Individuality to conformity

The character that I am choosing to write about this week is Ira from the story, “Pollen.” Ira was a man of few words unless spoken to. He had no desire to change his ways of thinking for anybody around him and refused to do such things. When he was good at something, he capitalized on that and made himself better. If there was something he was not good at, he would avoid that task completely and continue on with the things he knew he could do. The people of the town found this to be different from the rest of society. There were moments in the story where they referred back to him saying that some of the town’s people constantly joked around about how quiet and introverted he was. His neighbors told their children that if they didn’t behave, they would make them go stay with Ira Mead, and the children screamed and then started to behave again due to fear. They were fearful of this man because he was different and was not afraid to be exactly that. He wanted to keep to himself and focus on the things that he found important rather than the things that society as a whole found important.

His thoughts changed however when his neighbor’s corn started to grow better than his own. He knew that the corn needed other corn surrounding it for it to grow the best it possibly could. This made him furious, because all his life, he focused on his corn and his corn only and knew that it was his corn that was helping his neighbors’ corn grow too. Despite the anger he felt, he went out of his comfort zone and took seeds to his neighbors and was going to share all the information he knew about growing corn with them. He knew that his corn could not grow if his neighbors’ wasn’t growing as well. This showed him conforming to society against his own will. He wanted what was best for what he knew and that was corn. When he came to the realization that his corn could not be the best without the corn surrounding it also being good, he changed his ways of thinking and wanted to involve others. This story caught my attention because he was just a man who chose to focus on things that others never really focused on. He wanted to make things good for himself and he really pushed to achieve that goal; however, regardless of how creepy and quiet others found him to be, he spoke when he was spoken to and he minded his own business. In the end, even though he was upset, he was not against helping others in order to help himself. He was very good at being an individual and focusing on what was important there, and when it came time to conform to other’s to help himself, he struggled at first but pushed through that struggle to move forward.