There is so much death that occurs, but I would expect nothing less from Mr. Boyd. I would be extremely surprised if there is a book that we would read in his classes that did not have to do with death. I find Ona's death very symbolic, because it is the last in line at the end of Chapter 20 of the tragedies that Jurgis is finding. It occurs after Jurgis goes to jail for about 40 days, in which all the factory working family members are turned out. They must rely on the four children to sell plenty of newspapers, but that would be scary to me to have four out of the five children in my family stay in the city for a couple of days and not come home without inform one of our members. It would also be hard going around begging for food or change or something to help them survive because they cannot support themselves.
I believe that I will state what my prediction for the end of the book is. I believe that Marija will be the next one to die because she has no use of her one arm from blood poisoning. Then eventually all the children besides little Antanas and Stanislovas will develop a cough, freeze to death, or just never come home. So out of the four remaining people, Teta Elzbieta, Jurgis, Stanisvalos, and Antanas, I have two theories. The first one is that Teta will die and then the children without her support will starve to death or run away and die. Only Jurgis will survive. The other theory I have is that Jurgis will become a drunk and live and the many saloons owing a credit to each and once the owners find out that he cannot pay, he is booted out. Eventually, he will die from the cold. Teta after some amount of time, will die and the two little children will take care of themselves and might die.
Brenna,
ReplyDeleteI really like that you are developing predictions based on the reading. I think this is an effective way of reading the novel and will help you understand it more in the future. However, I would have like to see more of your reaction to the assigned text.