The Leader Of The People

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Herlufsholm Skole        Engelsk        Johanne Fremmich        

22/10/09        English assignment        3.a

The Leader of the People

Family is one of the most important things in a person's life. Some people have an outstanding relationship with their family, while others have a relationship where they do not talk to each other. In "The leader of the People," we meet a family who do not respect each other. The father does not like the grandfather, and that brings pain into the family – and maybe they do not know it, but that plays a part in destroying the family.  

The small family lives in America in an isolated little valley in the country. The boy Jody does not see any people around him but his mum, dad and the man Billy. Jody wants to be like his Grandfather when he grows up someday, he looks up to his grandfather. He wants to do and see something special some day, something the Grandfather did in his youth. Jody has also a great respect for the grown ups, which is also why he does not dare kill the mice before he has asked Billy and, to be completely sure, his father. His loves his grandfather and think of him as his idol. The grandfather tries to talk him out of his new dream about exploring the world.  The grandfather says to Jody, his grandchild: "There's no place to go, Jody. Every place is taken." When the grandfather speaks to his grandchild, he is very depressing and a pessimist, because the American edge is not lost. It has simply changed. The grandfather hadn't the imagination to see the new American edges: the oceans, the planets and the universe. One of the man’s reasons must now reach further than the mountains and plains; for without a purpose - man is nothing

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Jody’s grandfather who was the “Leader of the People”, keenly feels this sense of loss. He has been telling and retelling his stories of "Indians and crossing the plains", since he got to the sea and could not go any further. For Jody's grandfather, "it was the movement and the westering" that had mattered. The grandfather hears the son-in-law, Carl, talking bad of him. The Grandfather refers to the groom on the farm where Billy Buck who works hard, as one of the 2nd generation men who hadn’t grown soft. It’s really the whole generation after the westering people that the ...

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