Eleanor and Park - Post Reading

“Yesterday happens,” is a quote from Eleanor and Park. This means that you can’t go back and change the past, so you shouldn’t worry over it. Since you can’t change anything that has happened before, you have to try and change things in the future. You need to do everything you can to make the future the best that you can make it. For example, if you get a bad grade on a test, you can’t go back to change it, but you should study more so that you do better on the next one. If you made a bad decision in life, you can’t change it, but you can try to do better.

In the novel, “Eleanor and Park”, Eleanor can’t go back and change how she acted around her step-dad. She can’t go back and not argue with him, no matter how much she wanted to. She can’t go back and not accept the gifts that Park and his mom gave her, even though she wanted to after she saw that her dad had found them, and saw what he had done.

In other books that I have read, the same theme is present. In “Code Name Verity”, for example, when Julie is caught and imprisoned, she writes that she shouldn’t have gone on that mission. Similarly, Maddie regrets having flown the mission, but neither of them could change what they did, and ended up making the best of it.

Also, in “Ship Breaker”, Nailer might rescuing the girl, but he still made the best of it and things ended up turning out well, both for him and for her.

If you can’t change the past, then why is it important at all? Simple: you need to learn from it as best as you can, and use what you have learned to try and make the future better. Then, when the future becomes the past, you will have done everything you can to make it as good as possible, leaving you nothing to worry about, and knowing that there is no need to want to change it, at all.