The literary works Master Harold and the Boys and boy and egg illustrate clearly the device employed by their authors of showing their main characters trapped by their surroundings.

International Baccalaureate World Literature

The play “Master Harold and the Boys” is a literary work written by Athol Fugard, a famous South African playwright. It is set in South Africa during the Apartheid government, and deals with themes that portray loneliness, racial discrimination, family and internal conflicts of their main characters. The poem “Boy and Egg” is a literary work written by Naomi Shihab Nye, which deals as well with themes of character´s internal struggles and isolation. Authors of literary works often show characters trapped due to certain situations as a device to highlight the themes in their creations. In both the poem and the play, there are some characters, Hally in the case of “Master Harold and the Boys” and the boy in the case of “Boy and Egg”, who appear trapped by several factors, such as the social environment that surrounds them and their emotional struggles, which in the case of Hally are triggered by his past. In both cases, the main characters attempt to resolve their confinement throughout escaping their problems instead of facing them.

In the literary work “Master Harold and The Boys”, Hally feels trapped in a first instance by the social environment that surrounds him. In the first place, he feels trapped due to his familiar reality. On the one hand, he has a drunken crippled father, with whom he has a very distant relationship. In many occasions the main character of the play has to take the role of an adult and take care of him. On the other hand, he has a weak mother with no authority over neither him nor his father. From a very young age, when he lived at the Old Jubilee Boarding house, Hally had to look for company in his parents’ servants, since they were not able to provide him the familiar support every young child needs at that age. As a result, Hally feels trapped due to lack of familiar comprehension, with no one belonging to his family available to rely on. Instead of trying to improve his familiar relationship, he avoids it and blinds himself to his reality. Hally therefore looks for support in Sam, a black servant of Hally´s family tea shop, who is constantly looking after him and is his moral advisor. In the second place, Hally feels enclosed as well by the social influence of his surroundings. In the context of the Apartheid in South Africa, black people segregation was a common issue. Racial discrimination was recurrent among white people. Hally feels trapped because he escapes the stereotype established by society by having Sam and Willie as friends and counselors. The main character of the play has a conflict between following the culture that surrounds him, which includes his father´s thoughts, or following his own ideas. Therefore, he feels trapped by his social environment, but does nothing to change it neither. Hally, the main character of Athol Fugard´s “Master Harold and the Boys” feels confined by the social surroundings in which he is inserted: both his family and the culture to which he belongs. Even though he has the tools to face these problems, he prefers to avoid them and therefore escape his reality.

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In the second literary work, “Boy and Egg”, the boy as well feels trapped by the social environment that surrounds him. The boy is inserted in a place with a lot of other kids, but he is rejected due to his age: “So little yet, too forgetful in games”. The other kids say he is not capable of playing with them because he is too small. As a result, the boy is faced to isolation and exclusion coming from the society that surrounds him, that in this case are the other kids. The boy therefore feels trapped because he does not know what to do to be included in those games. The boy is looking forward to accept everything it implied, he was even “ready to cry if the ball brushed him”. However, instead of insisting the other boys to include him, he decides to someway banish himself and decides to have an egg as a friend. The boy in his action is showing that as a replacement for facing the reality that traps him, he evades it, looking for a solution that does not actually solve his troubles. Despite the egg was enough company for the boy, it definitely does not accomplish the goals that friendship and interaction with others do.

In the play “Master Harold and the Boys” Hally feels confined by another important factor: his emotional troubles and his past. Hally has a moral conflict between the choice he has among his own father and Sam as his paternal figure. On the one hand, Hally´s father represents his family, his legacy and basically his past, which he cannot deny. On the other hand, Sam has been his advisor and life guide by teaching the boy about life, for example with the dancing metaphor and how people “bump into each other all the time”. This creates a conflict in him, because he cannot live with both of them as paternal figures, causing him the feeling of being trapped. To resolve this issue, Hally prefers to evade reality by hiding under his fair skin. This can be seen in his action at the end of the play, when he treats in a really bad way both Sam and Willie, with offensive and discriminatory phrases such as “ he is a white man, and that´s good enough for you”, referring to his father and the authority he has over them. Here, Hally´s family traditions of apartheid are clearly seen, as he insults his mentor and friend in a very cruel way until a point in which he spits on him. Hally shows that his family is present in his flesh, and that is something he cannot escape from. As a result, Hally evades the reality that is actually calling him to choose Sam, but he instead decides to avoid it by choosing his father over his guide.

The literary work “Boy and Egg” shows that the boy´s emotional troubles make him feel trapped in them, just as Hally appears trapped in his internal struggles. The boy is affected by the fact that the other kids do not pay attention to him developing a feeling of loneliness. He feels confined because he cannot understand the reasons of his peers to exclude him, since he considers that his age is not a barrier for it. These emotional troubles affect him, but the boy escapes from them: he hides these feelings from the other young boys and decides to rely on an egg he takes from the barn as a friend. At the end of the poem, it is expressed that he is “not ready to give it over to the refrigerator”. This symbolizes that actually the boy in the poem is not ready to face his problems, since the egg represents somehow the shelter where he protects himself from them. Consequently, the boy is escaping is emotional troubles by evading his reality instead of overcoming his internal conflicts and facing them.

The literary works “Master Harold and the Boys” and “boy and egg” illustrate clearly the device employed by their authors of showing their main characters trapped by their surroundings. In both cases, the decision of these characters of how to confront the struggle is the evasion of reality. Characters show incapacity of overcoming hard situations and confronting the truth, just as one does over and over in the everyday life. It is important to emphasize that the evasion of reality many times seems as the easy route to decipher problems, but it is not really this way. The two literary works clearly exemplify that their characters´ decision of evasion of reality was not really the best for them, and did not therefore resolve their problems the way they sought.

Gabriela Orellana 11°B