Literary Bullies Part II: Nineteen Minutes- The Other Bullies

Tags

19 Minutes, bullying, friendship, guns, ice hockey, intolerance, Jodi Piccoult, Self Esteem, social settings

In the last post, it was established that Matt Royston was Peter Houghton’s primary bully in “Nineteen Minutes,” however, he wasn’t the only person in the story to bully Peter. There were plenty of others. Foremost of these was Matt’s hockey teammate or right hand man, Drew Girard. Drew would often join in with Matt’s bullying of Peter and sometimes even initiate it. In one instance, he played the lead role in a bullying incident when he spammed an email Peter had wrote to Matt’s girlfriend Josie proclaiming his love for her. To add further humiliation for Peter, he encouraged Matt to pull Peter’s pants down in the school cafeteria. Many readers, myself included, site this incident as being the final straw which causes Peter to snap and go on his shooting spree.

Back in the early days of Peaceful Rampage, I established the well known fact that girls are just as capable of bullying boys as boys are of bullying boys. Only the feminine bullying is more subtle and carried out differently. Enter Courtney Ignatio. She is the one who recruits Peter’s only friend at the time, Josie Cormier, to her circle of popular kids, thus taking her away from him for good. She also knows that Peter has feelings for Josie and uses this against him. She also uses this as a tool in Matt and Drew’s bullying. Courtney also initiates the events which leading up to Peter’s pantsing when she tells him that Josie secretly likes him and wants him to tell her so. Therefore, she plays a role in the final straw.

There are plenty of other bullies who make Peter’s life hell in “Nineteen Minutes” but I will only mention a couple. First, there is John Eberhard. I don’t recall him carrying out any direct bullying but he often seems to be there when Matt and Drew are bullying Peter. He certainly does nothing to stop it. Then there are the worst bullies in the story in my opinion. The unnamed boys who constantly throw Peter’s lunchbox out of the school bus window when he is in kindergarten. This happens a lot in that first year and while reading it, I hoped something would have been done about it but it never was.

Like with Matt, Peter gets his revenge on most of these bullies. Drew gets shot through the shoulder and though he survives, his ice hockey career is over. Courtney catches one square in the chest and is killed. John Eberhard gets shot in the head and suffers severe brain damage leaving him mentally handicapped. Of course, I wanted to cheer when I read that Peter got his revenge on all of the above. However, I still believe that no matter how badly he suffered, taking lives isn’t the answer. Saying that, I think it’s a damn shame that Peter never shot those boys who kept throwing his lunchbox out the window. If anyone deserved to be shot, it was them.

Next Post: Endgame

To buy He Was Weird, go to http://www.amazon.co.uk/He-Was-Weird-Michael-Lefevre/dp/1909740942/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1430161519&sr=8-1&keywords=he+was+weird

 

 

 

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Literary Bullies Part 1: Nineteen Minutes- Matt Royston

Tags

19 Minutes, bullying, exclusion, friendship, guns, ice hockey, Jodi Piccoult, school shootings, teasing

 

The Bullies in Jodi Picoult’s novel “Nineteen Minutes,” are almost the easiest to identify in the story. From almost the very beginning, they make their presence known and make victim Peter Houghton’s life hell. Foremost of these bullies and the main antagonist in the story is Matt Royston.

Matt is the total alpha-male of his high school. He is the star of the school ice hockey team and all around popular jock. This celebrity status seems to give him the God given right to tease, haze and bully undesirables and unpopular kids and backed by his entourage of friends and fellow jocks, he bullies because he believes he can. Peter, being the perfect victim, falls into his line of sight straight away.

Since Matt and Peter are in school together since Kindergarten, that’s when the bullying begins. Matt and his companion Drew, who I will go a little more into in the next post, make Peter’s life a misery. In the early years, they are constantly teasing him and pushing, shoving and elbowing him in the playground. As the boys grow older, the bullying intensifies to stuffing Peter’s head down toilets and by junior high school, it becomes emotional as well as physical. Matt leads the others in calling Peter “fag” and “homo” to the point that Peter begins to question his sexual orientation.

By high school, Matt ascends to his throne as the popular jock and while he throws his brute privilege around targeting all whom he considers inferior, Peter is still the main target of his onslaught. Peter still gets thrown against lockers and punched while walking down the school hall. In their sophomore year, he beats Peter up because he thinks that he has designs on his girlfriend. Even after that, the bullying doesn’t stop.

It is here where we can see further into Matt Royston. Being the popular jock he has a girlfriend, Josie, who was Peter’s only friend in grade school. As the story unfolds we can see that Matt treats Josie bad. In one instance, he causes Josie to break her leg, which he justifies with the claim that he loves her so much, he can’t bear other boys giving her attention. Although he never knows, he gets Josie pregnant when one night he insists on having unprotected sex. His behaviour towards Josie is as abusive as his bullying of Peter.

In the end, Matt gets his just desserts when Peter gets his revenge for all the bullying he has suffered for nearly twelve years by shooting up the school. Matt manages to escape the initial hail of bullets and takes Josie with him to try to hide from the rampaging Peter. However, Peter tracks them down in the boys’ locker room. One of his guns falls out of his rucksack and Josie picks it up. Matt begins yelling at her to shoot Peter but instead, she turns and shoots him in the stomach. Bewildered and lying wounded, Peter finishes him off with a round to the head.

