The God Boy Essay Example

when the family life around him begins to disintegrate. His father’s a drunk, his mother has a secret abortion, and their disdain for each other grows throughout the novel.

Jimmy, always thinking he is to blame, attributes their arguments to the new bike he begged for and received and even offers to give it back if that will stop the trouble. Jimmy Sullivan believed he was protected by god but when things go wrong jimmy blames god. Ian Cross uses action to help the reader understand jimmy.

All through The God Boy, Jimmy’s anger grows until one day he lashes out at God and finds a new mean streak swearing at an old lady, throwing stones at a friend, smashing a window which. When the novel’s end comes around Jimmy believes he is being punished until he realises that he is not to blame he’s made all the effort and God hasn’t even lifted a finger. ‘’then for days on end I get annoyed at God for putting one across on me way he did.’’

At his Catholic school, the other boys are unable to see what he is driving at when he wants to discuss parents, and think he is trying to start a sex discussion. While not actually a battered child, Jimmy exists in a ‘no man’s-land’ between the warring parties. He is virtually an only child because his older sister Molly lives in a board Set in a small town in New Zealand, the story is told through the eyes of a gauche thirteen year-old boy called Jimmy Sullivan.

It is the haunting tale of a young boy

growing up in a catholic household, seeing things he shouldn't and struggling to cope. The book appears to be domestic in scope and provincial in vision, but by the end of the novel, the reader has encountered murder, and witnessed the warping of a promising mind and the destruction of a family.

In this deceptively modest masterpiece, the cruelty beneath society's surface is revealed, all the more devastingly so through the ordinariness of the location. ing school in another town.