St Columba’s College
Transition Year Programme : English Department
Extended Essay
CHILDHOOD
&
PARENTHOOD
Darcy Maule
Michaelmas Term
2013
Contents
1.Introduction
2.Setting
3.Main characters
4.Effects of parenthood
5.Conclusion
Introduction
Choosing new books to read has always been a challenge for me. I can never trust myself on picking up a book at random and begin by reading, for the fear of losing hope and eventually giving up on it. I usually stick to what’s popular at the moment and that has always worked out quite well. However, this extended essay is meant to be a challenge so that’s exactly what I made it, so I decided to read books a bit out of my comfort zone, and I’m so glad I did.
The three books I chose for my extended essay are We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon and In the Blood; A Memoir of My Childhood by Andrew Motion. After completing all three of my books, I was very pleased with what I had chosen. I was fairly certain I wanted to read We Need to Talk about Kevin from the beginning as I had heard of it before and the whole concept of the book sounded so appealing to me for my essay that I had to read it. When I had established that I was reading this book, my theme was clear to me; childhood and parenthood. However it is a broad theme, I wanted to especially focus on the psychological aspect of the theme as it a subject that I have always been so curious about and thought that this essay was the perfect excuse to study this in depth through reading my books.
All three books are told in the first person narrative. We Need to Talk about Kevin is told from the point of view of the mother of a boy called Kevin who is the killer in a high school massacre. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is narrated by a boy called Christopher who has Asperger’s syndrome. The book is written in the most interesting way and includes maths puzzles, diagrams and pictures. In the Blood is an autobiography of the author, Andrew Motion’s childhood.
All three of the books are very different, but they are all about the same period; childhood. I thought that because they were so different it would be really interesting to compare them as childhood is such an important time in someone’s life. It shapes you to be the person you will become and it sets a base for your entire life. It truly is the most fascinating period of someone’s life as the amount you learn in your first 10 years or so of your life will be more than you ever will learn.
Setting
All three of the books are set in quite different areas and time. In the Blood and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time however, share England as their country although In the Blood was set in the 1960s mainly in the countryside and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was set in suburban modern England. We Need to Talk about Kevin was set in modern America. I thought that the different times and places would make it interesting to compare how the place where you grow up can have an impact on the kind of person you are. For example, someone who grows up moving house all the time would be more used to change than someone who has had a stable home all their life. This is shown in most detail in In the Blood as he goes into the most detail of his family home and life and how he thought about them. Andrew lived in two different houses throughout the book, yet they weren’t very different. They were both old and in the countryside with a large garden. I thought the houses were old-fashioned which also reflected Andrew’s personality.
I think that the way In the Blood was written as an autobiography made the time and places in the book much more realistic than a fiction book. For example, in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time there was no clear indicator of the time they were living in and to figure out the year I had to do some simple math using Christopher’s date of birth and age. The setting wasn’t completely important in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and didn’t have much of an impact on Christopher and although he tried deliberately to describe his surroundings, they didn’t have an important part in the book.
Both Kevin and his mother hated the house they lived in. Kevin’s mother, Eva, said “Every morning I woke to its glib surfaces, its smart design features, its sleek horizontal contours, and actively hated it.” about the house. It was a large, modern house which was recently built and the house was portrayed in the book as if it had little life. I thought that this was interesting as the house reflected Kevin’s personality; dull and lifeless. Also, the time that the book was set in was a time where there was no major current affair or special incident that would make the period stand out except for the fictional string of high school massacres that occurred before Kevin’s. This made these incidents more dramatic as there was nothing major happening so these massacres drew people in and gave them more publicity. This is a crucial detail for the book as a key scene in the book was when Kevin was being interviewed in jail after the massacre and when asked why he did it, he answered by saying that everyone in this world is watching people like him. He describes the world “divided into the watchers and the watchees, and there’s more and more of the audience and less and less to see.” So the time in which the book takes place is important as it inspired Kevin to be a “watchee”.
Although the setting isn’t the most important aspect of any of my books, it is a really important aspect of any book. It sets the scene and draws you into the story and I believe that if you have a strong sense of time and location in a book than the story becomes much more real for the reader and captivates the attention of the reader.
Main Characters
Coincidentally, the three main characters of all my books are all teenage boys. However, I find this makes the characters more interesting as you can compare each one as you’re reading which makes the point of how every person is different, very clear. These three boys (Christopher, Andrew and Kevin), are almost opposites. One might think that this would make them harder to compare, but I think that it makes it easier as it’s a simpler task of pointing out their similarities.
