The whipping boy
The Whipping Boy
The Whipping Boy is a short story, written by Richard Gibney in 2011, and used for the written English exams in the summer of 2013 in Denmark.
The Whipping Boy is a story about three slaves, two men and a woman, who get told that they’re no longer slaves, and that they can do whatever they want to. The two men start off by killing the ground dogs, because the dogs are considered evil towards the slaves. Afterwards they whip their former owner, because they want him to feel, how they have felt their entire lives, under his ownership. Then they get him drunk and escape the premises with the female slave, only to be discovered and killed by a squad of the federation’s army.
The short story is a tale about freedom, slavery and the conditions the slaves had to endure before, and even after they were liberated.
The story takes place around 1865-66 due to the boy from the Union with the proclamation that states that the slaves are free men and women, and furthermore does the fact that the three slaves meet a squad from the southern states army, indicate that it takes place somewhere between those years. Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election and that escalated into the American civil war in 1861, and ended with the Unions victory in 1865 and the liberation of slaves all across the USA.
The author uses foreshadowing (a type of building up suspense in a story, where the reader can predict what happens) in the text multiple times, and the first incident is already in the title “The Whipping Boy”. Already here we, as readers, can in a way predict that this story has something to do with tables turning, because back in that time, African American slave males were often referred to as “boy”, and it was also a known punishment to slaves to be whipped. To mix up these two terms in the title makes the reader think about the meaning of it, and try to predict the story, in a way that concludes in slaves whipping a white man, which it actually
The Whipping Boy is a short story, written by Richard Gibney in 2011, and used for the written English exams in the summer of 2013 in Denmark.
The Whipping Boy is a story about three slaves, two men and a woman, who get told that they’re no longer slaves, and that they can do whatever they want to. The two men start off by killing the ground dogs, because the dogs are considered evil towards the slaves. Afterwards they whip their former owner, because they want him to feel, how they have felt their entire lives, under his ownership. Then they get him drunk and escape the premises with the female slave, only to be discovered and killed by a squad of the federation’s army.
The short story is a tale about freedom, slavery and the conditions the slaves had to endure before, and even after they were liberated.
The story takes place around 1865-66 due to the boy from the Union with the proclamation that states that the slaves are free men and women, and furthermore does the fact that the three slaves meet a squad from the southern states army, indicate that it takes place somewhere between those years. Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election and that escalated into the American civil war in 1861, and ended with the Unions victory in 1865 and the liberation of slaves all across the USA.
The author uses foreshadowing (a type of building up suspense in a story, where the reader can predict what happens) in the text multiple times, and the first incident is already in the title “The Whipping Boy”. Already here we, as readers, can in a way predict that this story has something to do with tables turning, because back in that time, African American slave males were often referred to as “boy”, and it was also a known punishment to slaves to be whipped. To mix up these two terms in the title makes the reader think about the meaning of it, and try to predict the story, in a way that concludes in slaves whipping a white man, which it actually