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Essay / A Theme of Conflict in Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
Conflict can arise in ways both large and small. Conflict can impact anyone's life, at any age. Conflict can be the most influential power in a person's life. However, when young people are forced to face these conflicts, they must learn to mature and their opinions and views on various topics will change. Matilda Laimo, the protagonist of Lloyd Jones' novel Mister Pip, lives on an isolated island in the middle of a civil war. Matilda is exposed to the dark side of her beloved island and she must grow up quickly as the stark differences between black and white tear her world apart. In the novel, the colors black and white are used to symbolize the conflicts in Matilda's island life, her inner thoughts and her own family and describe how, when young people are exposed to conflicts, they reach a certain level of maturity and new opinions arise. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Matilda Island is riddled with conflict depicted in black and white. The villagers are intrigued by the mysterious white man who lives among them. Matilda “grew up believing that white was the color of all things important” and the white man, Mr. Watts, was no exception to what she considered important. He starts conflicts and wakes up the village simply by being a white man. He holds greater power in the eyes of the outside world than the rest of the villagers combined. His authority and prejudices are brought to the forefront when his house is spared after everything else is burned by the redskins. The problem is that all the villagers believe that "the Redskins would not do anything that would cause the displeasure of the whites" and this makes the villagers angry because they feel it is unfair and they hold Mr. Watts as responsible. They point the finger at Mr. Watts because he was the one who introduced Great Expectations to the village, which quickly became another source of conflict for the island. The book provides insight into the white world and opens the villagers' eyes to previously unknown concepts because "it contained a world that was whole and had meaning, unlike their own." The book changed everyone's lives, whether they knew Pip or not, because of the serious consequences it brought to the village. The confusion the novel brought to the redskins led to the annihilation of everything in the village, showing how the white world represented by Mr. Watts and Great Expectations clashed with the predominantly black village and sparked a horrible conflict who changed Matilda's life forever. Years later, she determined that "Mr. Dickens was easier to understand than Mr. Watts" which sums up the impact both men had on her life, through history and teaching, and how the effects of the conflicts that the two men introduced to her life were carried with her for years after they occurred (246). The introduction of the white world was so different from the world the islanders were accustomed to and this unfamiliarity naturally led to conflict which greatly influenced Mathilde. With Mr. Watts and Great Expectations representing the color white and the village representing black, it is clear how the two colors relate to the conflicts caused by Watts and the book. The colors then lead Matilda to grow and develop due to the conflict they represent that has taken over her life, showing how conflict has the ability to mature young people and change their opinions. The conflictrages in other ways at Mister Pip. This extends so deeply that it torments Matilda's inner thoughts through a conflict represented by black and white. The main sources of conflict affecting Matilda's thoughts arise from her changing opinions of Mr. Watts and Great Expectations. Before Mr. Watts became her teacher, Matilda considered "Pop Eye" "a source of mystery" because he led a very private life and she knew very little about him. After conflict breaks out on the island, Matilda's opinion of Mr. Watts becomes more mature. Once she left the island, "only recently did she realize that she had never seen Mr. Watts with a machete - his survival weapons were a story." Her adult outlook on life shows how the conflict caused her to change and see Mr. Watt in a new light and she realized how different he was from the people in her village who allegedly resorted to gun violence during conflict, but Mr. Watts sought to do so. a more peaceful approach that simply involved his words and imagination. High expectations also seriously influenced the way Matilda thought later in life because of the conflict it brought. A noticeable change in her thought patterns is evident between when she first reads the book and when Matilda reads it again. As a child, she felt "it was always a relief to come back to Great Expectations" but, once she devoted her life to the works of Dickens, she felt like the book was "an act of magic.” As a young girl, Matilda viewed the novel as a sanctuary and escape from the conflict around her, a route to the white world. After the conflict passed, the young adult considered the book a revolutionary work and recognizes how much of an impact it had on her, showing how the conflict made her less naive. Matilda's transition from innocent teenager to woman demonstrates how the conflict between blacks and whites in Mr. Pip shows that when a child is faced with hostilities, their identity and opinions change. the white is through the feuds in Matilda's family. The absence of his father in his life constitutes a large part of his identity. She explains that before her father left, she had an "ignorance of the outside world" and that her father's postcards allowed her to acquire knowledge about the white world. Everything he had learned about the white world before leaving for his new job conflicted with what their family knew and this led his parents to "argue like roosters" about the differences between the two worlds. The way black people did things was extremely different from the way white people did them and this confused Matilda's mother, with Dolores showing how black and white represent conflict in the novel. Another source of conflict for Matilda's family is Dolores' strong religious views which clash with Mr. Watts' lack of conviction and how this affects Matilda. Dolores took matters into her own hands and decided to "fight" with Mr. Watts because "its lovely Matilda." . . tells him that she doesn't believe in the devil. She believes in Pip'. Dolores' beliefs go against what Mr. Watts teaches the children about the white world and Dolores begins to become overprotective because she feels like the white world is stealing Matilda from her. and she holds Mr. Watts responsible. Dolores fighting Mr. Watts over Pip and religion shows another way that blacks and whites clash to formulate the conflict in Mister Pip The pressure that all of this puts on. Matilda leads him to forge his own..