Alive and Westbury Court

Alive by, Laurie Lynn Drummond and "Westbury Court" by, Edwidge Daticat are both stories that involve personal experience about being alive. "Westbury Court" is about a fourteen year old boy who experiences a fire in his apartment building right across the hall from where he lives. In this story he explains how he watched over his siblings everyday as well as watched his favorite television show, General Hospital, everyday too. One day a fire started across the hall in his apartment building,which he did not realize till two firemen knocked on his door and evacuated him and his brothers out of the building. In this story the boy questions that he was to involved in his show that he did not hear the fire. He also questions that the fire could have happened to him and his brothers. Later on throughout the story the boy speaks about a cabdriver who lived down the hall , who was killed on his night shift and a Nigerian immigrant who was shot right in front of the building of which he lived in too. By the end of the story we realize as does the boy that he is living in a violent area and he questions that he never thought it was violent because to him that was his home. The boy questions what happened to the two children that lived across the hall and questions if they died or if they're still alive. He adds, "Or maybe i am struggling to phase them out of my memory altogether.Not just them, but the fear that their destiny could have so easily been mine and my brothers". Here we can see that the boy questions his destiny as well as his brothers and feels scared but fortunate to be alive. The structure of this story had many realistic events that happened around the boy's apartment which made the boy continue to question his destiny about being alive.Therefore all the dramatic events he saw or heard about put an impact on the way the boy thought about life.
Alive , is a story about a women who used to be a police officer and who now is very cautious because there is a serial killer at work in Baton Rouge, who has murdered three women and attempted four abductions in the past two weeks. Here the women speaks about being at a newspaper stand and noticing a bald man in the store who is watching her. She tries to ignore it and calls herself paranoid until her gut instinct tells her "he is stalking you". At this point she becomes very frantic because she does not own a gun anymore and is simply a "female civilian". Throughout the rest of the story we notice her paranoia because of what she has seen and heard of that has happened to many victims near the area. This is very similar to the boy in Westbury Court, who also hears about many incidents near his neighborhood, which makes him question his destiny. The structure of this story is suspenseful in the details that lead up to the end of the story. At the end the women questions her paranoia and realizes she is only paranoid because she is alive and needs to be. In both stories the characters question there destiny because what they have seen or heard and need to be cautious because they are alive and there is crime and violence everywhere.