Nothing Special
Nothing Special is a short story written by Brett Woodland. The story is about a young drug addict who had a drunken father and a dead mother which meant that nobody could really take good care of him. With no one to take care of him he soon fell in wrong hands and started dealing drugs and soon enough went broke. Deciding that he needed a fresher start he went to his uncle’s farm to start a new life but when the drug dealer that supplied him with drugs couldn’t make any money he stabbed the young fellow to death. In this essay we will look at how we are encouraged to respond to the death of the boy.
In this story the reader is encouraged to feel sympathy for the main character (protagonist) and to not like the drug dealer (antagonist). The details of the protagonist is used to influence the reader to feel sorry for the main character because as the narrator tells the reader that he wanted to “start a new life on the farm” and wanted to get clean. This makes the reader think that he admitted his mistake and was ashamed of what he had done and the reader then feels sorry for him. Another way that the reader feels sorry for the protagonist is when the police and newspaper reporters arrived they didn’t really care about him and just thought of him as “another junkie who sold his body for drugs” and most people that heard about the story in the news also thought the same way or they either got scared and “added another lock to the doors”. This makes us feel sorry for the protagonist because no one really cares about him and he has no friends or family to take care of him when he was going through a rough patch in his life. For example in the story it says, “Nobody cared, though. Maybe if people had known him, they’d have cared. Maybe not.”
The reader is being encouraged to not like the narrator because of his values and attitudes. It seems that the narrator only cares about money which is the reason he stabbed the protagonist to death. It...