Honors English Deibler 5

Prompt 1) despite the very severe situation, i think that mark’s thoughts are justifiable. throughout his life, mark has had to experience things that no one should have. starvation, poverty, sickness, and violence are just some of the countless things that he has to deal with, and on a daily basis at that. in addition, i think he realized that none of these things would be getting better for awhile, as he was not even old enough to start a job or make a difference. the enormous amount of pure stress and suffering he had to endure does give his contemplation of suicide some justification.

However, to contradict myself like i normally do, i know that he did not realize all of the consequences of suicide. he does mention some things, like how his family would miss him and such, but he was not looking into the situation deeply enough. firstly, mark was, at that time, the only hope for the family in the near future, as his siblings were still much younger. his mother wished so much that he would continue school and get a job, thus supporting the family more. im positive mark really only focused on the current effects, like people mourning and such, and not the possible problems in the future.

Prompt 2) “Through some superhuman effort, it seemed, the man, now bleeding heavily from gaping wounds, managed to break through the cordon of butchers and make a mad dash for the street. The tsotsis didn’t chase after him immediately, tarrying a while to rummage through the packages he had dropped. The wounded man staggered left and right, clutching his slashed throat, which spewed blood. I was now bathed in perspiration. My breath was coming out in spurts. As the wounded man staggered past me, I detected tubelike things unwinding like a spool of thread through his slashed overalls. His guts were spilling from his belly! Nausea overcame me. I wanted desperately to faint and be away from it all. I thought I would panic any minute. The fatally wounded man turned his bleeding head in the direction of the fortified shacks, as if pleading for them to open and let him in. There was a dreadful glint in his eyes, the flint of death creeping in. I can never forget the look on his face for as long as I live” (pg 163-164). This passage was possibly one of the most gruesome and horrible ones in the novel so far. it really demonstrates the total brutality and unjust rage the tsotis use against blacks. i think mark really became angry at this, confused and enraged that such a thing could be done so quickly and easily, with no one helping. also, the fact that they were blacks as well probably angered him, because the police, who had probably witnessed the brutality of the police when they were younger, were now performing the same horrible deeds that they had hated as children.

Prompt 3) -In Mark’s situation, do you think suicide is an acceptable way out?

-Why do the police, who were probably in a situation similar to mark’s at one point, commit such violent acts against the people in alexandra?

The effectiveness of portraying a dystopian society is often better in a fictional writing, however there are situations where it is just as effective, if not more. In stories such as Harrison Bergeron, the author obviously had great success portraying a dystopia. He was able to craft such a strange and dysfunctional world, which has not been paralleled by anything we know today. In addition, the fictional aspects such as super strength and being able to handicap normally uncontrollable things such as gravity and mental capacity would have been entirely impossible in a non-fiction writing. However, there are also some exceptions where a non-fiction story far exceeds what a fiction writer could do. In Kaffir Boy, the situation is just so utterly horrible and dysfunctional that no one in their right mind could have thought of something equally horrible. The troubles and hardships experienced by the peoples in the apartheid could not be recreated to the same extent by someone who has not seen it first hand. For example, the many raids of their home, the prostitution scene, their utter poverty and hunger, and the brutal punishments for the most menial of things demonstrate one of the fewer exceptions of how non-fiction can portray a better dystopia. However, this is one of few exceptions of this case, with many other stories being much more effective of demonstrating a dystopia, such as The Lottery and Animal Farm. Really, it just boils down to the author’s writing ability, and the situations at hand.