I think that Andrew is the most different out of the three boys simply because he is the most normal of the three. He seems to be an average boy who likes the subject English and birds and he has a pretty normal life up until his mother’s tragic accident. Christopher and Kevin are alike in the way that they are both reserved and you never seem to know what’s going on in their head. Luckily, we get to see inside Christopher’s mind in The Curious Incident of The Dog In the Night-time as it is told in the first person narrative from Christopher’s point of view. In We Need to Talk about Kevin we don’t get to see what goes through Kevin’s mind. We see from his mother’s point of view who has always been suspicious of him.
Mothers are a subject found profoundly in all of the books. In The Curious Incident of The Dog In the Night-time the book revolves around Christopher’s search for his once thought known to be dead mother when he uncovers a series of letters from her to Christopher that his father had hidden. Although he had an undeveloped relationship with his mother, he still goes in search of her alone. Christopher’s reaction to finding out that his mother is alive and that his father had lied to him, was described by Christopher in a way as if Christopher was a third person looking on at the scene but also as he himself. He says “I could tell he was in the room, but his voice sounded tiny and far away” when his father was trying to defend himself for lying to him and he also says “I noticed I had been sick because I could feel something wet all over me” which is an unusual description of getting sick as it is described as if he doesn’t realise that it’s happening to him. However Christopher was angry that he found out that his mother was still alive, I felt that when I was reading the book that he didn’t have strong feelings for his mother or else didn’t express them in his actions or words. For example when he finds his mother after thinking she’s been dead, the first thing he did was when she tried to hug him was push her off and the first thing he said to her was about his rat. I thought because of this, Christopher shared the same unwanted affection from his mother as Kevin although I think that Kevin purposely did this just because he didn’t seem to like his mother much and Christopher did it because it was just the way his brain worked.
Kevin and his mother had a strange relationship. It was almost a love/hate relationship but it was more than just pure love and pure hate. It was jealousy, cruelty, neglect and hints of affection and appreciation that are shown, very rarely in the book. Most of the time, Kevin was sly, arrogant, sarcastic and devious such as when he squirted the walls of his mother’s office with red and black ink after she had spent weeks decorating the walls with maps. Kevin was still very young at this stage which made the incident even more troubling for his mother as she knew that it hadn’t been an accident. But Kevin also had moments, although very few, when he acted like a normal child who loved their mother, such as when he had a really bad fever and was very sick, it was like he was a different boy as he laid his head on his mother’s lap and she read Robin Hood to him. I think that very deep down Kevin loved his mother. He tried very hard to frustrate her as much as possible and succeeded, but when he was being interviewed at the jail he was questioned on whether he thought it was his mother’s fault that he killed all those people and he said “Oh, lay off my mother.” And defended her and also said “Look, I could be kind of a creep, okay? And she could be kind of a creep, too, so we’re even.” I thought that this was brave to defend his mother after all he had done which I thought showed that Kevin truly did love his mother and he wasn’t all bad.
It seemed that Andrew was the only one of three boys who had a healthy relationship with his mother. When he had his operation done on his knees and stayed at home for weeks, he and his mother became inseparable. He truly loved his mother and while reading the book, I could see that he admired her and looked up to her. On the last page of the book, Andrew is describing the journey back from the hospital where they went to see his mother, still in a coma. He says “We’ll take it tomorrow as well, and all the other days. The days turning into weeks, and the weeks into months, and the months into years” as his mother died after nine years of being in that hospital and the fact that their family never gave up on visiting her, and his father had only missed three days of the hospital in that nine years, is true love.
Effects of Parenthood
While choosing my books for my extended essay, I knew straight away a book that I wanted to read was We Need to Talk about Kevin. It was a book that I had seen other people read and hear other people talking about and so when we began to select our books it was the first book I chose. I find that psychology and the way people’s mind can be affected really fascinating so when I was reading We Need to Talk about Kevin I knew that I wanted the topic of how parenthood can affect a child’s upbringing to be a major part of my essay.
This topic is most strong in We Need to Talk about Kevin but it is not neglected in the other books. I found it was shown throughout the whole book as I often wondered if Kevin was born bad or was it the lack of affection shown by his mother from the day he was born that caused him to become the boy he is. Kevin’s relationship with his father was unusual. I thought that his father, Franklin, was trying to make Kevin into the typical American son that played baseball and had a happy-go-lucky life and in the process, was suffocating him. Kevin always played this role back to his father sarcastically which only his mother could see. For example he would put on the “Gee Dad, that sounds great!” act whenever he was around him. Because of this, his father always took Kevin’s side and always gave him the benefit of doubt whenever he did something wrong. This repeated act overtime really irritated Kevin which eventually led to the murder of his father.
