College Essay

This is a college essay that I wrote.

Option #4. Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence.

A character from fiction that has seriously influenced me would have to be Drizzt Do'urden, a character from R.A. Salvatore's the Legend of Drizzt. This character came from a society where females are dominant, and males can never get anywhere in the power structure. The whole society of the subterranean city is based on the worship of an evil goddess of spiders and chaos, causing her followers to weave webs of intrigue and betrayal. The race that Drizzt is, is as a fact evil, however Drizzt is not. Drizzt throws off the cloak of his past and travels the tunnels of the Underdark, a vast network of caves and tunnels. There, he finds the evil inside him, but suppresses it. He works his way to the surface, where he finds a group of friends. They go through many hardships, and grow so close. All the time Drizzt is finding out the truths of his own being. He goes through the discovery of the physical embodiment of what he would have become if he stayed back in the city of his birth in the form of a human assassin named Artemis Enteri, he finds love with his friend and eventual wife Cattie-Bre, and feels the deep pain of death and loss with the death of one of his closest friends Wulfgar, but all along this journey, he drives himself with a set of unshakeable morals, much of which I have adopted. With each new part of each book (they're divided into chapters and parts) Drizzt seems to discover a new part of himself, or comes more to terms with the world around him. He has influenced me not only in the way of me reading all of his currently 30 books, but he also gave to me a structure out of the chaos. Because of him, I accept death as a fact, not a fear. He taught me not to just plan for the future but be in and treasure each moment, because whether we're on this earth for a thousand years or just one, each moment, memory, person, place, each sunrise, is worth more than the gold of a dragons horde.