How has Robert Swindells made the reader sympathise with Link and the other homeless people?

The novel ‘stone cold’ is written by Robert Swindells. He feels sympathetic towards the poor and wants the future generations to learn from other peoples mistakes such as caring for everyone in the community, society. The following exportation of certain key points will easily indicate and give a clearer view of the way Swindells creates sympathy throughout the novel. Sympathy may easily be revealed using these points which will able me to answer the question as a full summery and get a clearer understanding of the novel than I previously knew.

Swindells makes the reader sympathise with Link when he gets thrown out of his family house for example he states “It wasn’t even his house but he locked the door and wouldn’t let mum open it” this shows that he is weak and has become homeless due to other peoples actions and was forced to become homeless. He is shown as a young innocent person. The reader will think that young people are innocent and are still learning and so it is written in a children’s point of view to make the reader in the perspective of Link or with him throughout the novel. He also indicates “Next morning Vince started slapping me around the head for going off a worrying mum.” He uses this sentence to make people look at Vince like he is in the wrong and he should know better. Swindells uses a teenaged boy because if he had used a grown up person he would not have got that much sympathy from the reader. This would make the reader learn from Link’s mistakes and the reader was once Links age and might know how it felt for this to happen to them. This quote has been written in Links perspective so the reader would sympathise more with Link afterall there is only one side of the story. The techniques Swindells has used when describing this event is rhetorical questions, personal pronoun, short hand words and amotive language, these techniques makes Link sympathetic and makes the reader feel part of the novel. It is written in the terms of a diary in which Link and Shelter are writing and the reader is reading the diary. This means that the novel has been written in the past. At the end of the chapter it uses a rhetorical question to create tension and make the reader want to carry on reading to find out what happens next.

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The second way in which Swindells sympathies with the homeless people is through the weather. “It was a raw morning with a sneaky wind which came out of side streets and went through you.” The way in Swindells says it was a ‘raw’ morning shows that it was freezing cold and is set in the morning which is the coldest time of the day. Also homeless people cannot afford as many clothes as people with money so they would feel colder and would want to go indoors to get out of the coldness in the winter. Weather tends to indicate mood and emotion so they would feel more depressed and angry. The reader would sympathise with Link and the other homeless people because they might know how it feels to be in this situation and would refer it to Link and the other characters. The technique Swindells uses in this chapter is speech, plurals and long sentences. These techniques make the chapter more motive and shows the reader what’s going on.

The third way in which Swindells makes Link sympathetic is also through dangers of homelessness “Gizzit, if you don’t want your face smacked in” This shows that it is very dangerous being all alone with a world of people you don’t know and Link is very young and vulnerable and cannot fully stand up for himself. This is how people would sympathise with homeless people. The language he uses is slang to show that these homeless or violently behaved people do not get an education or even good vocabulary. Also it seems realistic and true to make the reader thinks that that it is really happening or already happened. The techniques Swindells has used for this chapter is speech, slang and long sentences. He has used long sentences to make the novel more exciting and has used speech to make you feel like you are listening to them speak to one another.

The forth and final way Swindells creates sympathy for Link is when he discovers that Gail had betrayed him when he found out she was really a reporter. “ ‘Louise darling’ he blurbed ‘you’re a genius’ Gail had broken our clinch. I looked around for a Louise darling but there was only me and Gail. Then it hit me. He was talking to Gail.” Therefore this shows that Link is still growing up and furthermore facing problems that you receive whilst growing up. On the other hand people make mistakes and have to deal with them. The technique he uses are short sentences to make it seem more dramatic.

Throughout the novel Swindells has sympathized with Link and the homeless people in many different ways. The structure he had used is that he is miserable at the beginning, gets happier when meets Ginger, gets upset again when he loses him then he meets Gail and gets happier and later gets humiliated when Link got betrayed by Gail. Swindells makes you feel sorry for him are that he was young, vulnerable and all alone trying to survive on the streets of London. The writer does this by using different techniques like slang, speech, short and long sentences. Swindells also shows that Link is all alone facing the problems of life as he grows up, furthermore he involves the reader into the book and makes them want to read more. Nevertheless, I think that this book was satisfactory but could have had some improvements. The good points about book was that it was very interesting and made you want to carry on reading and makes you feel extremely sympathetic towards Link.

The bad points about ‘stone cold’ was that it was a bit obvious what would happen towards the end of the book because good always defeats bad. It has many themes and teaches the reader how it feels to be homeless. Homelessness is a major talking point in the world today and always will be. I have learnt that dramatic tension can be symbolized and shown in many different ways. There are one of the purpose of writing a novel as you get to read all these crucial points. This novel is a cyclical book and will probably never end. As you know towards the end, Link will probably have a lot more adventures throughout his life.