Can you analyse the essay Nature is not always kind by Hellen Keller with textual evidence.
Answers
The Story of my Life by Helen Keller is an autobiography that recounts Helen’s experiences as she adjusts to the world as a blind and deaf person. Helen begins the story by describing her earliest memories of sights and sounds and her memory of contracting the illness that resulted in her deafness and blindness. Helen learned sign language after her illness, but she describes the isolation she felt from the world around her and the frustration she felt while trying to learn.
At the age of six, Helen’s life changes drastically when she is referred to a teacher who has had tremendous success educating blind and deaf children. Helen devotes the rest of the book to describing her experiences learning to read, write, and speak under the tutelage of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. She describes the sensory experiences Miss Sullivan encouraged that helped her first learn words, and then learn the meaning of words, and then gain a fuller understanding of their meaning in the world around her. Helen describes moments of insight that came over the course of her learning as she was able to connect her learning activities to her childhood memories of sights and sounds. By the end of the book, the author’s descriptions of past and present come together to give the story continuity and meaning.