Power, slavery and death.
The ideas I have listed out are just a few of the many themes in this novel. Power, El Patron is ruling Opium. Anyone will do anything for El Patron, he's so powerful because of his wealth. Consequences of a ruling dictator is a country filed without freedom, and frankly, a country filled with slavery. Of course, El Patron can do whatever he chooses. He chooses to create eejits. Take away their brain, and force them to do mind-less, excruciating, hardworking jobs. Why does he force them to become mindless slaves? Just because he can.
Power is never a good thing, you become self centred and in El Patron's case, take over a country. Power can ruins lives, and take away what's best for our society. Farmer has taught me about the horrors of slavery. Slavery doesn't only happen in this novel, but it does happen in real life. What about Celia working at a factory. She explained to Matt, "All day I sat on an assembly line and put tiny square into tiny holes with a pair of tweezers. I thought I'd go blind!" (141)
This isn't the only form of slavery we exhibit in this novel. Have we forgotten about the clones? All the lives El Patron has killed to make himself live longer. He takes away their organs for his own selfish needs, because he can. Learning about both slavery and clones has taught us a bit of a lesson. You cannot take peoples lives away for innocent reasons. And this is definitely one of the biggest issues with El Patron and in countries around the world. Recently in a news article, I learned that children in Africa are being used as slaves, and this is not okay. We have learned about individual rights through our Charter of Rights and Freedoms unit. Treat everyone the same, and as an equal.
And finally, the last theme I will talk about is death. El Patron was terrified of death, he hated the thought. "There were eight of us, we should all have grown up, but I was the only survivor. I am meant to have those lives! I am meant to have justice!" (233) Living forever isn't worth it, and taking other people's lives makes it so much worse. Death can be a pretty scary thing, considering how easy it is for you to lose your life. Sometimes in life, you have to just let these things happen. You can't stop it, and I guess that's what Farmer is trying to say.
"Pastor Jailed for Trafficking African Child 'slaves'" BBC News. BBC, 18 Mar. 2011. Web. 22 Mar. 2012. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12789690>.
Nice, good job angel! I liked how you used Powerful words to describe what your talking about, and i have to agree with you. At the beginning when you say" Consequences of a ruling dictator is a country filed without freedom, and frankly, a country filled with slavery. Of course, El Patron can do whatever he chooses." that kind of sounds like it's taken on the role of North Korea, which in a way it really has.
ReplyDeleteWhen you talk about clones, or more specifically "All the lives El Patron has killed to make himself live longer. He takes away their organs for his own selfish needs, because he can." you need to keep in mind that el patron was cloned (when you think about it, that must have hurt) and clones ARE considered monsters, so they agreed with what you say here about taking organs from people is wrong, but they don't consider the clones people.
But I'm not saying they're right, and they should consider them people.