Character Analysis: The Thing In The Forest

Imagine an Iraqi girl, in the wake of 9/11, exposed to the tortures of war. Everywhere she looks she is surrounded by the awful sights, sounds and smells. She never knows at any moment, and with every turn of a corner what is going to happen. One morning she is awaken and stripped from her parents home by a person she does not even know. Scared and lonely, the girl is carted off to a house with several other children. None of them know what is going on or why they are in this place. Is it because they have missed behaved or is it because their parents just don’t love them anymore? After they all have settled into this new place, they are separated yet again and put into new families. Never are these children explained to what is happening. In “The Thing in the Forest”, Primrose and
After being stripped from their parents house at such a young age and seeing all the horrible things they encountered, the girls never really knew how to live in everyday life without the war always hanging over their head. Both girls grew up in their respective homes they were put in and then returned to their city earlier then they should have. They still had to encounter the terrors their parents tried to save them from: “bombardment, blitz, unearthly light and roaring, changed landscapes, holes in their world where the newly dead had been”(229). Both girls had surpress the memory of everything around them that they could barely even remember the face of their own fathers, which had died in the war. Both girls, never knew how to live life. Penny went to school and became a development psychologist, but still did not understand herself. Primrose did odd and end jobs just to keep herself busy, but still did not know herself and her feelings. Both girls were numb to their environment and were perfectly content with living that way. Neither girl had ever faced the terror in which they lived