“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.
They both know that their daughter will break if they were to split up. To keep in mind absolutely no one knows anything about Melinda's attack, and if her parents were to find out she knows that they would split. On the first day of high school Melinda finds herself alone, along with another new girl named Heather. Heather is a new student hoping to find a popular group of friends. Heather and Melinda set out to find a good group of friends, but finally settle on a group of preppy and rich kids named the Marthas. The girls are not wanted by the group, and now they have really have nowhere to go. They only have each other. Sadly in the beginning half of the book Heather realizes that Melinda is too depressed for her, and not good enough for her. Sadly Heather dumps Melinda leaving her by herself. Consequently Melinda starts to quit school. She goes to the mall multiple times and starts to not care, once she is caught she starts to self harm herself. Melinda becomes severely depressed as shown on page 81... ¨ I just want to sleep. The whole point of not talking about it, silencing the memory, is to make it go away. It won't. I'll need brain surgery to cut it out of my head. ¨ This shows how Melinda just wants to be left alone. Being raped was one of the biggest incidents that affected her mental life plus her social life. On page 61 the text says ¨ I get out of my bed and take down the mirror. I put
Her grandmother, father and mother all have a significant amount to teach her about herself and about herself. Each in their own way has the power to impart some personal experience that will assist Josie in her journey. She does come to learn, however, that these realisations can do much harm. Overall, however, her journey in regard to her family is a cathartic experience that solves many issues she was forced to deal with.
The film’s brilliance lies in the choice to show three distinct familial units with varying and different responses to their disadvantaged circumstances. The three boys who are the main subject of this film each experience a set of challenges and disadvantages associated with growing up in poverty. Appachey lives with his mother and younger siblings and has little to no adult supervision because his single mother must work long hours to support the family. Harley lives with his grandmother because his mother is incarcerated for attempting to kill the man who sexually abused her son. Harley suffers from anger and personality disorders and has a difficult time fitting in at school. Andrew lives with his father, mother and sister but is subject to repeated and frequent moves due his father’s inability to secure stable employment. His mother also suffers from significant mental illness and bouts of manic
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.
As humans, we all embody different qualities and characteristics that make us unique. I might find someone with completely opposite traits than me, and the contrasts between us may become apparent. In East of Eden, John Steinbeck introduces many such contrasts, most notably good versus evil and fate versus free will. He creates characters to represent these contrasts, some at the extreme ends of the spectrum, and some in the areas in between. The most significant of these characters are Cal and Aron Trask. Throughout the second part of the novel, the brothers visibly clash. We are not really introduced to them until Chapter 24, but their differences are greatly stressed from that point on. Steinbeck uses these characters to show the contrast
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.
The boys live a new life without adults and social norms. Roles in their makeshift society have been carried out but Jack’s self-imposed responsibility only aims to fulfill his personal agenda. Jack’s fervent character is aggressiveness masquerading as passion. This destructive behavior sends Jack to a faster decline to savagery in relation to his peers.
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.
... is reminiscing about the fact that she messed up and it cost the boy’s life. The overall tone in the end of the novel is depressing as the governess’s actions and attitudes about current events tend to reflect the tone of the situation.
Jack is the biggest character in this book. Jack is a 12-year-old boy that is very good at baseball and very passionate about it as well. He lives in a fairly big city in New York called, Walton. His family has lived there his whole life and the baseball tradition kept on. His father played for the same baseball team that jack is playing for when he was a young kid. Jack was described in the book as big tall, average build, blonde hair, and a good head on his shoulders. Jack’s personality wasn’t really noticeable until later in the book. At the beginning of the book he was just an average kid that loved to play baseball. He had his normal friends that he hung out with every day and an older brother that he really looked up to. Jack loved his friends and his family just as much as he loved baseball. Then one day when jack got home his mother and father were crying and when he asked why they were crying they said that his brother had died is a tragic motorcycle accident. This tore Jack up inside more than anyone would have ever thought. As a result of his brother’s death he quit baseball and shunned some of his friends. When he did this he come to get really close to a girl that he started hanging out with. Her name was Cassie and she was the reason he was able to hold it all
Overall, Mark and Bryon show great similarities and differences between both of them in this novel. You see this through their actions, thoughts, and even their pasts. Although many of the things they do are identical, their viewpoints and perspective are completely
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.
In both the film and the book This Boy’s Life Tobias Wolff is surrounded by bad role models and terrible father figures. Wolff and his mother are constantly looking for the complete family life and find themselves in a series of bad situations on their quest. In the book Toby’s relationship with his mother Rosemary is illustrated in a clear and deeper manner but the movie just didn’t seem to focus on it enough. This paper will evaluate the portrayal of Toby’s relationship with his mother and the men in their lives as told in the memoir and the film.
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...
About a boy is a novel which follows the lives of two people: Marcus and Will. Marcus is a strange kid who struggles with growing up, he is in need for acceptance outside of his own family, he is searching for his own identity, he is a victim of constant bullying and is suffering with his lack of parental care. Will is the complete opposite to Marcus. He is a 36 year old who is in his own extended childhood, he is searching for his identity not wanting to lose his youth, he ‘prides himself on his cool’ and simply can’t find a way to grow up. It is when these two opposing characters meet that they soon act as catalysts for each other. From their dependence on others they find independence for themselves within one another.