Subject: Brian O’Connal’s feelings about death, his thoughts __________________________________________________________
Purpose: To express a child’s feelings about life’s biggest tragedy. To show how different from adults is a child’s point of view on such an important matter.
Audience: Readers of Who has seen the wind
Context (where appropriate): __________________________________________________________
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International Baccalaureate Form 2/WTRF (reverse)
SCHOOL NAME:... Collège Laflèche.............................................................................................
In the space below, provide the following information:
- your objectives and how you have attempted to achieve them
- specific examples showing how this was done
- comments on how the task demonstrates an understanding of the cultural or literary option on which it is based.
For my written task, I chose to write Brian O’Connal’s diary. Brian O’Connal is the main character of the novel Who Has Seen The Wind by W.O. Mitchell, which tells the story of a prairie boy’s first discoveries about the mysteries of life, death, God and most important, the spirit that travels through everything, the wind. I wanted to show the beauty of a child’s understandings of such important things. I chose to focus on Brian’s vision of death, since it’s one of the principal themes in the novel. Brian is mostly affected by the death of his father and his dog Jappy, whom he both loved very deeply.
Therefore, my objective by writing this diary entry was to show the novel’s greatest strength which lies in the sensitive evocations of the young boy’s feelings, often associated with his various experiences of death. Also, the reason why I chose to write a diary is because I wanted it to be written just as the entire novel is which is in the words of Brian. I imagined him writing this diary sitting on top of the prairie because it’s a very crucial symbol of the novel, representing the spiritual side of it. The diary is written after the novel, after Brian dealt with all the deaths. The novel shows different aspects of Brian’s reactions to death, through different levels of suffering. For example, when the pigeon dies, Brian’s father, in response to his son’s misunderstanding of that death, tells him that it happens because it’s the way living things end. After that event, Brian learns even more about death when his dog Jappy dies. When that happens, Brian cries because he wants his dog back. From that second death, the boy learns that death brings feelings of pain and emptiness. Brian’s third encounter with death involves a lot more than what it did beforehand. It’s his father’s death. The boy has a lot of difficulty to deal with that loss and he wonders how society expects him to accept that. Brian doesn’t even cry right away when he loses his dad and he also has issues understanding why, until he gets hit by reality and starts to feel the pain and to cry. The death of Brian’s father teaches Brian a great lesson: accepting the truth and letting go of fear.
My biggest challenge was to express myself as a child, as Brian O’Connal. I really wanted readers to see the difference between the points of view of a child and an adult.
I was successful in my demonstration because I was able to describe the boy’s feelings, in a short diary entry and by choosing just the right words.
What death means to me
Life is weird. Life is cruel; at least that’s what I think. So many people enter and leave your life, hundreds of people, maybe thousands. You let them in, you get to know them, and some of them you even learn to love. Letting people in also means letting people go; that’s what I understood lately. In the end, everyone loses everyone. It’s as simple and as complicated as that at the same time. Everyone is going to die, even myself, even though I am so young, I still know that it’s going to happen. I could die in a second, or a minute, or twenty years, or ninety-nine years if I’m very lucky. Everything that’s born is going to die. But then, why do we invest so much in our existence? Why do we want people to love us? Why would I be a good kid following all the rules if life breaks the rules anyways? Why do people leave earlier than others? Why did my dad leave this early? I learned the signification of the three letters that we often see on the gravestones… Rest in Peace, it says, written on my father’s gravestone. Does that mean that death is supposed to be peaceful? Then why do people suffer to get there? My dad was very sick and the path that led him to death wasn’t peaceful at all. He suffered and he felt a lot of pain because I saw his face become paler each day. It’s so hard to understand the phenomenon of death. Phenomenon is a very complicated word but I heard it while adults were having a conversation the other day and I thought I would start using it. Death makes me feel old. Death makes me realize that you don’t necessarily die because you are old, since I think my father wasn’t that old after all, compared to the grandparents I know; so then, age does not really matter anymore. We always talk about how old we are, as if we were comparing our number of days left. I hate death, but I love death in some way because it’s the only thing that will reunite my dad and me. But I hate it because it’s also what took him away from me. The thing I hate the most about all this, about this too serious subject, is that nobody completely looks like they understand. Everyone prefers not to talk or even think about it. Adults don’t think enough and they choose too much. They always think before they speak and that makes them boring and too careful. They don’t dig deep enough into their hearts… Death, to me, is like the missing puzzle piece. I have a pretty good idea of what it is, what it’s like, but without experiencing it, without finding it, I can’t portray the entire thing perfectly.
Word count: 484
Bibliography
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MITCHELL, W.O. 1947. Who Has Seen the Wind, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 392 pages.