Flowers In The Attic

1397 Words3 Pages

How can friendship impact a person’s life? In the novel, Flowers In The Attic by V.C. Andrews, the friendship between Catherine Dollanganger and Christopher Dollanganger changed both Cathy and Christopher as people, as well as impacting their younger siblings, Carrie and Cory Dollanganger’s lives. Their friendship made Catherine into a more mature person. It forced Christopher to be more caring and compassionate than he naturally was. And because of the impact it had on Catherine and Christopher, it also impacted Carrie and Cory’s lives as well, by saving their innocence and shielding them from the horrifying truth of the world they were living in. At the very beginning of it all, Catherine was only a little girl.
Catherine’s friendship with …show more content…

At the near beginning of the novel, Cory and Carrie are both five years old, and know almost nothing of the world but their family and play. This is illustrated on page 14 when Carrie and Cory play in mud after being cleaned and dressed for a birthday party, and complain to Catherine about having to take another bath. They tell her, “One bath a day is enough!...We’re already clean! Stop! We don’t like soap! We don’t like hair washing! Don’t you do that to us again, Cathy, or we’ll tell Momma!”. Throughout the book, Cory and Carrie suffer abusive acts from their grandmother, such as when they are threatened by their grandmother to be whipped if they disobey her (p. 92), are starved for two weeks to the point where they had to drink their sibling’s blood for sustenance (p. 251), and are poisoned with arsenic for months (p. 396-397). Catherine was always a mother for them, she cared for them when they were sick (p. 362-363) and told them stories to calm them down (p. 172-173), and Christopher was always a father for them, ushering them to eat healthy food they didn’t want (p. 167) and trying his best to give them what they wanted and what they needed (p. 281-282). Through their older siblings they were able to make it through the three years they had been abused and locked away in an attic like rats, and were kept from suffering trauma afterwards because of it. Near the end of the book, it is described how they played together, in a joyous way that it would seem no one who suffered what they did could, “...Cory was plucking a tune on banjo...as Carrie chanted simple lyrics he’d composed...And I sang to him that special, wistful song that belonged to Dorothy in the movie The Wizard Of Oz, - a movie that the twins adored every time they saw it…The look on Cory’s face as he

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