| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

BensAnalogyDraft

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years, 5 months ago

In the early nineties a well known movie came out along with a certain quote that is used to this day. The movie “Forest Gump,” starring Tom Hanks brought about the saying, “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.” Looking at this saying, a simple analogy is set up comparing life to a box of chocolates. Some similarities come about and are true, yet there are many things that are untrue about this statement. For the sake of an analogy, it works fairly well, but when we dig deeper to uncover the comparisons that it holds, we find many things that disagree with i.

 

As stated in the analogy itself, life is full of surprises, just like a box of chocolates. Life does hold many surprises for us and we encounter these each day of our life, but, is our life made up of surprises, where each day we encounter new ones? The comparison that it is set up is that when a box of chocolate is opened, there are many little surprises in each chocolate, you do not know what each one holds. When a box of chocolates is opened though, do we not expect to eat chocolate? There is also almost always some sort of guide which tells you what each chocolate contains. In life, we do not have these simple guides to help us. Each day holds something new for us, we our not always sure what to expect. People also do not have a guide book that they can readily open and uncover what each day will contain. We are on our own because each day does in someway hold a surprise for us, yet we make choices that help us to know what each day holds also.

 

While many people may believe that each day holds a new surprise, there are little surprises that come upon us. People plan their lives to best fit their needs and in doing this know what each day brings. Each day is not full of surprises, but has a few surprises thrown into the mix of our planned lives. The analogy says that you never know what you are going to get in life, yet this is not true. For the majority of your life you get what you work for, for example, those who go to college work to get into a decent paying job and do well for themselves and those who do not go to college find it harder to find a job in the marketplace. So while we can believe that each day brings about a wonderful surprise, we all know what our day holds in large and can only expect small surprises if any.

 

When we dig deeper into the analogy, we can use the comparison that because chocolates are sweet, then life also must be “sweet.” In reality life is not always “sweet” or great, but can be troublesome at times. We cannot say that life is great and dandy and everything tastes so sweet, but rather we must look at both the good and the bad. While at times life is wonderful and great, there are many times when the opposite occurs. People naturally have bad and good days and it is impossible to claim that life is great, especially to claim that life for everyone is great. To make a better analogy we would have to use a more neutral word to describe the flavor of life, because it is neither bitter, nor is it sweet. Life is an individual thing and we cannot generalize everybody’s life as being good.

 

"Life is like a box of chocolates" is an analogy used so often to describe the many surprises that people face in life, but when we go into an analysis of this quote, we find so much of it to be wrong. We can say that life does throw us surprises but for the majority of a person’s day, we know what to expect. We have the day scheduled and planned out to maximize our productivity. Comparing life to a box of chocolates is like saying that life has a simple guide book that shows you what to do, and at all times is sweet and good. A better analogy would state that life is like the internet. It is always changing and updating itself. Life is never the same from one day to the next. The internet is full of information that is being replaced or modified as in our life. People learn new things daily and replace old knowledge with new. We change the way we live our life as we grow older according to the environment that we live in. We say the internet is both fascinating and troublesome and is a vast tool showing that a person’s life is full of fascination and troublesome times. Comparing life to items like chocolates or the internet helps to show the major differences between the two things along with the comparison that the analogies tries to set up. Life is a complex term to use in an analogy and trying to compare such an important and meaningful idea with such a miniscule object in the scheme of things, such as a box of chocolates does not do the word justice.

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.