Sticks And Stones Analysis

Sticks and Stones

By Nicolai Madsen

’’Stick and Stones’’ is a short story written by Trezza Azzopardi. The story is about a teacher named Lewis. Lewis is a teacher at a school somewhere in the middle of England. Although Lewis has his job as a teacher at a school, he runs away from his job and everything else, out to his mother. He runs away because of an episode at school where one of his students, Paul Fry, commits suicide because he was bullied. Lewis knew about the bullying. He has been taking notes about it, observed the bullying and even reported it to the Headmaster, but he feels that he should have helped Paul Fry physically. That’s the reason that he runs off to his mother’s house, his childhood home by the coast.

The reason why

Lewis often has this dream about committing suicide, just like Paul Fry. It seems that he has been standing on the edge, about to commit suicide in the past. When he dreams that dream, the same dream over and over again, he thinks back on his mother’s speech about ‘’It’s survival of the fittest…’’ and that gives him some kind of hope in life back.

The main theme in this text is, in my opinion, bullying. Definitely. This whole story in its brief is about a boy who commits suicide as a consequence of bullying, and a man who is mentally ripped in pieces because he sees this boy being bullied, and thinks back to the time where he himself was bullied. He, Lewis, has trauma from the time when he was bullied, and he has paranoia everytime he sees or walks by a bigger group of people, because he is afraid that they are talking stupid about him or, even worse, want to hurt him.

When I read the ending of the text, I sit back with the feeling that Lewis gets some kind of control over his traumatization about the time that he was bullied. He has survived, he thinks. Just like his mother said that he would do, if he continued fighting. It seems that he is now ready to go home, and that he is now ready to stop running away from his