It is very easy to say that Matt deserved to die because of his arrogant attitude but it’s just as easy to say that no one deserves to have their life taken in the way his was. To be extremely blunt, Matt Royston was a dick. Like so many teenagers who feel they should be seen as royalty because they play sports, he acted like the entire school should bow down to him and that it was his duty to bully undesirables from the lower castes of school social structures. “Nineteen Minutes” shows what can happen if this goes unchecked.

Next post: Other Bullies from 19 Minutes

To buy He Was Weird, go to: http://www.amazon.co.uk/He-Was-Weird-Michael-Lefevre/dp/1909740942/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1429564157&sr=1-1&keywords=he+was+weird

 

Literary Bullies

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19 Minutes, bullying, Endgame, He Was Weird, Jodi Piccoult, Lionel Shriver, Nancy Garden, Rupture, school shootings, schools, Simon Lelic, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Since I have started Peaceful Rampage nearly two years ago, I have looked at books that talked about the same points I wrote about in my own book “He Was Weird.” The main points of these have been about bullying and school shootings. I have used four other titles along with mine which are:

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

19 Minutes by Jodi Picoult

Endgame by Nancy Garden

Rupture by Simon Lelic

So far, I have looked at each of the shooters and with three of them offered my view of what my main character, Mark, would have thought about them. A little while later, I took a look at each of the shooters’ mothers to ask if their killing spree was a result of bad parents. Not very long ago, I wrote a series of posts asking if teachers played a role in encouraging bullying once again, using teachers from all five books.

Recently, I have begun to ask myself, “What about the bullies themselves?” In all five novels, the bullies have been rightfully demonized but now I thought it was time to give them a fair chance. I will attempt to examine the main bullies in each story and decide if they are fairly portrayed in the story and give suggestions as to why they display their bullying behaviour. More importantly, since in four of the five novels, the bullies get their comeupance, I will also try to determine if they deserved their fate.

I am looking forward to the challenge I have set myself. Having been in the shoes of the victim, I too, need to understand the bullies. I hope you will all come along for the ride and I hope you will venture opinions on the matter.

Next post: Part 1- 19 Minutes

To buy He Was Weird, go to: http://www.amazon.co.uk/He-Was-Weird-Michael-Lefevre/dp/1909740942/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1428958700&sr=1-1&keywords=he+was+weird

With Friends Like These

Tags

anxiety, Asperger's Syndrome, Autism, bullying, friendship, He Was Weird, relationships, Self Esteem, social settings, South Park

Today’s post was actually inspired by the television programme “South Park.” Ironically, when the programme was first aired, I dismissed it as a badly drawn cartoon that got its laughs from being downright rude. Then I saw the episode where Walmart comes to town and basically destroys the community and I thought, “This is true, Walmart does do some towns more harm than good when they come in.” It made me see the show in a whole new light and I think that the shows creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are just plain brilliant.

 There is no particular episode that is behind the inspiration for what I am writing about today. It’s about how the four principle characters treat a fifth character. For those unfamiliar, the main characters, pictured above, Kyle, Stan, Kenny and Cartman sometimes include a fifth friend named Butters. Butters is a victim. He has oppressive parents who ground him at the first instance and is victimized, set up and picked on by the main four. But because Butters is do desperate to be liked, the others used the threat of withdrawing their friendship to manipulate him. As a result, it is often Butters who gets hurt or into trouble and consequently, grounded by his father, which is always his biggest fear. Watching the show for a number of years and thinking back to parts of my own childhood, I realise that I was Butters!

Butters

 Because of my suspected Aspergers Syndrome, I had difficulty in making lasting friendships. Therefore, in order to get people to like me, I would allow them to manipulate me into doing their bidding even to the point of making a fool of myself for their own amusement. Thinking that doing these things would make people like me, I did them. It also didn’t help that I believed that being a bit of a clown would also win me friends, it didn’t. Other kids would simply get me to perform and when they had their amusement from me, discard me and go back to treating me like trash. So, I can see that Butters and I had a lot in common.

Shameless link to my book: Since Mark’s experiences in the story are drawn from my own, he experiences the same thing. Like me in sixth grade, when his classmates learn that Mark can do a few impressions, they egg him on to do them, often at an inappropriate time. They would then find it funny when he got in trouble, either with a teacher or nearly beaten up by some boy who didn’t find him amusing.

Unfortunately, this experience carried over into my early adult life. Not wanting to be without friends, I would let people take advantage of me in thinking they would be my friend if I let them. It was too late before I discovered they were using me. Another factor in this was covered in my post “You’re an Asshole for Standing Up For Yourself.” These two factors together made a dangerous combination.

With an older perspective, I can see the plight of poor Butters in South Park and have loads of sympathy for him. I have this sympathy because I experienced the same things and hope that others will see it and prevent it.

Next post: A Series on Literary Bullies

To buy He Was Weird, go to: http://www.amazon.co.uk/He-Was-Weird-Michael-Lefevre/dp/1909740942/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1428434007&sr=1-1&keywords=he+was+weird