The Other Wes Moore Character Analysis Essay

Complex Characters in The Other Wes Moore

A man reads a newspaper article, in which somebody sharing his name is convicted of a serious crime and is sentenced to life in prison. The convict shares the name, is close in age, and grew up in the same town as the, now very curious, reader. The reader, a man named Wes Moore, is struck by this story, and couldn’t quite shake it off after a few years. He decides to write a book. In Wes Moore’s The Other Wes Moore, the convict Wes hadn’t had many good influences in his life; his father wanted nothing to do with him, his brother was a drug dealer, and only one of his friends would graduate from high school; he lived a life unfortunately all too common. His mother and brother tried to lead him away from “that life”, at least for a while, but Wes became involved with drug dealing, teen pregnancy, and eventually dropped out of school. But before being arrested he seemed to start to take hold of his life, he completed his GED near the top of his class, and started to build a house for his daughter. He was not

He had many instances lying and cheating. When he got started in “the drug game” he lied to himself, trying to “rationalize”. After it really picked up, he had to come up with an explanation for his increasing income, he said he made the money DJing, “it was the story he used with mary, and she bought it whole”(Moore 64). He was getting comfortable lying to his mother to do something he knew he shouldn’t have been doing. By doing so, he betrayed Mary’s trust; now that she could no longer trust him she had to start searching his room. Other people trusted him too, Alicia, his “girlfriend” trusted him to stay with her and help raise his own child , but very “soon after the news of Alicia’s pregnancy, Wes met another girl.”(Moore 101) He was very quick to betray the trust of someone else he (hopefully) cared about. Wes was undeserving of trust because of how much he