purpose of about a boy

One of the main characters in Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy and the eponymous film based upon it is Fiona. Fiona is Marcus’ forty-year-old mother, who tries to raise Marcus as a perfect person into a falling world on her own, ever since she divorced Marcus’ father several years ago. Until the very end of the story, Fiona is incapable of seeing her own wrongs, and thus, she raises her son as a boy who seemingly is every parent’s dream, but also is unfamiliar with social norms in areas such as clothing, music and speech, and all this results in that he’s being bullied at school. Even when she finally hears about the social slaughter he experiences every day, she’s still of the opinion that everything that matters is that he is himself, and that he shouldn’t care about them and what they think. This whole side story about Fiona slowly understanding how the world works, and the difference between theoretical and practical ideologies, has an obvious moral: Ofcourse you should always be yourself, but you should also adjust after the world; if everyone goes as they want, nothing will work. Another moral of the story can simply be that you can’t always save everyone; sometimes you just have to help yourself and try not to think of the others. Fiona’s life was already a mass of grief and sorrow because of herself, so when she tried to help Marcus as well, it all fell apart for both of them. Her suicide attempt was ofcourse the biggest break-through, leading Marcus to worry much more about her for a long period of time, leading the two of them into an evil circle where neither could help themselves simply because they cared too much about the other.

Even though she in the beginning of the novel sees herself as the perfect mother as she doesn’t raise her son to be a sheep, she realises more and more throughout the story that she’s wrong, and that she has been too ignorant to understand that everything she does isn’t always right. Towards the end of the end of the film,