I thought that Andrew, from In the Blood, had almost imprints of his parents in himself. The Motions came across as a well off family with their fancy car and sending their children to posh schools but they were really quite ordinary and the money for school fees came from a rich grandfather. I thought that they believed they were much grander than they actually were. Andrew’s mother often told him not to use “non-U” words such as loo instead of toilet. She told his “Don’t call it patio, patio is suburban”. I thought the way his mother told him which words to say and words to not was interesting as we don’t realise that we pick up new words everyday by just talking to new people. Andrew couldn’t have gotten the words from his family as they don’t use them, so he must have gotten them from school which he wasn’t even at for a long time in this part of the book. This is a clear example on the potential effect a parent could have on a child as their minds are so open to all these new words and we don’t realise that they are constantly learning new things every day.
However I found that in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time parenthood didn’t have a huge effect on Christopher. He seemed to have his own way of thinking and speaking which were unlike the people around him. However I think this is due to his Asperger’s syndrome because it is almost as if he is born the way that he thinks and due to his lack of social skills, he is unable to communicate well with other people. This made him different than the other two boys who could pick up on what other people say and think. Therefore, he isn’t at the advantage as other children who are learning so much through asking questions and talking to people. Christopher’s lack of common sense is clearly shown throughout the book. When he’s buying a train ticket he asks the policeman how much is it to get a train ticket to London and he replies “About 20 quid”, Christopher then asks “Is that pounds?” It’s little things like this that makes Christopher different from the rest.
There is only one major example of the effects of parenthood on Christopher and that is his hot temper that both he and his mother share. His mother was always fighting with his father about Christopher and in the end she had enough and left her family with her neighbour.
Christopher could also get very mad whenever he was touched or there were too many people around or someone was screaming at him. Christopher had witnessed his mother’s hot temper as a child and that was the only major connection I could find between Christopher and his parents.
I still find it fascinating how our minds can simply pick details up and store them and then make these details a part of who we are. And then if we have children, this becomes a cycle and these traits or details live on. I have come to the conclusion that the effects of parenthood have a major influence on a child and they potentially become who the child will be in later life. Parenting is almost an art as it could be done so many different ways that the outcomes are endless.
Conclusion
Writing this essay, has opened my mind a lot more while reading books. I question the author’s choice of words and story line a lot more and I think about the characters more in depth. However, if there’s one thing that this essay had taught me, it is to get assignments done as soon as possible so you’re not rushing towards the deadline. I thought that if I was to learn any valuable lesson from this essay it would be that.
I set out writing this essay, with the hope of understanding more of the psychological aspect of childhood and parenthood and I’m glad to say that I think I’ve achieved that. I’ve also learnt a bit more about how people can deal with death as death is something that each boy encounters, one more than the other and another not knowing the full story. I believe that death is such a delicate topic and the fact that everyone will pass away is so daunting that writers cannot help but incorporate death into their stories at some point or another.
If I had to choose a favourite book it would be The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time because it was such an entertaining read. Christopher narrates the story in a way that’s different to any book that I have ever read. Because of his Asperger’s syndrome, he remembers almost everything; his surroundings, conversations, people. It makes the book so detailed and interesting. Also, he named the chapters after prime numbers. I found that these quirky details made the book really special and the book overall opened up my eyes to Asperger’s syndrome and the difficulties that they face.
Thinking back to the beginning of September, when I was dreading this essay, I didn’t think I would get any sort of enjoyment out of it. But now, thinking back on the experience, I’m glad I got to read the books I read because I wanted to try to read books that were out of my comfort zone to try to challenge myself and I believe I succeeded in that.
I’ve realised after reading these books, that a parent’s relationship with their child is priceless and there is nothing that can come between and parent and their child. Not even if their child has killed their fellow high school students, their husband and their daughter. Not even if their child runs away from one parent to find the other. And not even if their parent goes into a coma and stays in hospital for nine years. The everlasting unbreakable bond will live on between them forever.
Bibliography
2. Haddon, M. (2005) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, London, Vintage
3. Motion, A. (2006) In the Blood; A Memoir of My Childhood, London, Faber and Faber Limited
4. Shriver, L. (2005), We Need to Talk about Kevin, London, Serpent’s Tail