“About a boy” is a story about twelve year old Marcus and 36-year old Will and how they develop their friendship. Fiona, Marcus’ mother, tries to not be like everyone else and tells Marcus to be himself, which in his situation means to be like her, and is therefore making troubles for him with fitting in at his new school. Will on the other hand is the complete different from Marcus. He is a grown-up man but thinks like a teenager. The points I will be addressing are how depression is shown in the novel, reactions to suicide and how the characters heal and how this affects Will and Marcus’ relationship together.
The bullying of Marcus leads to his low self-esteem and because of this he shows depressive tendencies through his thoughts presented in the novel. Fiona is incapable of seeing her own mistakes, and therefore, she raises her son as a boy who apparently is every parent’s fantasy, but also is unfamiliar in the regular childhood life such as clothing, music and speech, and all this results in that he’s being bullied at school. “as he was usually wearing the wrong shoes or the wrong trousers, and his haircut was wrong all the time, every day of the week, he didn’t have to do much to send them [school kids] demented” (pg.13) Even when Fiona finally hears about the social overwhelm he experiences every day, she’s still thinks that everything that matters is that he is himself and that he shouldn’t care about the bullies and what they think of him. Ellie helps him in various situations and defends him against other kids who want to bully him. Ellie is very resourceful because Marcus can talk to her about his situations in and out of school. His divorced mother is periodically depressed and has also contemplated suicide. Marcus ha...
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...s a supporting factor for Marcus for when he gets bullied at school and when his mother reduces to another sad depression. When Marcus looks up to someone for help, it proves that he has inner strength and becoming more of a kid. He asks Will to help with his mother's feeling to suicide. Marcus wants Will to be his ‘father figure’ “I don’t know what I need. Only Will knows what I need” (pg. 117). This unusual friendship was a great team for both the characters, as they both needed help on different aspects of their and as a result, becoming better for Will, Marcus and Fiona.
Marcus and Will, the ones that have very little in common, use their differences to change their characteristics such as a need for recognition, finding their identity and fighting lonesomeness. Without those two together they would not have been able to achieve what they accomplished together.
Imagine if your best friend or someone close to you suddenly dies of a fatal disease. The death of this person would physically and mentally inflict trauma. All though the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield is a grieving seventeen year old because he endures a traumatic experience at the age of 13. His 11 year old brother, Allie, dies of leukemia, and this affects Holden throughout the novel. It causes him to yearn for his innocence and childhood back because he wants to return to the stage in his life when there are no worries. He realizes that it is not realistic to become a child again, and he begins to accept the fact that he must grow up and set an example for his sister, Phoebe. Growing up with the loss of a close brother, Holden wants to be a protector of all innocence, and later in the novel, he begins to notice he must find a solution to his traumatic experiences in order to become successful in his lifetime.
Friendship can be debated as both a blessing and a curse; as a necessary part of life to be happy or an unnecessary use of time. Friends can be a source of joy and support, they can be a constant stress and something that brings us down, or anywhere in between. In Book 9 of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses to great lengths what friendship is and how we should go about these relationships. In the short story “Melvin in the Sixth Grade” by Dana Johnson, we see the main character Avery’s struggle to find herself and also find friendship, as well as Melvin’s rejection of the notion that one must have friends.
William Pollack, in his article “Inside the World of Boys: Behind the Mask of Masculinity”, discusses on how boy tries to hide behind the mask and the stereotypical of masculinity. He demonstrates how boy hide their deepest though and feelings and real self. Pollack open the essay with “a fourteen-year-old boy, he is doing badly in school and he might fail algebra, but when teacher or his parent ask about it, he said everything is just fine. He hide his true identity behind the mask, and let no one see his true self.” After read the story, I think the story is really useful source to write an essay about how boy become men and they are emotionless.
Even though Melinda’s society rejected her, Ivy becomes an important friend to Melinda. Ivy supported Melinda and made her feel confident when Melinda wasn’t too happy. An instance of this is when Ivy helped Melinda feel better when she was down. After Melinda tried to talk to Rachel, and got rejected, Ivy noticed how depressed Melinda was and she tried to make her feel better. As the book states, “Someone touches my arm gently. ‘Melinda?’ It’s Ivy. ‘Can you take the late bus? I want to show you something.’... There’s more. Different pens, different handwriting, conversations between some writers, arrows to longer paragraphs. It’s better than taking out a billboard. I feel like I can fly” (Anderson 185-186). Ivy was trying to make Melinda feel better because she could tell how sad Melinda was. When the author writes “Different pends, different handwriting, conversations between some writers, arrows to longer paragraphs”, she’s trying to show the reader that Melinda has the support of many people so instead of being thrown around like a rag doll, these people gave her strength and became her backbone. They allowed her to stand up and resist being tossed around. As the
...development of your identity. Gregor, the family man, tried as hard as he can to be there for his family. His family is everything he has got and this is his identity. While Sonny, the trouble kid turned musician, abandoned his family’s suggestions and went his own way by keeping true to himself and being dedicative to a specific goal. Both of these characters are polar opposites in a sense that one follows his family and the other does not. But, both characters were forced into difficult situations and both have experienced some sort of sacrifice.
