1) My reflections and views about the novel.

  

From reading the first few chapters of The Power of One, written by Bryce Courtenay, I have gotten an idea about what his novel is about. That it is highly about justice, racism and the unfairness between different cultures. Although I have only read the first few chapters I haven’t really gotten a full idea of what this novel is about. At first it was the thought of having to read a book for English which made me procrastinate, but then once I started reading the exposition, I really got into it and didn’t want to put the book down, even though I had other work or even sleep to go to.

 

What puts me off this book is the language of Courtenay, he uses a lot of blasphemy which although we have blotted it out in the book, it still puts me off because sometimes extra is blotted out and you miss parts of the novel and it doesn’t make sense, although this has nothing to do with the author. Another point is the fact that this is not a Christian author, and we will hardly ever read books from a Christian author with a Christian perspective, but it is nice to be able to read from a Christian.

From reading these first few chapters we get a sense of what this novel is going to be about, for instance in the exposition, we can know what the context is about and also the setting, in the first chapter and on the first page, we can see that this novel takes place in Africa. How do we know this? Because it talks about the character having a Zulu wet nurse, and Zulu is the great African tribe. Also another give away that this book takes place in Africa because of the animals which are mentioned on the first page, the baboons, we know that it is definitely not an Australian book because we do not have wild baboons.

By reading through the first chapters we can see that Peekay is bullied, he is bullied at the Boarding School which he is staying at because his mother had a personal breakdown.

From reading the first few chapters we can see that Peekay starts to get a hold of the bullies, by not showing his emotions and also by getting a hold of some things that they bullied him about, for instance, they bullied him about his wetting his bed, but once he met Inkosi-Inkosikazi and once he got ‘Grandpa Chook’ he conquered his bed wetting stage. Then the bullies couldn’t bother him about that, and so they had one less thing.

I heard from others that this is actually a really good book, and I am thinking that too, I heard that later on Peekay learns to fight, and therefore fighting back against the bullies, so he learns to stand up for himself.