Preview

"Broken Lives" By Estelle Blackburn.

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1267 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
"Broken Lives" By Estelle Blackburn.
The chapter "Another Gun, Another Unlocked Door" is a chapter from Estelle Blackburn's expository text Broken Lives. This chapter focuses on one night of Eric Edgar Cooke's murderous sprees where he steals a rifle and shoots a baby sitter, once again leaving the city of Perth in the hands of fear and danger. The purpose of this chapter is to fight for Cooke's guilt. It shows that he had no fear of being caught and was a devious man when it came to him stealing, killing and the plans he came up with. Through particular aspects of its construction including point of view, structure, language, personality presentation and tone, our response to the ideas conveyed are able to be shaped and moulded to the ideas that are presented

The point of view in "Another Gun, Another Unlocked Door" is from a third person omniscient view, looking in on the world surround Cooke. However the point of view is no ordinary third person point of view, it is in fact shifting, jumping from one character to the next so that we can get into the minds of all the characters and the emotions they are experiencing at the time of the 'gunman's rampage." The point of view is shifting as to present the views of the many characters we come into contact with throughout the chapter. All people views on Cooke come to fruition and to our realisation. The fear that Cooke spread throughout Perth is exposed and our response to him and our feelings moulded. He shoots an innocent girl studying, through the point of view we can look in on his emotions and thoughts and the evil side of him.

"... He had a rifle and was in a killing mood ..."

This suggests that Cooke had been in this mood before when he has killed people previously and asks us the question, what sort of man is he if he gets in a killing mood. If Broken Lives was written from a first person point of view, we would not see the same emotions and feeling that we do from a third person omniscient view.

The language goes hand in hand with the point

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Turtles give hope “Slower than the rest” by Cynthia Rylant is a realistic fiction about a boy named Leo. In the beginning, Leo and his family are in the car driving Leo yells, “There's a turtle.” The car halts Leo gets out of the car to pick up the turtle. Soon Leo feels happy and names the turtle Charlie. In the end Leo has to make a presentation on wildlife and uses Charlie as an example of a slow animals.…

    • 351 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Reading Journal #4 The book I am reading is called “From Bad To Cursed”, by Katie Alender. The genre of this book is Horror Fiction. It is the second book in the “Bad Girls Don’t Die” series In the first book, “Bad Girls Don’t Die”, Alexis’s little sister, Kasey, becomes obsessed with an antique doll. Alexis thinks it’s just another phase her sister is going through, but her life is slowly becoming something straight out of a horror movie.…

    • 600 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Through her use of anaphora, she stresses that things could’ve been done to help the kids so that nothing bad would’ve happened. She reiterated that all of the crimes could’ve been avoided if the healthcare system was tweaked to better care for the mentally ill. “If only there had been long-term intervention and medication, Kip Kinkel might be out of jail, off the taxpayers’ tab and perhaps leading a productive life. If only Sam Manzie had been treated aggressively earlier, new psychotropic drugs might have slowed or stilled his downward slide. And if only those things had happened, Faith Kinkel, William Kinkel, Mikael Nickolauson, Ben Walker, and Eddie Werner might all be alive today” (9). Quindlen emphasizes that there were other options at the time that could’ve prevented such horrific events from occurring. She connects with the reader through her appeals of emotion, wishing those who suffered from shootings were still alive today. Quindlen’s use of anaphora deepens her relativity to the reader and also establishes her optimistic side for a better future where the medically ill are treated better and there is no such thing as violence in schools.…

    • 712 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Dalton Trumbo uses the third person point of view to capture a universal view of the situation. This offers us a wider angle on the feelings, circumstances and thoughts of both the father and the son. For example, if it was first person point of view, the story would most likely be centered around Joe, giving us an inside look on what he is thinking and feeling but not what the father is feeling.…

    • 473 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Those were the days is by Jenny Bravo. Those were the days is about a girl named Claudia and her sister Wendy. Claudia is upset that wendy got her first car at the age of 16 and she still doesn’t have a car, Her mom still has to take her to school since she doesn’t have a car and Wendy won’t take her. The reason why Claudia doesn’t have a car is because she failed her test 5 times, so their mom takes Claudia to practice driving just so that she can get better at driving when she does get her license. While the mom is teaching her how to drive her eyes never left the road to kinda like prove a point that she can’t drive like she sucks at driving. Then she finally realizes that she can’t argue with her mom who Is trying to protect her. After…

    • 925 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Everyone has a choice what they do with it is up to them. Sharon G. Flake wrote the book You Don’t Even Know Me which is a very intense and emotional book. This book speaks of topics one would not hear regularly. Many parents and the reader wonder why would they let a teenager read this book. She wrote this for young adults because she probably experienced this or saw many of her friends go through these kinds of problems. According to research by State Farm, every twenty-eight seconds a youth drops out of school. Many of them get jobs to survive, and many live at their parents until they can live on their own. As you may know, almost fifty percent of the kids who drop out of school end up either in a gang or in jail, and/or even homeless. The book also deals with teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.…

    • 308 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Psychosis Leads to Murder

