Honors English Deibler 5

Prompt One

Even though he is going through such a horrible time, and he witnessed such a terrible thing I do not think that he should even be thinking about killing himself. I agree, seeing someone be killed is a really frightening and probably traumatic experience, thinking about ending your life because you saw that and think how easy it must be to just die is understandable and, not to be cliche, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Being hungry, yeah it’s hard. I know after only going 30 hours without any food I was starving. But wanting to die because your hungry is not a good reason either.

Mark felt alone and abandoned by the world. That feeling of loneliness is a horrible feeling but people feel it everyday. Yes, some of them kill themselves but that just means that they did not want to be strong enough. You have to WANT to survive and WANT to get through the hard times in life in order to get though whatever it is you might be going through. Mark is only ten years old and he is already contemplating death and suicide and reading that makes me hurt for him because I can not imagine what it must have felt like to be hungry everyday, all day, 24/7. I can’t imagine what it is like to be cold and lonely. But obviously, if he has made it this far, he s strong enough to make it through anything.

Prompt Two

” My tenth birthday came and went, like all the other nine, uncelebrated. Having never had a normal childhood, I didn’t miss birthdays; to me they were simply like other days: to be survived. Strangely, however, on each birthday I somehow got the feeling that I had aged more than a year. Suffering seemed to age me more than birthdays. Though I was only ten, black life seemed to have, all along, been teaching me the same lessons of survival, and making me the same demands upon me for that survival, as it was doing to grown-ups. Thus, emotionally, I had aged far beyond my ten years.”

chapter 27 ; page 162; paragraph 1.

I don’t know if this was as life altering as it seems to be to me, but I feel as though only being ten years old and feeling like you are far older than you are emotionally is really hard for Mark. Saying he is well beyond his ten years emotionally is a very strange thing because during the book so far, besides going to school, you never get to see him be a kid. So it actually makes sense that he feels this way about himself because I honestly believe he is too.

Also, never having celebrated a birthday except when you go to sleep that night thankful that you survived, is a horrible way to have spent a life. I don’t know if it is just because we live in such a fortunate place where almost, if not everyone, celebrates their birthday, but I just feel horrible knowing that in ten years he hasn’t received a gift or celebrated in anyway. We often forget how lucky we are to be in such an amazing country and how less fortunate other people are, even in America.

Prompt Three

Does he ever have the right things for school? He gets beaten everyday for not being well prepared, why do the teachers do this if they know he and his family can not afford the right supplies?

Does he even go back to school?

There are many ways to present different types of controversy. The most effective way for me is reading non-fiction novels because the story is real. It is not some made up story someone thought. The three other stories we read got the point across but, I felt it was more of an issue while reading “Kaffer Boy.” The book explains in such detail all of the terribly things the author went through as a child. The constant raids, the fear of white men and the Peri-Urban haunted Mark and his family all their lives. Having your father taken away and not knowing when or even if he will return had to have been heart wrenching and I could not bear to read how horribly the police treated such young children. This five year old boy had to watch over his little siblings while his mother hid from the Peri-Urban. In Animal Farm, the animals were over ruled by a drunken farmer then again by a greedy ban of pigs. In Harrison Bergeron, every one was set to be equal, except for the one who set that law. In The Lottery, even though they do not want to win, every one in town participates in this lottery but who ever wins in stoned to death. The three stories are interesting and tell of horrible things but non of them really get the point across that there is such a horrible thing such as a dystopia to me.