In creating a character so confident, insecure, manipulative, and unstable, Reginald McKnight also creates a character we can sympathize with. McKnight created a sense that Marcus was a confident individual, who set himself apart from society, but in doing so, he set himself up for failure. Where the one woman who could make all the difference began to fear him. Once that happened, everything went downhill as soon as Marcus began to dismiss Ritas response at any given point. Whether or not he was fully aware, Marcus built walls around him and avoided speaking about his personal life with any sort of depth. This, if anything, makes us aware that negative remarks and statements can lead to a very negative result. We are forced to form our own conclusion and conform to the fact that no matter how many miles away, one person may never change.
“One name, two fates.” The characters of the two Wes Moores are a reflection of our society in which people with similar background can choose different paths in the metaphorical fork in the road, purely because of how the people in their surrounding environment shaped them. Joy, Mary, Captain Ty Hill, Tony, Justin, Alicia and Cheryl, also many other chracter I didn’t mention about, those people are all significant factors in shaping the two Wes Moores’ life.
The film chronicles the histories of three fathers, and manages to relates and link their events and situations. First is Mitchell Stephens and his relationship with his drug-addict daughter. Second is Sam, and the secret affair he is having with his young daughter Nicole. He is somewhat of a narcissistic character because of his preoccupation with himself and pleasing himself, and his lack of empathy throughout the film for the others in the town. Third is Billy, who loves his two children so much that he follows behind the school bus every day waving at them. Billy is also having an affair with a married woman who owns the town’s only motel. On the exterior the town is an average place with good people just living their lives. But, beneath all the small town simplicity is a web of lies and secrets, some which must be dealt with in the face of this tragedy.
...n effort to get along. Their friendship was so secure and they were so pleased that they had learnt to overcome the racial issues and spent the time to get to know each other. They both still acted as if they were better than each other and they weren?t going to attempt to change this, even when they were playing football together. If something went wrong they would blame each other, or disagree, and always end up fighting and usually about different things, like who was better and right. By observing the friendship emerging between Gerry and Julius other people began to realize that having friends of a different race was not wrong. This also made Gerry and Julius?s friendship grow even stronger as they made a huge impact on the community. They started to understand each other and created a bond that was so strong that their appearance didn?t seem to matter anymore.
Much success has come from the novel due to its highly relatable nature and has made others’ lives easier to make sense of. The novel’s importance is that it is there to describe the rough period where one changes from a child to an adult, and accomplishes this through the blunt nature of Holden Caulfield, his lack of understanding of adults, and his dissatisfaction of life in general.
This theory is particularly evident in Morrison's development of Cholly, the man who raped his daughter. She could have portrayed him as a degenerate akin to Soaphead, a slimy character, who leaves us with a feeling of revulsion. Instead, step-by-step, she leads us through Cholly's life and experiences; so in the end, instead of hating him, we feel his pain.
This novel by J.D Salinger is about a rebellious teenage, Holden Caulfield. Holden's brother, Allie death affects Holden academics and future. Holden goes through many different experiences that make his pyschoanalytic traits stand out.
He explains that boys hide their feelings they may seem normal on the outside but on the inside they are hiding something. When they are asked if anything is wrong they say no everything is just fine. This is because ever since the boy was a child he has been taught not to express his emotions. Little boys are made to feel ashamed of their feelings. Also society places an emphasis on boys separating from their mother at an unnecessarily young age. Often the result of all this is that the boys decide to be silent. They learn to suffer quietly and retreat behind the mask. This is why the boys do not express their feelings, because they are told not to. What tells them not to is the boy code. It says the men should be stoic, stable, and independent. Boys are not to share their pain or grief openly. Also this code says the boys should be daring and do risky behaviors. The most traumatizing code is the fact that boys should not express feelings which might be mistakenly as “feminine” –dependence, warmth, and empathy. This causes boys to never act this way and hide these feelings. These are the reasons the “mask” is formed over the boy.
Will tries to teach Marcus about being ‘cool’. It is in this that the author makes the comment that in order for Marcus to be cool he must lose his individualism and eccentricities and become what Fiona and Marcus refer to as ‘sheep’ or in other words, conforming with society, and in essence, becoming more like Will. As much as a reader may disagree that in order to prevent bullying one must conform, it is hard to say that it is completely invalid. Everyone, at some point in their lives deals with bullying. There is constant pressure to uphold a responsibility to act and dress in a specific manner which society deems fit. For instance, as a female teenager often those girls who do not look, act and dress in a certain feministic way are not considered as ‘popular’ as some of the others. Whilst in these aspects of a person is so petty and unimportant the same thing nonetheless reoccurs throughout generations.
A significant relationship in this text is the relationship between will and Marcus, will and Marcus develop a relationship throughout the text that help them function as human beings. Both characters need this relationship because will has no purpose for his life and Marcus needs the support from a male figure. Will is a 36 years old male who is single, selfish, Immature, is looking for single parents to take advantage of. Marcus on the other hand is a 12 year old boy, lives with his single mum, is bullied, abandoned by his friends, and finds it hard to fit in. These two characters are completely different in all aspects, but this only brings them closer. Will is reluctant to commit to a relationship and so when he finds Rachael who is just as reluctant as himself he has to start lying to her about him having a child so he can join a single parents group called SPAT, this is how Marcus is introduced to Will. Wills first impression of Marcus are that he is “weird kid”(Pg 46), he also thinks that Marcus acts older than he actually is whereas Will is an immature adult and people believe that he is just a child in a grownups body. As the text progresses the relationship that Marcus and will establish grows stronger and stronger. Because Marcus has no father f...