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Violence in children's literature
The Effects of Violence Among Children
The Effects of Violence Among Children
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In The Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, the kid goes through many tough times starting off from a very young age. The kid in some cases has a taste for mindless violence that he fulfills often. The aggression the kid shows seems to come natural to him in a way that it seems to be in his nature to be a savage on a day to day basis. The kid is born evil and becoming an expert in acts of savage violence throughout the story. The acts of savage violence the kid portrays throughout the first couple chapters including the way he treats the barkeep, make it hard not to believe the kid is evil. The scene starts out when the kid walks in the bar and right off the bat hears the barkeep talking in Spanish. The kid doesn’t like people that speak Spanish because of the time period. The boy then asks if there is anything he could do to get a few drinks. After the kid sweeps the bar thoroughly and …show more content…
After being beat up by Toadvine, the kid is asked to help Toadvine kill Old Sidney. The kid agrees to help Toadvine and they go into the hotel. In the hotel they go up to Old Sidney’s room and catch it on fire. When they do Old Sidney runs out and Toadvine starts beating him. Toadvine begin to pry the eyeball out of Old Sidney’s eye and is holding him down when he says to the kid “aw, kick him, honey”, and so the kid kicked old Sidney (McCarthy, 13). The clerk then runs upstairs and says “Toadvine you son of a bitch” (McCarthy, 13). When he does Toadvine kicks him in the throat and he falls down the steps. The kid, while walking down the steps, kicks the already wounded clerk further down the stairs. The kid was never provoked by anything to treat the clerk the way he did. Such unprovoked violence can only come from a person that is born evil. After that the kid, showing no remorse, jumps over the clerk and heads out the door to continue his mindless acts of violence
At the beginnings of the 1900s, some leading magazines in the U.S have already started to exhibit choking reports about unjust monopolistic practices, rampant political corruption, and many other offenses; which helped their sales to soar. In this context, in 1904, The Appeal to Reason, a leading socialist weekly, offered Sinclair $500 to prepare an exposé on the meatpacking industry (Cherny). To accomplish his mission, Sinclair headed to Chicago, the center of the meatpacking industry, and started an investigation as he declared“ I spent seven weeks in Packingtown studying conditions there, and I verified every smallest detail, so that as a picture of social conditions the book is as exact as a government report” (Sinclair, The Industrial Republic 115-16). To get a direct knowledge of the work, he sneaked into the packing plants as a pretended worker. He toured the streets of Packingtown, the area near the stockyards where the workers live. He approached people, from different walks of life, who could provide useful information about conditions in Packingtown. At the end of seven weeks, he returned home to New Jersey, shut himself up in a small cabin, wrote for nine months, and produced The Jungle (Cherny).
John Small, a fourteen year old boy in Uptown St. Paul, proceeds into the Suburban World Cinema, anxious to see Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. He is equipped with a parental note, replete with the phone number where his parents can be reached to verify that they did indeed author the note should its authenticity be questioned. John pushes seven crumpled-up dollar bills and the folded note into the metal dugout under the box office window, only to be met with a tinny, disinterested voice booming through the round silver speaker mounted on the window: "No children under seventeen allowed! Sorry. This note isn't gonna cut it."
Cormac McCarthy's setting in Blood Meridian is a landscape of endless and diverse beauty. McCarthy highlights the surprising beauty of combinations of scrubby plants, jagged rock, and the fused auburn and crimson colors of the fiery wasteland that frame this nightmarish novel. Various descriptions, from the desolate to the scenic, feature McCarthy's highly wrought, lyrical prose. Such descriptions of the divine landscape seem to serve a dual function. While being an isolated highlight to this gruesome novel, McCarthy's beautiful setting also serves as an intricate device in defining the novel's themes and creating the reality in which it is set.
In a single sense, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is a book in regards to the West; it is just a book that bridges this gap between your “old” mythological along with the “new” revisionist Traditional Western and creates a brand new direction to the genre to follow along with that of a more practical myth. It works by using and inverts various classic tasks of the cliché Western and sets them having themes in addition to issues connected with modern traditional interpretations of the West, generating a brand new type of Western. The novel follows an adolescent runaway from home with some sort of disposition intended for violence, acknowledged only as "the kid, " who had been born inside Tennessee during the famous Leonids meteor showers of 1833. Inside late 1840s, he first meets a large and absolutely hairless personality, Judge Holden, for a religious resurrection in Nacogdoches, Texas. There, Holden displays his darker nature by falsely accusing some sort of preacher involving raping both a little daughter girl plus a goat, inciting these attending the actual revival to physically strike and kill the preacher.
Employment is hard to find and hard to keep and a job isn’t always what one hoped for. Sometimes jobs do not sufficiently support our lifestyles, and all too frequently we’re convinced that our boss’s real job is to make us miserable. However, every now and then there are reprieves such as company holiday parties or bonuses, raises, promotions and even a half hour or hour to eat lunch that allows escape from monotonous workloads. Aside from our complaints, employment today for majority of American’s isn’t totally dreadful, and there always lies opportunity for promotion. American’s did not always experience this reality in their work places though, and not long past are days of abysmal and disgusting work conditions. In 1906 Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was published. His novel drastically transformed the way Americans felt about the unmitigated power corporations wielded in the ‘free’ market economy that was heavily propagandized at the turn of the century. Corporations do not have the same unscrupulous practices today because of actions taken by former President Theodore Roosevelt who felt deeply impacted by Sinclair’s famous novel. Back in early 1900’s in the meatpacking plants of Chicago the incarnation of greed ruled over the working man and dictated his role as a simple cog within an enormous insatiable industrial machine. Executives of the 1900’s meatpacking industry in Chicago, IL, conspired to work men to death, obliterate worker’s unions and lie to American citizens about what they were actually consuming in order to simply acquire more money.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair exemplifies a muckraking style in its often gory depictions of life in a meat packing factory, Sinclair writes of how the meat packing industry exploits its workers, many of whom are uneducated and poor in the same way a capitalist government exploits it's working class. Sinclair uses Symbolism in terms of physical objects, Objects that serve a metaphorical purpose, and oppressive tone, to persuade the reader that Capitalism leads to the declination and corruption of America and that the only way to remedy this is socialistic government.
