Three English essays

Extract

[...] Three English essays Question 1 Children's stories often evoke the importance of family for the happiness of children. It can be demonstrated through the presence of strong parental figures in the stories, or on the contrary by showing the lack of love resulting from broken or absent families. In this case, it is common for the novels to show how children end up living in an adult-free world, happy on their own. To illustrate how family is an important topic in many children's books, we are going to study four examples of parental figures - or of lack of it. [...]

[...] Nevertheless, later in the novel, the little girl finds in her young maid Martha a new parental figure who helps her to finally blossom as a happy girl. Indeed, following this new encounter, she becomes nicer and starts to look for the secret garden, where she can finally find some happiness. Here, even if the child manages to find happiness on her own, her relation with Martha is very important in this achievement and one can think that she would not have done it without her. Finally, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe written by C. [...]

[...] Milne, we notice at once that the act of storytelling is what triggers the rest of the story. Indeed, at the very beginning of the novel, a whole passage is dedicated to Christopher Robin asking the narrator to tell him a story: ""What about a story?" said Christopher Robin." (chapter 1). Then, the actual novel begins as the narrator starts to tell him the stories of Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends. Besides, the novel is punctuated by interventions from Christopher Robin, saying that he does not understand something or asking for a precision (for example, "What does 'under the name' mean?" asked Christopher Robin." in chapter 1). [...]

[...] Indeed, this novel tells us the story of Mowgli, a young boy raised by wild animals in the jungle. Thus, he has to learn how to communicate with animals, and not human beings. Besides, many chapters allude to the many languages that each species speak. For example, the narrator tells us that "The sea cows went on schlooping and grazing and chumping in the weed, and Kotick asked them questions in every language that he had picked up in his travels; and the Sea People talk nearly as many languages as human beings. [...]

[...] Therefore, it is only logical that language can become an essential theme for children's books. Then, we are going to study how language is used in two novels chosen as examples: Lewis Carroll'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. In the novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, language is an important driving force for the plot. Indeed, Alice finds herself in many situations where she tries to communicate with the characters that she meets, but cannot. [...]