    • 835 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Throughout the novel, In Cold Blood, the two murderers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, show instances of unwarranted anger and aggression that leads readers into believing that a serious issue with their psyches have occurred. Early in, the novel Hickock states, “I didn’t want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat” (Capote 88). Here, the reader can clearly see Hickock contradicting himself but in in a rather frightening way. Smith also shows an instance of this as well later in the novel when he says, “I wish she’d been in that house that night. What a sweet scene!” (Capote 259). When Smith says ‘she’ in the previous, quote he is referring to his own sister. He vocalizes that he wishes his sister was among the Clutters in their house the night he and Dick killed them. This allows the reader to truly gage the depth of his psychosis by not even allowing himself to show any compassion to his own family. In Brian Conniff’s article “Psychological Accidents: In Cold Blood and Ritual Sacrifice,” he agrees with the previous thought by stating, “Hickock was the one with the ‘sexual intrest in female children’ who wants to stop, in the middle of the burglary, to rape Nancy Clutter,” a direct quote from Smith (5). Furnished from Capote’s personal accounts, it allows the reader to see further into the extreme violence of the convicted felons.…

    • 835 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Swallowing Stones

    • 326 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Jenna, Charlie Ward’s daughter, is hunting for her fathers killer, she has pictured him as a faceless killer, a cold hearted man, but she finally hears from the town gossip that the shot came from the MacKenzie house during a party. Soon the police begin to think that it was Michael who fired the shot and they search the property, and they use metal detectors to try and find the gun, but come up with only a shell casing from the…

    • 326 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Banal Evil

    • 1317 Words
    • 6 Pages

    However, as the book moves on so does the readers point of view, from one of the townspeople to that of the killers. Capote replaces the simplistic view to a more sensitive interpretation exploring the physiological, material, and environmental circumstances that are the catalyst for Smith and Hickock to commit murder.…

    • 1317 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    When a story is told from first-person point of view, the author fades away into one of the characters. The character telling the story may be major or minor, protagonist or observer. The position from which the story is told makes a considerable difference on the thoughts of the reader. Through the use of first person point of view, authors Alice Munro and William Faulkner achieve contrasting effects.…

    • 853 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The main interest of the work is in a character, Matt, whose son has just been murdered, and his conflict with the concept of revenge. Throughout the story Matt makes frequent mentions to his family that he wants to and should kill his son’s murderer but is just as frequently disturbed and uncertain at this notion. Matt is never described to the reader as a violent or murderous person. The story even mentions that he was a caring and concerned father by stating that “He had always been a fearful father: when his children were young, at the start of the summer he thought of them drowning in a pond or the sea, and he was relieved when he would come home in the evenings and they were there” (92). Matt is angry with himself because he feels he should have been able to protect his son, but was not able to, and “he lost Frank in a way no father expected to lose his son, and he felt that all the fears he had borne while they were growing up, and all the grief he had been afraid of, had backed up like a huge wave and struck him on the beach and swept him out to sea.” (94). Frank, Matt’s son, was also previously beaten by Richard Strout, the man who would later murder him for “making it” with Richard’s wife. Frank’s battery was described as “Before ten o’ clock one night Frank came home; he had driven to the hospital first and he walked into the living room with stitches over his right eye and both lips bright and swollen” (91). Matt has such a burden put on him with the death of his son, and the magnitude of that event causes him not being able to think about “any of the small pleasures he had earned, as he had earned what was now…

    • 701 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Police and John Busby

    • 1477 Words
    • 6 Pages

    2. There were two significant external conflicts in this book. First, John Busby (Author) vs. Meyer Family (Crime Family responsible for the attack). Raymond Meyer organized the shooting of John Busby. Raymond Meyer drove the car when James Meyer shot John Busby in the face with a shotgun. John Busby was an honest police officer who had a family. He was working hard for the right reasons. Busby’s life was forever changed by this act of violence. This conflict created a different world for not only John Busby, but his entire family. In a quick moment the life of the Busby family was drastically changed. Their world was now full of fear, pain and uncertainty about the future.…

    • 1477 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Broken Lives

    • 691 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Broken Lives written by Estelle Blackburn is an expository text, which through research has presented that nineteen year old John Button was wrongfully convicted of killing his seventeen year old girlfriend Rosemary Anderson in a hit and run. I believe through my reading of Broken Lives that the key factor of expository texts is to explore awkward questions deeply and critically. In this case who was guilty of killing Rosemary Anderson in a hit and run, John Button or Eric Edgar Cooke, and the effect of Cooke's crimes and murders had on people.…

    • 691 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Frankenstein

    • 1069 Words
    • 5 Pages

    “There had never been a death more foretold,” the narrator asserts, repeating the truth that haunts the entire town. Dismissing their superficial reactions—”most of the townspeople consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honor are sacred monopolies”—he finds the murder has in fact created “a single anxiety which had made of the town an open wound.”…

    • 1069 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    I chose the song, "Begin Again" by Taylor Swift to represent this unit's theme; hope and despair.…

    • 967 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays

Related Topics