In this essay I will be looking into the treatment of Billy in A Kestrel for a Knave, the emotions surrounding them and comparing and contrasting the differences between how three characters treat Billy, those three characters are Billy’s Mother, Jud, and Mr Farthing. The novel, A Kestrel for a Knave, is about a young boy who doesn’t fit in much, he doesn’t have a farther and gets picked on at school, to top it all off he has a terrible home life with his brother Jud bullying him and his mum going off every night drinking. If you take this all into consideration these factors help amplify any feeling we get when a character interacts with our underdog, Billy.
The first character I will look at is Billy’s Mother. Billy’s Mother is a bit of a sleep around; this is implied because when we first meet her in the novel she mistakes Billy entering the house for her current boyfriend Reg. During this scene it is also implied that she doesn't really care too much about Billy or that she is a bit neglectful as she asks Billy for a cigarette even though he is only 15 and asks him to basically steal some cigarettes, eggs, butter, and bread from the local store. We also see that she is neglectful because when she is going out to the pub she leaves him money for ‘some pop an’ some crisps’ as dinner. She is not much of a mother as the description of the house at the start of the novel proves; it is cold, unwelcoming and there is no food there are clothes strewn around piled on furniture which shows that she doesn’t care too much about keeping things tidy she is also a coward and doesn’t stand up to her own son Jud. Personally I see Mrs Casper as being a pathetic role model; she doesn’t care about Billy’s health and treats him as her own persona...
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...s talked with Billy more than once, he also knows about Billy’s history with the police and how he was constantly getting into trouble but instead of judging him on it Mr Farthing makes sure that he isn’t getting into trouble and offers alternatives to roaming the streets with MacDowell’s gang like youth clubs. Mr Farthing is the only adult in the book that treats Billy properly in my opinion, also because everyone else sort of bullies him it makes Mr Farthing seem all the more kinder.
Overall Billy is treated very badly by his family and teachers bar Mr Farthing who acts as a sort of father figure towards Billy, Mr Farthing is also the only one who takes any interest in Billy’s talents and interests. As I said before Billy is most certainly an underdog but that just helps the reader feel for him even more because you can empathise with Billy in some way or another.
The characters in this story are some very interesting people. They each lead their own way of life, and have their own interests at heart. Some of the main characters in this novel are: Sarny, Lucy, Miss Laura, Bartlett, Stanley, and Sarny's two children Little Delie, and Tyler. Sarny is the central character in this book. She is clever and knows exactly what to even in the worst of times. She is very emotional though, and can break down and cry when the slightest of things happens. This is perhaps from what she has experienced as a slave earlier on in her life. Sarny is fond of teaching people, as a friend named Nightjohn once taught her. Lucy is Sarny's close friend. She is also quite wise, but is a bit too optimistic at times. She never stops smiling and is very friendly. However, she does help Sarny find her lost children. Miss Laura is a middle-aged woman who lives a very luxurious life. She gives Sarny and Lucy a place to live and offers them employment. She also finds Sarny's children for her. Bartlett works for Miss Laura as well. He is a quiet and patient man who is helpful and quite kind. He was however castrated as a young slave boy, and cannot have children. Stanley is Sarny's second husband, for her first died from being worked to death on the plantation. Stanley is a gentle, big, fun-loving man, but is not intimidated by anything. This leads him to his death when he gets mad at a white man, and is confronted by the Ku Klux Klan. Little Delie and Tyler are Sarny's lost children. After she recovers them, and they grow up, Little Delie starts to like business, while Tyler wants to become a doctor.
The Kelvey family’s low income and less fortunate lives made them experience different treatments from many people. For example, “Even the teacher had a special voice for them, and a special smile for the other children when Lil Kelvey came up to her desk with a bunch of dreadfully common-looking flowers.” In their lives, people treated the Kelveys differently from others just because of their financial situation. This helps further make it evident that many different things factor into the experience of being an outsider. For the Kelveys, it was social status and how they were seen because of their lifestyle. As seen from the 3 different texts, the universal feeling of being an outsider stands as something to be learned from. Although everyone may be an outsider in the regards of someone else, it is not hard to treat a fellow human as if they were not an outsider. Anyone can be an outsider, but everyone can be an insider if enough effort is
...erson & by not doing everything that his parents said he was able to find out the truth which I think, in the end would have made his relationship with his parents much stronger. Billy was very restricted & confined by the expectations placed on him by his family & as well as society & because of this was not able to express himself or find his own personal happiness but through dance he was able to discover who he really is & what he loves & by pursuing it he became a much stronger person, it even enabled him to stand up to his father in showing him how much he loves dance & in doing so also stood up to society & gender stereotypes, this made Billy a much stronger person, throughout the movie it also shows how Billy is able to make a better personal relationship with his father & his brother Tony who he grows closer to as he becomes his own person through dance.
