We all fall down - Essay in speech format

Good morning year 11, thank you for turning up to what will be an engaging analysis of the complexity of conflict in literature. If you ponder upon it, how many of us have experienced some form of conflict in our lives? No doubt all of you. But year 11, it is the way in which we handle this conflict that moulds us into the individuals we are today. My work in the novel ‘We all fall down’ has caused some controversy in schools simply because I paint the picture of characters who fail to metaphorically ‘get back up’. I’ve no doubt that if you look closely enough around this room you will associate someone with these problems and that’s what I’d like to explore today; the complex character that is Buddy Walker. The thing that really got the critics cranky was Buddy’s escapist tendencies. The reason being that Buddy drinks, he drinks a lot to assist him in sanding down the rough edges in his highly conflicted life, and that will be the focus of our discussion today. Year 11, I would now offer you some valuable advice in the hope that you will learn from Buddy’s mistakes, and that is that in life, it’s not about how you fall down… It’s how you get up.
Now, the main theme I implicitly explored in this novel through the experiences of Buddy Walker and Jane Jerome is the concept of resilience. Evidently, these two vastly different characters both have vastly different levels of resilience, seen through the way they handle the conflict in their lives. But what exactly is resilience? Resilience is a person’s ability to bounce back from setbacks, major or minor, and just the all-round ability to keep going, you could describe it differently as mental toughness. Buddy, as stated before, is an escapist. He uses many different things as tools for his escapism, the major one being his metaphorical ‘life crutch’, his gin (alcohol). He uses alcohol as a form of escapism in many different instances, and I feel that the way I described the gin’s significance to Buddy’s escapism