Overcoming One's Past

Sing for Your Life emphasizes the need of others’ help for changing one’s life. Daniel Bergner describes Ryan’s thoughts upon release from the facility: “The facility he’d left, the trailer park he’d come to, the family he was imprisoned within, the person he’d always been, the person, he said, who was ‘the worst of the worst’--he needed to escape everything, escape himself. He had scarcely any notion about how to achieve this. But his desperation was extreme; it exceeded his cluelessness; and he had one advantage. He held within him the lessons Mrs. Hughes had taught, the lesson she had taught with the phrase ‘content of their character’” (125). What Mrs. Hughes had taught Ryan as an elementary kid helped him to change his life at this watershed moment. Additionally, Mr. Brown’s determination of giving Ryan private singing...