Notes for talk 1

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Note on Notes for talk 1, created by Sean Kierney on 03/09/2017.
Sean Kierney
Note by Sean Kierney, updated more than 1 year ago
Sean Kierney
Created by Sean Kierney over 6 years ago
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Resource summary

Page 1

1st NOTE

Seven high school students, one cafeteria worker and one teacher. All shot dead by one boy, with one bow gifted to him as a Christmas present, positioned in a high hidden vantage point, eyes on each square centimetre of the gymnasium in which the incident took place. Nowhere for anyone to escape but only to stand praying for their lives. This is why…

2nd NOTE

We need to talk about Kevin, a fictional book written in 2003 by a commendable author, Lionel Shriver covering the shock horror we read every day on the subject of high-school massacres similar to that of Columbine. Though this is fictional, the book is based on true events of this type as stated in the blurb “A book that acknowledges what many woman worry about but never express“– This obviously referencing to the worry of your child committing crime such as Kevin did. Multiple real occasions of this form are also mentioned throughout the book by Eva – The main character.

3rd NOTE

Plot: disclosed through many letters from Kevin’s mother Eva, to her absent husband Franklin. This book explores the themes of evil, relationships and motherhood and the way it can transform a healthy happy marriage into an age of trauma. Many of those expecting can relate to the pressure and anxieties Eva feels during preparation to face parenthood such as questioning if she even wants a whole new person in her life, that alone someone she has to take care of and raise well though what mother wouldn’t pause to think about such a life changing step?

4th NOTE

Eva’s sense of discomfort while giving birth, the many failed attempts to breast feed and the sleepless nights she endures are also all familiar to any mother. Though the post dramatic stress disorder, long time depression and hatred for her son that followed are not.

5th NOTE

Kevin was not an ordinary boy to begin with, far from it. Kevin is a behemoth, a vile satire of what it means to be a child, at just four he destroys his mother’s beloved decorated study, then proceeds to break his next-door neighbour’s bike, blind his younger sister in one eye and make strong false accusations of attempted sexual abuse against one of his high school teachers with embarrassing details to make his pledge more believable. All this committed before landing himself in a juvenile prison.

6th NOTE

Shriver’s tendency to overwrite shows the internal conflict she encounters when trying to relate to the story though this book was not written about an ordinary motherhood or an ordinary son, so combining the two portrays the message that your son growing up to commit mass murder is just one of those things creating in my opinion a dishonest feeling to the write. Though I appreciate the controversy leaving it down to an important question of nurture versus nature. Was Eva simply a bad causing her child to grow up this way parent or was Kevin just born evil, we as the reader are left to make that decision.

7th NOTE

Characterization is one of the many things I adore about this book though some might consider cliché, I consider real. Eva’s husband Franklin, with his boundless belief in Kevin and his endless efforts to defend him in any given incident even when all evidence points towards him is in my opinion, such a true representation of “everyone else”. Have you ever been the only one to know or see something and even after countless efforts to make people aware, everyone else tries only to convince you otherwise and that you*re wrong? Well that’s Franklin, and to me that isn’t seeing the good in people, it’s a choice they make because they don’t want to believe it. And it’s that same choice that got Franklin killed.

8th NOTE

. At the beginning, I told you that the main character Eva wrote many letters after the incident to her “absent” husband Franklin. Absent meaning dead. Before leaving the house the morning of the incident, after just saying goodbye to her husband and youngest child Celia. Kevin muttered the chilling words “Are you sure you don’t want to say goodbye one last time” taking it as a joke Eva replies with “ha ha” and leaves. That same day after hearing of the incident, Eva returned home in a hurry to find her Husband Franklin laying shot on the grass and her daughter Celia hung up to the archery target only by arrows that pierce her body.

9th NOTE

Each letter written, each of a different date, every single one. None posted and sent anywhere except the ever-growing pile on the same very desk she wrote them on, as she mourns for the loss she blames her bad parenting and failure to love a child on.

10th NOTE

By a close of the book. Shriver reopens the same question of nurture versus nature as she has Eva offer Kevin, the soulless boy who murdered her husband and most loved child along with 7 high school students and two staff members, a room to stay in after being released from prison due to feeling majorly responsible for the actions of Kevin KatchaDourian.

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