![]() At the end of the story, she even becomes Jack’s lover. Tom, the youngest, starts dressing up as a girl and later on behaves like a toddler and Julie, the eldest, takes over the responsibility for the others and turns from sister to mother. While Sue, the younger sister of the first-person narrator Jack, does not change visibly, Jack himself runs through a metamorphosis in terms of hygiene and outward appearance as such. These codes become distorted in their independent existence, a process that culminates in the incestuous involvement of the eldest siblings. Moreover, all of them are influenced by adult codes of familial behavior. They try to keep their sense of family together by entombing their dead mother in concrete in the cellar of their isolated house. However, the children in McEwan’s novel are not entirely cut from society. The key reference here is to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a pessimistic tale of savage that emerges within the child when free of social controls. ![]() In The Cement Garden a prominent interpretative signpost is bestowed by the literary allusion to the story tradition in which children are put into a situation in which they must fend for themselves. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |