In Black Boy and ‘Fenland Chronicle’ Compare The Ways In Which The Authors Make You Feel Sorry For The Central
In Black Boy and ‘Fenland Chronicle’ Compare The Ways In Which The Authors Make You Feel Sorry For The Central Characters
Shiju Sasankan
‘Black Boy’ is an extract from an autobiography of Richard Wright as a youngster facing a mean predicament that taught him a lesson of shielding himself against the cruel outside world . Whereas ‘Fenland Chronicle’ is an extract of an oral history response of Sybil Marshall against the way in which ‘little girls’ where treated like ‘slaves’ by ‘nasty, vulgar’ farmers and shepherds. The two extracts have been written in the aim of achieving empathy from readers, however this is achieved in differing ways from both extracts by the use of differing storylines and techniques.
The character that is at the centre of attention in ‘Black Boy’ is young Richard Wright, this is shown in the extract when he explains that he and his brother ‘were too young to know’ that the family was in some disarray and that his life ‘would not be the same as other children’ the fact that he has been compared to other children shows that he is one himself. He is not only a child at this time, but he is also very naïve and perhaps too young to understand and be aware of such an emotionally painful incident of his father leaving him. The fact that the extract involves a suffering child makes it far more sympathising for the reader, as children are supposedly so naïve, helpless and innocent. Furthermore, in the extract the child is left to fend for himself, alone. Likewise, a similar technique is adopted by Marshall, however, instead of talking about her experiences as a young child, she uses the example of two girls who had bad experiences, ‘Eva’ and ‘Shady,’ nevertheless, she still uses the method of talking about young girls of, what was sometimes ‘eleven’ years old, suffering, alone, under the strict rules and unacceptable treatment from the farmers who supposedly ‘didn’t know how to treat the people who worked for’em.’ Marshall describes the girls as being ‘poor little mites’ and constantly repeats the word ‘little’ to describe the girls in order to emphasise their innocence. Marshall goes on to describe the girl’s harsh and gruelling daily routine, ‘she started to scrub the bare tiles o’ the kitchen floor.’ We begin to see that she uses the young ‘slaves’ to represent good and purity and the contrasting farmers to represent evil by the way she describes them which increases magnitude of how terrible the girls were treated which in turn leaves the reader an image of the farmer screaming at a girl while she is on her bare knees scrubbing the floors, and like in Wright’s extract, leaving the reader feeling sympathetic.
