I read the story "It Can't Be Helped, from Farewell to Manzanar" the story is written in the first person about a Japanese girl in the 1940's who is sent to a Japanese internment camp. The story doesn't go into the conditions of the camp at all, which I was disappointed with; it was more about the effort to keep her family together, and because the main character was a child she can do nothing to help keep the family together, it is a story about someone else's struggle. I did not like this story much because it was a very everyday sort of story. The story doesn't seem to go anywhere, only that they have to move a good bit and in the end go to an internment camp. There is nothing she is trying to achieve and the protagonist is completely helpless to change what happened to her, the story has no good or bad to it; things just happen.
There is no noticeable struggle in the story, which makes it uninteresting. There is no moral or meaning to this story, I did not gain any insight as to the living conditions of these internment camps because the story ends right when they get there. Unless you wanted back-story on the author, for instance at one point she says, "Instead of saying ba-ka-ta-re, a common insult meaning stupid, Terminal Islanders would say ba-ka-ya-ro, a coarser and exclusively masculine use of the word which implies gross stupidity" this does not make for very interesting narrative unless you are reading the story to see different japanese insults, which I care nothing for. The story does not reveal any information that would make you think about anything and that is essentially what books are for, to reveal information the reader cares about or tell an engaging story, and this story does neither.


I think the author’s purpose for writing the story was purely an internal one. The author does not show us much more hardship than we all have to endure. I think the author wrote this story so she could really organize part of her life. The story does not reveal anything that could have social significance, and I think it was written to better help the author figure out what she thought of her own circumstance at the time. for instance at one point she says, "One of his [she is referring to her father] threats to keep us younger kids in line was,'I'm going to sell you to the Chinaman.'" this only serves to illustrate the hostility between the chinese and the japanese, and nowhere in the story does this come into play.

I think it is important to read about other people's lives to expand our own understanding of the human condition. Through an autobiographical format a person can convey the idea and feelings they were experiencing much more accurately than in fiction. Many autobiographical works are intriguing because it tells of events, which we will never witness, with accuracy that only a person who actually experienced the event can convey.