Throughout the book, the author creates numerous hardships that Billy has to live through. One of the hardships that he is given is that he is captured in German lines of the war that he was drafted into, and was shipped with other American prisoners of war to a camp that was filled with dying Russians. After that, they were moved to Dresden where no one would expect this city to be bombed, but sooner than imagined, nothing was left of the breathtakingly beautiful German city. Another hardship that Billy faced and contributed to his moral struggle and issues in the story is after he returns back home from Dresden´s crazy firestorm, he gets engaged with Valencia and soon following is a nervous breakdown and recovers of it amazingly to have two children become more in depth of optometry to make more money to support his new family. To continue his life while it is on a high, Billy and his wife travel by airplane to an optometry conference in Montreal, resulting in a skull fracture for Billy and Valencia passes due to carbon monoxide poisoning on her way to see her husband at the hospital. Billy struggled through tough times and situations but kept going, even after he went mentally insane, even with the moral struggles and issues that were thrown out at him throughout his life
Billy’s father is a source of his instability from the beginning. Mr. Pilgrim treats Billy as if he has no feelings and he is a disgrace to him. Unfortunately for Billy, fathers are very influential in a boy’s growing up. In a terrible encounter with his father when Billy was young, Mr. Pilgrim sets the stage for Billy’s insanity:
child who would have no patience and be careless. One last example is when Billy took
The major idea I want to write about has to do with the way Mrs. Hale stands behind Mrs. Wright even though it seems like everyone else especially (the men) would rather lock her up and throw away the key. We see this right away when she gets on the County Attorney for putting down Mrs. Wright’s house keeping. I find this to be wonderfully symbolic in that most women of this time usually allowed the men to say whatever they wanted about their sex, never standing up for themselves or each other
“The third bullet was for the filthy flamingo, who stopped dead center in the road when the lethal bee buzzed past his ear. Billy stood there politely, giving the marksman another chance.” This clearly illustrated the child-like person Billy is. Instead of duck and cover, Billy stands there as if he were playing a board game he didn’t want to play and in protest did not move his player. He doesn’t truly grasp the distraught situation he is in and he most certainly doesn’t comprehend it. By not looking out for his own interest he becomes an infantile creature depending on the civil duties of others.
Tom Buchanan is a character that is very controlling and violent: he serves to show the authority the upper-class has over the lower social classes. As an example, when Tom, Nick, and Myrtle are having a party in the apartment, and Myrtle decides to upset Tom, the narrator details, “Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing…whether Mrs. Wilson has any right to mention Daisy’s name. ‘Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!’ shouting Mrs. Wilson. ‘I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai’— Making a short deft movement Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand” (Fitzgerald 41). As shown above, Nick recounts the affair between Tom and Myrtle to the reader. The purpose of this ordeal is to show how Tom symbolizes the controlling and cruel nature of the upper-class. On the other hand, George Wilson is hardworking and loyal to his spouse; these attributes make him lower-class to show how dedicated and devoted people typically are in his social class. Particularly, when Michaelis is talking to George for the first time in the story, the narrator defines, “Generally he is one of these worn-out men: when he wasn’t working he sits on a chair in the doorway and stares at the people and the cars that pass along the road. …He is his wife’s man and not his own” (Fitzgerald 146). As seen
The family feud between the Grangerford and Shepherdson families is an example of how fear and prejudice influence man’s unfair treatment of man. When Huckleberry Finn is separated to the
narrative focuses on a father and son, Grange and Brownfield Copeland, and illustrates how their respective demons and destructive tendencies affect the people around them. In the opening chapter of the novel, the reader is introduced to Grange as he exhibits abusive tendencies towards his wife, Margaret, while he is in a drunken state. ?Late Saturday night Grange would come home lurching drunk, threatening to kill his wife and Brownfield, he threatened Margaret and she ran and hid in the woods with Brownfield huddled at her feet? (Walker 14). Grange?s prolific consumption of alcohol seems to be a conscious effort to blunt the feeling inferiority he feels as marginalized citizen in southern society. Grange Copeland?s fits of violent anger seems to be misdirected at his family instead of the person whom he truly hates: Shipley.
Mark Twain, an American author of the 1800s, narrates the adventures of Huckleberry Finn in his novel The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn. Twain’s purpose is to expose the greedy nature of humanity and what effect it has to the society and the people. Twain highlights the lengths that people are willing to go through to benefit or gain for themselves through the satirical strategies of humour, irony, and derision. The author has adopted a humorous yet serious tone in order to compel the yearning for the refuge from the constraint environment of greed of the post-Civil War American easterners.
Claggart is also seen as attempting to destroy Billy due to his evil nature in general. Nothing depicts Claggart's evil nature better than the way he looks. His cleanly chiseled chin and cunning violet eyes that can cut lesser sailors with an evil glare. His pale yellow skin and jet black curly hair; they all contrast his character. He is out to destroy Billy because of the constant struggle of good and evil. Billy is innocent and cannot comprehend evil therefore making him good. People calling Billy "baby budd, and handsome sailor" just seem to contrast the good in him even more. Claggart was born evil and therefore is evil. Claggart would naturally be out to destroy Billy because he is what he is against. Just good vs. evil in a battle for control. That is why Claggart is naturally out to bring the downfall of Billy Budd.
Additionally, we learn that while he was recuperating, his wife died of carbon-monoxide poisoning trying to get to the hospital to see him. The entire story is basically told in Chapter 2.It is also in this chapter that Billy,"time-travels for the 1st time The series of scenes and fragmentations of Billy 's life in chapter 2 alone unnerving. Had we leaned the corse of events in a normal chronological sequence, rather than tidbit here and there, the events would have been m,ore understandable. We learn of his wife 's death in chapter 2, yet we learn the full circumstances of her death in chapter
“The situation of the orphan is truly the worst, you’re a child, powerless, with no protectors or guides. It’s the most vulnerable position you can be in, to see someone overcome those odds tells us something about the human spirit. They are often depicted as the kindest or most clever of characters.” Michelle Boisseau describes how important these types of characters are. In a Sunday Times article, she states that a lot of the stories and novels are considered to be apologues about orphans becoming the hero of the book. Huck’s story is quite like this subject. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel written by Mark Twain, it’s about a boy named Huckleberry Finn, who sets out on a journey to discover his own truth about living free in nature, rather than becoming civilized in a racist and ignorant society. Mark Twain implies that Huck Finn resembles more of what he believes is right rather than what society surmises from him. Twain reveals this through the themes of satire, racism, and hero’s journey, which he uses constantly through out the book.