Coming of Blog

When reading the chapter titled "Maggot" in Black Swan Green , I noticed a common recurrence that the adult figures in the story wished to use violent or aggressive means to fix the issues of kids, but were forced to restrain themselves. I think that this is representative of the growing allure of violent means for Jason to enact his revenge on Ross Wilcox. The first instance of this restraint is how angry Mr. McNamara gets after Ross and his boys run over the bridge and skip class. He doesn't resort to violence, but his pure rage prompts Jason to envision a headline in which he drowns Ross' gang. Fighting back is clearly on Jason's mind. The second instance is when Mr. Nixon says that back in his day, a "sound thrashing" would've taught the boys a lesson about speaking back to authority. At the end of the chaper, the bus driver encourages Jason to slice Ross Wilcox's sinews, which is quite gruesome. Together, these adults with violent intentio...

Mr. Mitchell made a comment in class the other day about Jason's masterful use of italics in Black Swan Green , so I thought I'd go through the first few pages and see what the fuss was all about. The first use of italics is the line " Do  not set foot in my office ". The italics in this instance simply give weight to the statement, but what's interesting is the lack of italics on the word "not", which somehow makes the word feel even heavier than its surroundings despite the fact that all it does is transition back to normal. [David] Mitchell is treating the italics almost like a color, similar to how one would use different pigments to design a flag since with flags, you're limited to only a few colors just like how there's only italicized and non-italicized options for text in this instance. The next use of italics (besides the italicized title of the TV show The Rockford Files ) is to emphasize the words forty  and fifty  when telling us ho...