English essay "The Exercise"

Hej. Det her er et englsk essay om en novelle der hedder "The Exercise". Lektien var,(for anden gang)- at rettet stilen igen for fejl, for de fejl vi ikke så den første gang vi afleverede. Nu har jeg rettet stilen, men ville være sikker på at der ikke er en masse andre dumme fejl jeg evt. har overset. Håber at der er en derude der lige ville tag et hurtigt kig på det, da engelsk ikke lige er min skarpeste sidde - på forhånd tak:

“The Exercise”

You are confused, you are in your adolescence and you have just found out that your father, who you thought was the strongest man in the world, just has proved that he isn’t. Both of your parents make mistakes, even though you never thought it was possible for them to do that. Your parents you thought were totally perfect are not as perfect as you thought they were. You have just realised that your parents are not able to solve all problems and your certainty about your parents has disappeared.
How do you tackle the situation and how are you ever going to make it clear to yourself that this is the way it is? That is what this short story is about.
“The Exercise” takes place in Ireland in the 1950s at time the country was ex-tremely poor, and the class distinctions were conspicuous. Kevin who is the eldest of three children, is attending grammar school- something, no one else in the family has ever done.
Kevin is a young boy, we don’t know exactly who old he is but we can con-clude that he is above the age of twelve where the adolescence usually starts. Kevin is the eldest of three children, he cares a great deal about school and he does his homework every evening. He loves to hear his father read stories to his younger siblings though he pretends not to listen because of his age, a big boy in grammar school. He should not care about bedtime stories but he does because he loves them. Kevin loves his father very much he looks up to him and does not want to disappoint him. He and his brothers love to hang around their father, and when he has got the night off from his job as a barman, they become happy. One might say that Kevin’s world has been enlarged after he has started at grammar school. Kevin is now among boys from very different strata, and differ-ent social positions, and it can influence him to behave in another way. In the grammar school is it important which family one comes from.
The father is a working man. We don’t know so much about his background, but since he ends up as a barman, he can hardly be from a wealthy family, in the


middleclass. He doesn’t drink, but he smokes lots of cigarettes and pipe as well4. It is a piece of information that he smoke pipe, because the pipe may symbolise intellectuality and richness. Pipe is for the person who has got the time to indulge in it, in contrast with the cigarettes, which may be for the working man; that he is as well as the professor type with the tasty pipe. His father cares for his children, he helps with their homework, and before bedtime he reads stories. He is very cu-rious and interested in learning; thus he often does the exercises in Kevin’s schoolbooks. The fact that the father apparently has some academic abilities, which he as a barman doesn’t fully utilize, is perhaps, the only, thing that disturbs the picture of a “perfect family”.
Kevin’s mother seems to be a little naïve. She thinks that her husband could have had a better job. Like Kevin’s father, we don’t know so much about his mother either.
She must be careless since she lets Kevin go down to the bus-stop only wearing his school uniform.
Waldo, Kevin’s Latin teacher in the grammar school, is very frightening; there is lots of respect surrounding his person, and his mere presence silences the pu-pils5. He is very strict and thinks very highly of himself, he has no room for errors, and when he enters a room, he strides into it as if he owns it. He follows the line of least resistance, at least when it comes to the correction of exercises. He has this system that allows him to carp at his students with minimal effort. He just simply gets them to show their mistakes in front of their whole class, and then he humili-ates them. He tries to be very correct, and after he has humiliated Kelvin’s father in public, he privately tells Kevin that he did not mean it in that way, probably because he doesn’t want Kevin to go home and tell it and Kevin’s father to complain about him to the headmaster. He also makes a big difference be-tween pupils with wealthy parents and the rest, he makes sure to show that he knows their parents. He just seems to be like a plain old suck-up trying to stay out of any kind of trouble, but still gets all the benefit he can from the important peo-ple.

The episode with the Latin exercise happens at a time when Kevin is going through a development from child to adult. – He looks up to his father’s adult-hood (for instance: he likes the “grown-up smells” and he’s fascinated by the fa-ther’s shaving4) By seeing that other people can have a negative view on his fa-ther, Kevin becomes able to realise that his father is not a perfect authority, but a human with faults and shortcomings like every other person. The important part is, however, that Kevin also finds out that his father fundamentally stays the same, no matter how other people see him. And that he is still able to love him, even though he’s not faultless – we know that since Kevin lies in order not to disturb his father’s dreams in the end of the story. In that way, the title of the story, “The Ex-ercise”, does not only refer to the Latin exercise, which appears in the story – (Kevin’s homework), but also the fact that Kevin gets his first “exercise” in “real life”.
The evening when Kevin is waiting outside in the cold and the rain was pouring down things change. If we look at it in a more metaphoric way, it is like; the rain rinses away Kevin’s dirt. All the things he went through, (for instance the episode in the classroom) - have been “rinsed away”. He goes through a change; all the things he has experienced have been cleared away and he is now ready to turn a new leaf. This becomes clear through author’s method of using flashbacks and past tense
This giving way us the emotion of what Kevin has been through, and as an om-niscient storyteller, he is able to know everything about Kevin’s personality and his behaviour. In that way we, as the readers, are able to see ourselves as Kevin.
The message in the short story could be that you should not blindly trust in your parents’ rightness, and it’s normal to lose faith in parents’ superiority when you are an adolescent. You will find out that your father isn’t the strongest man in the world, and maybe even that your mother is not the best cook, but that is not bad, it just gives you a realistic look on life.