The Twelve Year Old Boy

The Twelve Year Old Boy

  • Submitted By: knuj
  • Date Submitted: 03/08/2010 7:17 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 813
  • Page: 4
  • Views: 989

About a boy


Text 1 is an extract from ”About a boy” by Nick Hornby. The novel was published in 1998.
The title indicates that it is all about a boy and this extract particularly is about a boy, a twelve-year-old boy named Marcus. Marcus is a weird kid. He is too different from the other kids in school. He has the wrong trousers and the wrong haircut and while normal kids are listening to music like Snoop Doggy Dogg, he is listening to Joni Mitchell. Marcus feels left out which makes him a very withdrawn child. In some way he is living in his own world and he cannot tell the difference between the inside and outside of his head “For some reason he couldn’t spot the difference between inside and outside, because there didn’t seem to be a difference” (p.4, ll.69-70) – this reflects in Marcus in the way what he without warning and without noticing himself, starts singing Joni Mitchell out loud in the middle of class. He does not feel like anything about him is right – the essence of who he is, is the problem; he, himself, is the problem “He’d still be who he was, and that, it seemed to him, was the basic problem” (p.3, ll.11-12)
Marcus knows he is a weird kid and for that, he blames his mother. Marcus’ mother is weird too and seen through the eyes of Marcus, from a boy’s perspective, his mother’s craziness affects him and makes him weird too “Marcus knew he was weird, and he knew that part of the reason he was weird was because of his mum was weird” (p.3, ll.40-41). He feels that it is all her fault and that is why he cannot tell his mother about his horrible feelings about going to school, because if he does, he has to tell her that he feels different and that he partly blames her for being that, which is a thing he could never do.
Marcus and his mother are living together alone without a husband and father and it is very hard for a single mother to raise a man. Marcus’ dad left them and from that day everything got worse (p.3, ll.22-24)....

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