Flight

Flight
By Alice Hoffman
The author uses a number of symbols through the novel. The most prominent of the symbols is of course the owl. It can be interpreted in 2 different ways but the one dos not necessarily exclude the other. It can be seen as a symbol of how important freedom and the possibility to doing what we love means to us. When the owl comes in the possession of our narrator it is no longer able to go flying freely as it loved to do with Eugene. The other way to read the meaning of the owl is as the importance of friendship and love. Eugene took in the owl when it were quite young and the 2 of them have therefor obviously created a strong connection and therefor the owl gets sick when
Eugene Leaves.
Another symbol in the novel which are not as notable are the work distribution between our narrator and Eugene. It can be related to our gender discrimination we have today in our job community where we see a lot of the woman getting poorer paid jobs than the main just like our female narrator carries the bigger load in their company.
The last symbol that i have chosen are the slaying of Jason's hamsters. There are good and bad thing within all of us and you should not judge anyone by just one of their actions. When the owl slays
Jason´s hamsters he does not judge it by this single action instead of acting negatively against the owl he tries to help the owl by buying it some chickens.
The title of the novel flight can be interpreted in more than one way. It is common to associate the word flight with flying away and it is therefor obviously to read the title as a symbol of our narrators desire to leave here hometown Franconia. Another way to interpret the title are as direct reference to the owl. In the novel we see the result of freedom, or more precisely the absence freedom, when the owl are no longer permitted to fly freely. Some would therefor say that the real message lies in the owl.
The novel can be read in 2 separate ways as a result of these 2 very different understandings of the title and it is therefor a good example of the importance of a good title.
There are 3 main characters in the novel, our narrator, Eugene and Jason.
Our narrator are a teenage girl in a normal family in a normal city called Franconia which she by the way hates and she goes to a normal school. She earns money in here spare time by writing others papers in the exchange for cash. She runs the business with here older brothers best friend called Eugene.
Eugene Kessler lives close by our narrator and goes to the same school as our narrator and here brother Jason. Eugene does not have many friends besides Jason and our narrator which are his business partner so they aren´t necessarily friends. He has a horn owl as a pet which he sometimes sets free to fly around the neighborhood. He plans to go to cambridge with Jason when the School ends. Our narrators brother Jason is a straight laced boy. He is always behaving nice and are basically the perfect boys and many girls have therefor tried to get their fingers at him but he priorities his education higher than them so non of theme have succeeded at this.
By Gustav M. Lisner 1. M

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26. Marts 2014