Child Victims In Two Literary Texts

Hicret Osta 

AE-222  

 14.1.2014

Child Victims In Two Literary Texts

          The Price of Keeping One’s Place from Black Boy by Richard Wright is an autobiographical story and basically tells us about a black child “in the white world”. It is possible to see a remerkable discrimination against black people, especially black children,  throughout this autobiographical story, and unfortunately it reflects the reality of the world. In the other literary texts which is The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula Le Guin, its subject is also a discrimination against a child. While the first one is not a fictional short story and reflects the real world, the second one is a utopia which is an ideally perfect place, especially in terms of its social, political, and moral aspects. However, the people who live in a utopian city, Omelas, even do not refuse that people can neglect children and exercise violence on them.

          The authors choose child victims who are neglected and expose to psychological or physical violence to tell us about societies in their texts. Because children are not capable of saving themselves from the external world, this choice is not incidental. They can be damaged easily by adults. Of course, the damages are not only consist of psychological or physical violence, they also contain a kind of upbringing which shape children how they should be a person in the future. In this sense, because people bring children up with the world perception of them to keep their society, the one of the best ways to understand them and their society is analyse the children of the society. Due to this, the authors use child victims as an agent to state the structure of the societies in above-mentioned texts.

          In The Price of Keeping One’s Place, many dialogues between a black child or a child victim, who is actually Richard Wright, and his employers who are generally white people are very remarkable to see racial discrimination of the society:

           “Do you want this job?” the woman asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, afraid to trust my own judgment.

“Now, boy, I want to ask you one question and I want you to tell me truth,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, all attention.

“Do you steal?” she asked me seriously.

I brust into a laugh, then checked myself.

“Lady, if I was a thief, I’d never tell anybody.”

                    It is predictable how the child feels offended and insulted throughout the conversation. Initially to accept that the black child is a potential criminal is very hurtful for him and this teaches him how he is perceived by the society. Therefore, we can deduce from the social structure based on racial discrimination by means of the child victim.

          The other example of child victims is at the utopia of Ursula Le Guin. The city is beautiful, the weather and harvests are kind and abundant, and must everyone healthy, it is indeed a utopia, for all but the suffering child. Although the situation of the child who is exposed to many phsiyal and psychological vioelence is very miserable, other children who live in Omelas must encounter worse situation and they are also victims from a diffirent aspect. It can be explained from some sentences of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas:

This (the situation of the neglected child) is usually explained to children when they are betweeneight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come out to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained

to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to.

          While the child victim is behavioured terribly and tortured by people of Omelas, other children are obliged to accept that and are brougt up as no having their own thoughts about the child. Thanks to both the neglected child and the other children, we can resolve the social structer in Omelas, which refers to focusing on only the interest of Omelas despite of a miserable child.

          In conclusion, the authors may remind us that we may be a victim of something, because we were a child at one time.