Throughout this semester our class has explore the main topics of Humanity, Coming of Age, Personal and Cultural Identity, Love, and Death, by reading multiple short stories and poems. In the book, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, these topics play apart in his story between the eyes of a man and a little boy trying to survive their unfortunate situation. Examining each one of these topics in The Road helps understand the way McCarthy tries to explain the seriousness and meaning behind his view on the nature of humanity in his story. Humanity, Coming of Age and Death are the main topics that will compared with short stories and poems from this semester with the Road, these will show the nature of humanity that McCarthy must express to his readers.
“I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride.” The Count of Monte Cristo is a novel written by Alexander Dumas that tells the story of Edmond Dante a 19 year old sailor. The story begins with Edmond arriving into port with the news that he will become a captain of a ship, he is also engaged to a beautiful woman named Mercedes, Edmond is very well liked and has faced success early in life this causes jealousy between Edmond and three other men Danglars, Fernand Mondego, and Caderousse. Danglars the treasure of the ship Edmond was just appointed captain of becomes jealous purely for the reason that Edmond has become so successful at a young age. Fernand has become jealous of Edmond because of Fernand is in love with Edmonds fiancé Mercedes. Caderousse, Edmonds neighbor, is jealous of Edmond because of the fact that Edmond is so much luckier than Caderousse. Together these three men, Danglars Fernand and Caderousse, make a letter accusing Edmond of the act of treason. Edmond is in fact carrying a letter for the recently deceased captain of the ship to give to a group of Bonapartist in Paris so even though Edmond himself is not a Bonapartist, the task is still enough for him to be tried for treason. The prosecutor, Villefort sees through Danglars, Fernand and caderousse’s plan and decides not to send Edmond to Jail until Edmond reveals the name of the intended recipient who is Villerfort’s father. Not wanting to jeopardize his own career Villerfort sends Edmond to jail for treason. While in jail Edmond begins to think about suicide and falls into a depression. Edmond then begins planning his way to get revenge on the men who wronged him beginning with his plot to escape jail. Edmond Dante begins as a...
In all humans, evil exists. At some point we have to release it, and want to release it. For example, on the island Jack and Robert showed their evil while beating Wilfred, or even Robert who was hurt while the boys received pleasure out of his beating. Roger states, "He's going to beat Wilfred, I don't know why, he didn't say," (pg.159) as he giggles. Another example is when Robert is beaten by the boys for no reason in frenzy where he is the pig. They chant in chapter seven, "Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!" (pg. 114). These examples clearly show that the kids are letting their true evil get the better of them. As these boys are also humans, this also means that even if they were girls, and were exposed to a place where there was no civilization, they would want to let their evil out as well. It was philosophized by Thomas Hobbes- the famous English Philosopher, "All humans are born selfish and only seek their own personal interest, leading to violence and war." This quote is true and summarizes the children ...
Violence is often used in literature by antagonists to symbolize evil and darkness, and to represent the brutal force that opposes the characters. However, in the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, this is not the case. Violence in Blood Meridian is not used as a symbol of evil by the antagonist, but is used by all the main characters, including the protagonist, as a way of life. Blood Meridian is a fictional novel that documents the events of a character who is referred to as only “the kid”, as he joins the Glanton gang, a scalp hunting gang who targets Native Americans
In 1990, when he was 22 years old, Christopher McCandless ventured out into the Alaska wilderness in search for true happiness, and 2 years later he suffered a tragic death. An aspiring writer, Jon Krakauer, found McCandless’ story fascinating and chose to dedicate 3 years of his life to write a novel about him. The book entitled “Into the Wild” tells the tale of Christopher McCandless, an ill prepared transcendentalist longing for philosophical enrichment, who naïvely, failed to consider the dangers of isolating himself from human society for such a long period of time. Though Christopher McCandless made a courageous attempt to separate himself from society, in order to achieve self-fulfillment, the stubborn nature of this reckless greenhorn led him to his unfortunate demise.
To begin with, numerous reasons for why a child acts in the manner he exhibits and why he continues to exert such dangerous and even fatal schemes. Recent research shows that factors ranging from inherited personality traits to chemical imbalances and damages suffered in the womb can increase the odds that a child will become violent (Johnson 234). Experts argue that no one is predestined to a life of crime. They believe that influences such as repeated abuse, extreme neglect, poverty, media violence, and easy access to guns play the major role in molding children into criminals. The father of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer wonders, "If potential for evil is in the blood that some of us pass on to our children" (Seifert 23).
story is a young boy. The motive to kill is that he sees the boy’s
The Scarlet Letter is a blend of realism, symbolism, and allegory. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses historical settings for this fictional novel and even gives historical background information for the inspiration of the story of Hester Prynne in the introduction of The Scarlet Letter, ‘The Custom-House’. The psychological exploration of the characters and the author’s use of realistic dialogue only add to the realism of the novel. The most obvious symbol of the novel is the actual scarlet letter ‘A’ that Hester wears on her chest every day, but Hawthorne also uses Hester’s daughter Pearl and their surroundings as symbols as well. Allegory is present as well in The Scarlet Letter and is created through the character types of several characters in the novel.
McGillis, Roderick. “Children’s Literature: A World Accustomed to Violence.” Children’s Literature. Ed. Wendy Mass. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2001. 110- 119. Print.