James Moloney's coming-of-age novel, A Bridge to Wiseman's Cove, illustrates the life of an adolescent boy called Carl Matt. Through the characters of Carl, Harley and Maddy, Moloney demonstrates how every human being needs love and acceptance. Carl and Harley experience similar things because they are brothers and have both received very little or no love, whereas Maddy gained love from her family though she didn’t realise, and so went elsewhere to find love.
Using Carl as his example, Moloney illustrates how lack of love can affect a person. Carl's parents didn’t demonstrate any love to Carl, so he became very self-conscious and unable to show any emotion. Carl's father left when he was born which left his mother to look after and raise him and therefore it effected Carl deeply. Carl has an eagerness to turn into a "concrete statue", which establishes his inability to operate properly and build himself as a person, because of the pain of rejection from his own family. he never knew what true love was until he met the Duncan family. In contrast to, the "concrete statue" when Carl and Kerry made the vegetable garden he experiences love and appreciation for the first time from his mother, though it doesn’t last for very long.
…show more content…
The vegetable garden dies alongside Carl and his mother's relationship. Moloney demonstrates lack of love in other ways throughout the book in the other characters as well. Appling Harley as his model, Moloney shows how lack of love, care and attention can really harm people and they can turn to negative activities.
Harley's parents didn’t display any love or guidance to Harley. He was very rebellious and did not listen to anything anyone would say. He would run off all the time and spent most of his time with his bike and when he and Carl went to live in Wattle Beach he tried to get people's attention by stealing and vandalising from Nugent's store and as a result was given the name as a juvenile delinquent. Beryl chained Harley up like a dog as a punishment which made him misbehave even more because all he wanted was love. Moloney has shown through other characters that lack of love can affect them in a bad
way. With Maddy as his representation, Moloney demonstrates how love can turn you blind. Maddy was brought up in a loving family, but due to her father's gruff personality, she goes to find love in Nathan Trelfo who turns her life upside down though she does not realise it because of her blind love, Nathan leaves her in times of need and uses her for his own popularity growth. When Maddy was in need Nathan never helped her. Nathan did nothing for her and left it up to Justine and Carl were left help her when she had got very sick at the club. Maddy finds true love in Carl and Justine and realises that Nathan never loved her and he was only using her. For the first time she feels happy, loved and joyful. James Moloney has shown how lack of love can affect a person through Carl and his low self-esteem, Harley and his lack of guidance, and Maddy, who got love from her family, but never knew it and so went down the wrong path until Carl and Justine came and put her back onto the right path. Moloney displays how love can really make you grow as a person but when you don’t have love you can get mislead like all three of these characters.
“I looked anxiously. I didn’t see anybody… I’d keep my head up and my eyes open-`You got a smoke to spare?’” (Walters 3) In Shattered, Eric Walters hauls the reader through the life of Ian, the protagonist who experiences the joy of helping others. Throughout the white pine award novel, Ian is continually helping people around him realize that their life isn’t perfect and they ought to alter it somewhat. Furthermore, the author carefully compares the significance of family and how importance they are to everyone’s life. Right through the book, Eric Walters demonstrates the theme of compassion through the use of Ian helping Jack overcome his drinking problems, showing Berta the value of patriot and always there for the less fortunate.
... age of Gene Forrester. Because Finny causes Gene to grow up, we are able to realize that one must grow up to move on in life. In that process of growing up, several people impact your life. This novel shows us how our identity is basically created by those who are present in our lives; however we must not measure our abilities against another person (Overview: A Separate Peace 2). We are shown how the impact of one person can make a great difference. The goodness in people is what one should always take away from a relationship. This is shown in the relationship between Gene and Finny. The experiences Finny gives Gene cause him to grow up and become a better person because of them.
The story describes the protagonist who is coming of age as torn between the two worlds which he loves equally, represented by his mother and his father. He is now mature and is reflecting on his life and the difficulty of his childhood as a fisherman. Despite becoming a university professor and achieving his father’s dream, he feels lonely and regretful since, “No one waits at the base of the stairs and no boat rides restlessly in the waters of the pier” (MacLeod 261). Like his father, the narrator thinks about what his life could have been like if he had chosen another path. Now, with the wisdom and experience that comes from aging and the passing of time, he is trying to make sense of his own life and accept that he could not please everyone. The turmoil in his mind makes the narrator say, “I wished that the two things I loved so dearly did not exclude each other in a manner that was so blunt and too clear” (MacLeod 273). Once a decision is made, it is sometimes better to leave the past and focus on the present and future. The memories of the narrator’s family, the boat and the rural community in which he spent the beginning of his life made the narrator the person who he is today, but it is just a part of him, and should not consume his present.
“Into The Wild” by John Krakauer is a non-fiction biographical novel which is based on the life of a young man, Christopher McCandless. Many readers view Christopher’s journey as an escape from his family and his old life. The setting of a book often has a significant impact on the story itself. The various settings in the book contribute to the main characters’ actions and to the theme as a whole. This can be proven by examining the impact the setting has on the theme of young manhood, the theme of survival and the theme of independent happiness.
Bone is enthralled with the black and white of Christianity, the definitive line drawn between good and evil, because she can see where the love is, and what it does. She believes she can see that other people truly love one another, and believing this, she thinks the has a better grasp on the abstract idea of love. However, as Bone later discovers, love is abstract, and being abandoned by her mother, she never truly figures it out. The problem within, for Bone, is that love is a conceptual idea, and that, really, it means something different to each person. Not only that, but love is used by others, in ways that may not suit anyone else's conceptions of the idea. So when Anney insists to Bone and everyone else that Glen loves her and her girls, Bone tends, of course, to believe her, and thus the idea of love is transferred to how Glen treats Bone.
