Recently, I read Raisin in the Sun and To Kill a Mockingbird, both considered literary classics. They share a number of similar themes and characters and face similar situations. In the end, they have extremely different plots, but address the same issues; some were common at the time of their publication, and others are relevant in current times. What I want to highlight in this essay is that in both novels, there are many characters whose lives have reached a breaking point over the course of the story. It is at this breaking point that the characters' lives are irrevocably changed, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. What I'm going to explore is how these characters deal with the emotional fallout of what the aforementioned breaking point left in its wake. From A Raisin in the Sun we have Benethea Younger, and from To Kill a Mocking Bird we have Jeremy Finch. , better known as Jem to analyze. In Raisin in the Sun, Benethea Younger is an independent young African-American woman who has high ambitions for the time period in which the novel takes place. She wants to become a doctor so she can make a difference in the world by helping. people. It can be determined that it follows a hero's quest for identity, seeking to discover his roots. However, the point that breaks her is when she discovers that her brother essentially stole the portion of his father's life insurance that was intended for his college education to invest in a liquor store, which, as we find out later, won't yield anything. profit because one of his so-called “partners” left town with all the investment money. This shook Benethea to her core, because at this point she no longer cares about helping people, is no longer...... middle of paper ......sitive, as they can easily degenerate to the lowest level of society if they cannot deal with the feelings caused by these events. Although both novels end somewhat on a high note, it demonstrates the mastery of both authors through their incredible literary legacies in the form of these two novels. Works Cited Lee, Harper. To kill a mockingbird. HarperCollins: 1960 Hansberry, Lorrain. A raisin in the sun. New York: Random House, 1959. Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, Harvard University Press, MA: Cambridge, 2007, p. 249-251Ted Honderich, Punishment: The supposed justifications (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1969), chapter 1John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 266. Carson, Clayborne (1981). In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Harvard University Press