All over but the Shoutin'

All over but the Shoutin'

Throughout the novel All Over But The Shoutin’, the main character Rick Bragg goes through many struggles. Growing up in the rural south, Rick had to deal with many differences when compared with other children, mainly because he was a poor white boy with no steady father figure. That was just his problem, and also the beneficial stepping stone he used throughout his adulthood as an aspiring journalist. Rick’s mother, a southern hard working woman herself, sacrificed most of her own adulthood for her children to “climb up her backbone and escape the poverty and hopelessness that ringed them” (xii). She gave up buying new clothing, going out in public, and even eating for her children, so it obvious that her children would want to pay her back for all of her hard work towards making their lives better than hers was. Rick, out of the rest of her sons Mark and Sam, feels the most in debt because he was a trouble maker and caused so much grief growing up.
Throughout the novel, Rick talks of paying his mother back, from paying her money for bills and keeping her house warm in the winter to buying her the one thing she’s always dreamed of owning but never had the chance to. Sometimes his mother would deny the money and help, her pride getting in the way of letting her son gently push her into a “better” lifestyle. When Rick would give her money for bills, his journalist job in whichever newspaper going well and smoothly, she would say “I feel like a bum” (149). Even after offering to buy her new dentures, after Rick took his mother to a dentist for an exam she hadn’t had in too many years to count pulled every tooth from her head because they were so bad, she refused to get them from any place besides Pell City. Rick offered to buy ones that actually fit her mouth and didn’t give her headaches and nausea but she declined because they cost too much and Pell City was the affordable denture capital of the world.
This wasn’t enough, and neither were the glasses...

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