As he trudges across the docks towards the unfamiliar, suit-clad man looming like utopia in the distance, Terry Malloy is clearly a product of his relationships. His rapport-catalyzed metamorphosis from a follower of Johnny Friendly to a genuine “contender” is profoundly powerful, however the ending is bleak – with corruption still lingering as the gate slides closed behind the men, engulfing them into another cycle of exploitation as Bernstein’s music reaches a haunting shrill.
Throughout Kaye Gibbon’s novels, each unified character portrays a resemblance to overcome their obstacles through hope. In Gibbon’s first novel, Ellen Foster the main character, Ellen a young child struggles to survive and live a normal childhood. Making matters worse, Ellen’s father was a drunken alcoholic who physically abuses her mother and sexually harasses his own daughter. As a result, Ellen’s mother commits suicide and her father dies from over dosage. As her, own parents abandon their precious child; Ellen was alone in search of a new home and family. As hope motivates Ellen to seek forward and find her new home she begins to believe what an ideal family would be like, “I had not figured out how to go about getting one for the most part, but I had a feeling it could be got”. Similar in Ellen’s case, in Gibbon’s second novel A Virtuous Woman, Jack is in search to regain himself after a heartbreak loss to his wife Ruby who died several months prior from lung cancer. Jack is an old farmer and relied heavily towards Ruby. He is now left on his own, he acknowledges that only hope may lead him back on his tracks and leave all the crucial memories behind.
‘I’ll Give You the Sun’ is a book about two twins and their teenage lives at ages thirteen, fourteen and sixteen, told in both of their perspectives, one is in the perspective of the twin boy, Noah, on the events that occurs in their early years, and the other is in the perspective of the twin girl, Jude, who tells the tales of their later years. This book explores love in many different ways. ‘I’ll Give You the Sun’ explores love between family and lovers, and the conflict that occurs with love. There are many things that make me I believe that the book, ‘I’ll Give You the Sun’ by Jandy Nelson has an unbelievable plot. This can be seen from how Jude is said to be able to see her grandmother and her mother’s ghost. The story
At the age of ten, most children are dependent on their parents for everything in their lives needing a great deal of attention and care. However, Ellen, the main character and protagonist of the novel Ellen Foster, exemplifies a substantial amount of independence and mature, rational thought as a ten-year-old girl. The recent death of her mother sends her on a quest for the ideal family, or anywhere her father, who had shown apathy to both she and her fragile mother, was not. Kaye Gibbons’ use of simple diction, unmarked dialogue, and a unique story structure in her first novel, Ellen Foster, allows the reader to explore the emotions and thoughts of this heroic, ten-year-old girl modeled after Gibbons’ own experiences as a young girl.
In “A Prayer for Owen Meany”, John Irving reveals Owen by telling the story of his life in complete detail as the focus of the first person narrative, while the other character, Owen, will have the bulk of his life told as he interacts with John. Although, much of the story concentrates on some of the more static characters revealed through indirect presentation—characters who remain virtually the same once out of their teen years—it is necessary in order to shed light on the characters of Owen and John.
Harley is nineteen and the legal guardian of his three younger sisters: Amber (sixteen), Misty (twelve), and Jody (six). His conflicts range from having to raise these three girls while working two jobs, trying to be like “other guys,” mentally sorting out all the complications that come with having a mother who murdered an abusive father, and coming to grips with his tortured and confusing past. As Harley continues to roughly go through his therapy sessions, the deeper truths about his abusive upbringing reveal themselves, including the reasons for Amber’s strange behavior about Harley secretly dating Callie Mercer (explanation will come later), and her promiscuous sex life. I think the major conflict would have to be Harley facing who he is and what his family is.
1. Steven L. Layne’s This Side of Paradise is a science fiction novel meant for young adults and told by the perspective of a brilliant high school student in the tenth grade, older observant brother, and caring person in general, who solves multiple mysteries that lie within Paradise in an attempt to return to the normality of a life he once had. 2. Jack Edward Barrett, the decently charming older brother, protagonist, and main character, notices a change in his father’s, Chip’s, mood, feeling uneasy along with his brother, Troy, mother, and grandmother. 3. The family abruptly and quickly moves to an area that belongs to Mr. Eden, Mr. Barrett’s boss, which screams nothing but trouble to Jack, Troy, and Gram. 4. After numerous difficulties
Think back to your childhood; a time where everything and anything was possible. Magic and imagination was something that was used everyday in your life. Now think about where you are in your life right now. There is no longer any magic or mystery. Neil Gaiman and Antoine De Saint-Exupry write two different novels that include multitudes of fantasy. But in the midst of all of the fantasy is the fact that children and adults think differently. Both of these novels explore the idea that children think positively while adults grow out of that stage, developing a pessimistic way of thinking from what they experience in life.
It can be surmised that there are more shades to love than we are presented with by today’s superficial society, something depicted successfully by both Walker and Salinger. It is evident that through both major and minor characters in the novels ‘’The Color Purple’’ and ‘’The Catcher in the Rye’’, the protagonists had been beings stripped of confidence and an identity. Both Holden and Celie have catalysts throughout, that through love, coax their well-being. Through various themes such as sibling love, homosexual love and absence of parental love we can see the utopian and dystopian elements to the savior of the characters.
This novel shows how the seemingly separate and distinct lives of individuals can be intertwined. Life may present chaos and devastation through tragedy and the poor choices of individuals, but the resilience and ability to arise in order to create a new life is within the hearts of all people. This is emphasized in the end of the novel, when McCann writes, “The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough”. Life often takes people on a journey that is forged in hardships and despair to eventually bring them to where they were meant to be. As the world continues to spin in orbit, life may also spin out of one’s control, but life goes on.