Dream Wheel

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Exam 1
1. Wagamese tells the stories of the two protagonist families interchangeably. By doing
so he lets the reader have a look of two different worlds with two different sets of
people who have their fate intertwined. His theme being how to find ones way home,
the story retains suspense by keeping the reader guessing when the both protagonists
will find their way home. “The great bull sensed it and it shivered”, the writer also
uses such narration techniques to create suspense. In this sentence, for instance, the
reader does not know what the ‘it’ refers to. Accordingly, he is left in suspense and
has to read on to understand. This is evident throughout the narration as the lives of
joe Willie, his son, and the black families try to find their way home.
2. Success comes from taking advantage of opportunities.
Richard Wagamese’s story is about the choices that people make and how their fate is
eventually decided by the actions that come from those choices. In deed, he notes that
the Native Americans have a word for living one’s life by choice. Accordingly, this is
applicable to everyone’s life. People who have achieved great success did so by
taking advantage of available opportunities. Of course there are people who have had
opportunities took them but never achieved success. This indicates that taking
advantage of opportunities has to be complimented by many other factors. When the
two protagonists in Dream Wheel met and had a comfrontation Joe Willie saw an
opportunity to make another rodeo champion while taking another shot at healing his
son. He saw an opportunity and took advantage of it. In so doing, he later achieved
success on both fronts. His son was healed and the black family was empowered. In
fact, the author also, in some sense, achieved success by taking advantage of the
opportunity to unite the two characters.
3. Who experiences greater satisfaction in life
I think both Judith Viorst and Benoit Huot experience great satisfaction in their lives.
However, Huot seems to experience greater satisfactions because he came from a bad
situation and took advantage of available opportunities to become a paralympian.
Accordingly achieving great success than he or society would have expected of him.
Viorst, on the other hand, expected a lot of herself earlier on. She did not manage to

2. achieve as much. Therefore, he satisfaction comes from lessons learnt in failure. That
she has to live an ordinary life and appreciate it. It seems, therefore, that she has no
choice but to play the card that the world has dealt her. Thus she notes, “I’ve had my
share of necessary losses, Of dreams I know no longer can come true” (para.1). But
Huot was born with a handicap but tried his best to become more than what the world
expected him to be. He engaged in sports that were not within his realm of
capabilities. Although he tried to play just to be able to integrate with other children
his passion for sports and ambition to do try his best despite his physical condition
made him achieve beyond even his parents imagination. He says of his father “He told
me, I would never have believed that you would travel around the world to compete
after leaving baseball field crying”