Title Justification Short Essay: Fathers and Angels

Title Justification Short Essay: Fathers and Angels

The Other Wes Moore is the true story of two boys who shared the same name and hometown, but very different paths to opposite outcomes. While Wes Moore found success in business and academics through the help of a disciplinary school, the other Wes Moore is serving a life sentence in prison for murder. The book is divided into three parts that tell the stories of how the Wes Moores's started out virtually the same but soon split into different paths. The first part, "Fathers and Angels," focuses on each Wes's childhoods in Baltimore, where they had similar family situations. Both Wes' had an absent father, a single mother, and were very close with their grandparents. The title "Fathers and Angels" is appropriate for the author Wes Moore's purpose as it demonstrates his feelings about the role that family had in his and the other Wes' childhoods.

The first section of the book, Fathers and Angels, addresses one of the major challenges for people living below the poverty line. Often times, when a father is not involved in their family’s life, or there is no father, the families life is altered and effected for the worse most commonly. When a father is absent from a child’s life, somebody else becomes the light for the child to follow. In the first chapter, the other Wes Moore tells the author, “Your father wasn't there because he couldn't be, my father wasn't there because he chose not to be. We‘re going to mourn their absence in different ways.” (Page 3) This is the distinguishing factor between the two Moore's in this section of the book and these two reasons why their fathers weren't there made two different outcomes of people shown by Wes Moore and the other Wes Moore. This new light is synonymous with an angel. Wes Moore names this section of the book Fathers and Angels to represent the types of figures that can be present is a family. The father in the title represents the biological father for a child. The angel represents the person that saves the child from falling down without a fatherly figure to guide him. This title of the section in the text foreshadows how the absence of a father in a family can devastate a child mentally which can lead to further trust and motivational problems later in life for that child. 

By titling the section “Fathers and Angels”, Wes Moore is able to convey his purpose of detailing the effect of absent family members on the two young boys. While one Wes’s father died, the other chose not to be present in his son’s life, which created different, more hostile feelings and could be blamed for his violent actions later in life. The presence or absence of positive role models also played a difference in shaping the lives of the two Wes Moores, with the author having more positive influences in his life, and the other Wes having more negative role models. Wes Moore is able to elucidate that humans are guided by role models around them, and the fathers and angels of his life and the other Wes’s life have clearly influenced their outcomes in drastic ways.