Purpose

The arc of Mokhtar’s personal story can be described as the struggle to discover and actualize a clear purpose in life, and although Mokhtar ultimately triumphs in this regard, his earlier struggles function to demonstrate the internal necessity of determining and pursuing a clear sense of purpose. The narrative establishes this theme by first emphasizing the sorrow of Mokhtar’s sense of purposelessness earlier in his life. The narrative is generally linear, but Chapter 1 opens the book with an anecdote from Mokhtar’s 20s in which he fell into debt, could not attend college, and felt as if he had no clear direction forward in life. Chapter 1 ends with this sentence: “In the International Terminal, a monument to movement, [Mokhtar] sat, vibrating, going nowhere” (6). This quotation emphasizes Mokhtar’s feeling of driftlessness and helplessness in his early adulthood, and it sets up the overall narrative as one...