Durable Goods Compared to Choices

You may have a crummy life, but depending on your outlook and the actions you take you can make the best of it. You have to make do with what you have in life. You need to view the cup as half full, and not half empty. In other words you've got what you've got, and only you can make something positive of it. In the novel, Durable Goods, by Elizabeth Berg, and the poem, "Choices", by Nikki Giovanni, this common theme of choosing to make the best of what you have is developed. Both pieces explore this theme in a number of ways.

Both the novel and the poem explore the theme that life is about choices and making the best of them. In "Choices", the poet writes that:

if i can't have

what i want then

my job is to want

what i've got

and be satisfied

that at least there

is something more

to want (9-16)

The poet is saying that if you can't have what you really desperately want, then it's your job to make sure you can make do with what you have while still hoping for more.

Similarly, in Durable Goods, Katie must make the best of the father she was given, even though he is a broken and abusive man. Katie says of her father, "He is all apart broken...I see that he is only what I was given first. There are other places to look for things" (191). Katie realizes that even though her father is not perfect she will always be connected to him, however she also realizes that there will be other relationships in her life to fill the needs that he doesn't. In that moment she realizes that she has the choice to control how she views her life.

Along the same lines, Giovanni writes about making choices and the direction you take in life: "since i can't go/where i need/ to go/ then i must go/ where the signs point" (17-20). The poet is saying if you can't go where you need to go, then look for signs in life directing you where you should go.

Likewise, in Durable Goods, Katie is faced with a similar choice. She would really like to run away to Mexico with Diane and Dickie, but she finds that she just can't leave her father behind. When Katie calls Cherylanne and gives her their location in the middle of their escape, Diane says "'Why'd you do that? I'm trying to help. What do you want, to go back and live with him?'

Oh, the answer is sorrowful to me, too" Katie responds to her sister (178-179). Even though part of Katie is yearning to escape her father, her heart is pulling her back to him. She decides to return home and try to make the best