Perspectives of Death

Death is an inevitable part of life and yet, due to lack of experience, the majority of children are uncertain of its meaning. For adults, death is more familiar as they have experienced or witnessed the range of feelings that accompany a traumatic loss - anger, confusion and sadness. As much as adults may try to shelter children from the realities of death, death intrudes into their lives through television, newspapers, radio, and the internet, shaping their perspectives. In the novel “Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew,” Ben’s child perspective of death is shaped by the stylized, intimate and romantic deaths he witnesses in Hollywood movies. While both Ben’s child and adult perspectives of death are displayed in the novel, the comparison between the two suggests that Ben’s child self has a false reality of death, whereas his experienced, adult self, has a full and rational understanding that death does not always happen in the dramatic way he perceived it to as child.

By blending Ben’s adult perspective on the personal death of his father in with his child perspective of death in general, the reader can note how the two perspectives differ. Ben’s child perspective of death is shaped by the unrealistic deaths he witnesses in Hollywood war movies. He often re-enacts the dialogue between his favourite characters in the intimate moment when one is slowly dying in the others arms. He uses the verb tenses “would say, and he’d say” in his dialogue indicating how he has come to completely understand the genre so that he can extrapolate from all the movies he has seen and puts these scenes together to depict death. The author takes the reader from Ben’s child perspective of death, in which he perceives death to be similar to those in quaint war ...

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... fighting is sometimes a deep, emotional struggle and not just the dramatic scene he imagined during his childhood.

Death is very much a part of Ben’s childhood with all the stories he hears about the holocaust, the Hollywood war movies, the death of the catfish, his Johnny Seven, toy soldiers and his father’s death. As Ben matures and evolves from his childlike nature to the role of an adult he is faced with the personal loss of his father, which provides him with a rational understanding of death. In conclusion, death is not just an adult concern; kids are just as obsessed with death if not more. However due to their inexperience on the matter, their imaginations and their exposure to death through movies and in books, they may have a misguided perception of the reality of death.

Works Cited

Ross, Stuart. Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. Toronto: ECW Press, 2011.