented and more efficiently constructed than in the drawings. Additionally, his unhappiness is portrayed more clearly. The whole story revolves around Nasser Ali trying to replace his instrument, broken by his wife. After finding that no other tool is doing the job sufficiently, he decides to die. And in the next 7 days we are subject to emotions, visits from relatives and old friends and flashbacks to the past. In the end, it turns out that Nasser Ali was in love with a girl named Iran, a girl he couldn't have. And throughout his life as a musician, (in my opinion) he played his music with so much passion, emotion and feeling as a kind of dedication to his love for her, despite being married. At the beginning of the film there is a scene where he meets her and she doesn't recognize him. In the end, he shows the full scene, where she just pretends not to know him and then collapses behind a wall after separating from him. It is then made clear that after he met her, he expected her to remember him, and when she didn't, he, in one way or another, lost the will to live. This absence of will to live was beautifully depicted in her slow decline in health and her dissatisfaction with continuing to play music, as her music was the only memory of her, and she was his reason for.