The joy that comes from helping Every year, especially during the winter holidays, companies advertise that giving is the greatest gift and that helping someone and being charitable can make someone feel better about themselves. Because of the complexity of human emotions, giving someone a gift or helping them can't simply make them feel better about themselves. In his story “The Knife” Richard Selzer argues that by helping someone you become increasingly dissatisfied with yourself. He discusses this through the connection between helping someone and hurting someone, and by pointing out the stress that is placed on someone every time they try to help. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Selzer claims that the connection between helping and hurting causes someone to become progressively more unhappy in their attempts to help someone. The progression towards unhappiness and desperation is shown through the emotional structure surrounding the main character in the short story “The Knife”. As the surgeon begins surgery to save the person's life, the author uses words such as "tulip," "slender," "shining," and "quiet," all of which evoke a feeling of peace and serenity in the reader. This use of imagery helps explain to the reader that when you begin to help another person, like the surgeon in the story, you feel a sense of happiness, but quickly the feelings of happiness become overshadowed by feelings of fear of being, in fact , hurting the person they are trying to help. The emotional connection between helpfulness and pain helps emphasize the point that by helping a person one becomes unhappier because one may believe that they are actually hurting the person they set out to help, which adds stress to a person by causing emotional turmoil. This is shown in the short story with Selzer's use of imagery in words like "impaled" and "dangerous." Selzer further supports his point by discussing the stress someone is put under when trying to help someone else. Selzer explains how people get stressed every time they try to help someone else and how this stress correlates to becoming unhappy every time they try to help. Selzer uses the surgeon in the story as a metaphor for the stress people are under when trying to help someone. Everyone has problems, Selzer communicates this idea of ​​problems through the patient in the story. The patient had to put their fate entirely in the surgeon's hands, and this kind of pressure in real life can be incredibly stressful for anyone controlling someone else's fate. Selzer metaphorically shows the stress that people feel through the character of the surgeon who, when it is time to do business, speaks slowly, softly and flatly as if there is no joy left in the world. Even when you successfully help another person there is a part that cannot be completely healed, just like the surgeon leaves scars on his patients. Selzer believes that the stress of knowing that someone has forever scarred another person only adds to their unhappiness. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Selzer's idea that helping brings talk of unhappiness is correct because of the stress one faces, however it is an extremely pessimistic way of looking at helping. Just as you are not entirely a help or a hindrance, you cannot be entirely happy or unhappy after helping. The bittersweet feeling people get after a hard but productive day at work is the.