Looking for Alibrandi Essay
“I’ll run one day. Run for my life. To be free and think of myself. Not as an Australian and as an Italian and not as an in between. I’ll run to be emancipated.” Discuss.
Looking into the distance, an athlete runner can see the finishing line. However what stands before them are many hurdles one will have to jump over to reach the end. Comparing this analogy to an individual’s life, these hurdles are like the various challenges that one will have to overcome to cross their finishing line, and in order to come first, one will have to run. Melina Marchetta has written a novel, Looking for Alibrandi (LFA), which portrays the events that can waver a character from their finishing goal, their goal to achieve true freedom. It is situations such as the social class, identity and cultural difference Marchetta refers to enabling the growth of the character, of them becoming their own individual, throughout the novel.
In society, back then and now, there is always some sort of categorisation of individuals in society. Someone’s culture, religion, and status. How someone treats one another can be influenced through social class. Lee Taylor and Josephine Alibrandi (Josie) are from the same friendship group. They both are middle-class scholarship students, and both suffer from similar life situations. Even though Lee’s character in the novel does not come from an Italian family, known in the novel to be a family of “wogs”, she can still see and experience the injustice from the problem of social catergorising. “If your father is a dustman, you’re going to be a dustman. If your father is filthy rich, you’re going to be filthy rich because he’ll introduce you to his friend’s son.” (p.g. 144). lee was suffering from an adolescent problem of realising she has no plans after her high school life. She was fixated around the idea that once an individual is born into a class, one will never be able to escape. She further explores this through saying ...the rich marry the rich, Josie.
Looking into the distance, an athlete runner can see the finishing line. However what stands before them are many hurdles one will have to jump over to reach the end. Comparing this analogy to an individual’s life, these hurdles are like the various challenges that one will have to overcome to cross their finishing line, and in order to come first, one will have to run. Melina Marchetta has written a novel, Looking for Alibrandi (LFA), which portrays the events that can waver a character from their finishing goal, their goal to achieve true freedom. It is situations such as the social class, identity and cultural difference Marchetta refers to enabling the growth of the character, of them becoming their own individual, throughout the novel.
In society, back then and now, there is always some sort of categorisation of individuals in society. Someone’s culture, religion, and status. How someone treats one another can be influenced through social class. Lee Taylor and Josephine Alibrandi (Josie) are from the same friendship group. They both are middle-class scholarship students, and both suffer from similar life situations. Even though Lee’s character in the novel does not come from an Italian family, known in the novel to be a family of “wogs”, she can still see and experience the injustice from the problem of social catergorising. “If your father is a dustman, you’re going to be a dustman. If your father is filthy rich, you’re going to be filthy rich because he’ll introduce you to his friend’s son.” (p.g. 144). lee was suffering from an adolescent problem of realising she has no plans after her high school life. She was fixated around the idea that once an individual is born into a class, one will never be able to escape. She further explores this through saying ...the rich marry the rich, Josie.