“The challenge to belong may be resisted or embraced.”
How is this explored in your prescribed text and ONE other related text of your own choosing?
Belonging is a challenge that must be confronted by every individual over the course of their
lives. However, it is ultimately the individual’s decision whether to resist or embrace the
challenge that defines how belonging affects them. In the eleven-chaptered prose novel “The
Simple Gift” by Steven Herrick, the responder learns that an open heart is necessary for
people to belong to a new place. In other words, individuals must first learn to welcome the
challenges to belong. This is further reflected in KhaledHosseini’s “bilsdungroman” novel
entitled “The Kite Runner”. Both texts demonstrate the highly personal and varied ways in
which individuals overcome the barrier to belong to places and to others.
The actions of others are essential catalysts for an individual to embrace belonging. In
creating a feeling of belonging between individuals and groups, such interactions and
exchanges are necessary to establish commonality and connections through shared adversity.
These may be small or large gestures that show the individual is cared for, included and
wanted. While it may be challenging to show an act of kindness to a stranger, this is precisely
what Billy of “The Simple Gift” does in order to gain Old Bill’s friendship. It is the small
acts of kindness and compassion by Billy towards the drunken and grief-stricken Old Bill that
brings the two together as friends. By giving him cigarettes, making breakfast each morning
and encouraging him to work, Billy makes Old Bill feel comforted and human again. The use
of repetition in the framing device of the phrase ‘I like the kid’ reinforces the sense of how
important Billy has become in Old Bill’s life. In a similar way, Caitlin’s decision not to tell
the Manager when she sees Billy taking leftover food at McDonald’s is a way of her
embracing the possibility of his belonging. Instead Caitlin ‘smiled at him and said, ‘I hate
mopping.’ Herrick uses direct speech to demonstrate the potential for belonging between
Caitlin and Billy. She does the unexpected and puts him at ease and the motif of their smiles
further emphasises a connection between the two. Both of these examples reflect the
importance of small and large gestures as an act of embracing a bond between two
individuals.
The complexity of belonging is revealed through the way adversity and circumstance
can bring people together. At times, the situation in which individuals come together is a
challenging one and it is this shared difficulty that bonds them. Both Billy and Old Bill are
running away from something. Billy is escaping a violent, unloving alcoholic father and Old
Bill is trying to escape the tragic deaths of his wife and daughter. Their desire to escape leads
to the shared situation of homeless that provides the opportunity for a bond to develop. Billy
aligns himself with Old Bill through the phrase ‘hobos like us’, using the slang term to group
the pair through circumstance. In a similar way, adversity is what bonds Hassan and Amir in
Hosseini’s novel, “The Kite Runner”. The use of flashbacks to quote something that Baba has
said about how ‘there was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a
kinship that not even time could break’ emphasises the Hassan and Amir’s shared childhood
“The challenge to belong may be resisted or embraced.”
How is this explored in your prescribed text and ONE other related text of your own choosing?
in Afghanistan. The first-person narrative allows the responder to delve deeper into Amir’s
thoughts and recollections about how Hassan had always been willing to do anything for his
best friend. The repetition of the phrase ‘For you, a thousand times over’ which incorporates
a hyperbole demonstrates the strength of the bond between the two boys. This shows how the
commonality of their childhood experience will always give them a sense of belonging to
each other.
The importance of common ideals and connections is another factor that proves that
belonging involves the embracing of shared ideals. These shared values are important links
between people and help to strengthen their sense of belonging so that it becomes more than
just a fleeting experience. The way Caitlin comes to feel she belongs to Billy is largely
because she no longer feels connected to the materialistic values of her parents. In some
ways, his homelessness is an attractions as he is able to offer only himself to Caitlin and none
of the possessions and status symbols she has come to so despise. When he mentions to her
‘the honour of poverty’ after she has momentarily doubted their relationship Caitlin becomes
‘more determined to sit with him’. The adverb ‘more’ shows how powerful this attraction is.
Hosseini also shows the bonding between Afghan immigrants in San Francisco over their
shared cultural connections. When Baba and Amir arrived in America, they lived in an
enclave of Afghan immigrants. The use of imagery to describe the Afghan flea market which
was popular among the immigrants leads the responder to learn that Amir feels a strong sense
of belonging to his people. Hosseini also peppered his novel with Arabic words which are
foreign to most responders to lend verisimilitude to the story.
The fact that cultural connections and similar upbringings do not always make people
feel they belong again demonstrates that the challenge to belong may be resisted by
individuals. Caitlin feels no connection to her parents and the values they stand for. When she
lists all the things in her bedroom she concludes in a defiant tone: ‘And I’m not a spoilt brat
OK,/but I am spoilt,/spoilt to boredom,/ and I’m smart enough/to realise that none of
this/means anything…’ The repetition and hyperbole emphasises Caitlin’s feelings that these
things are barriers to feeling that she belongs to her parents. Their values are the opposite of
those that she is developing as a young woman. In “The Kite Runner”, Amir uses metaphors
to describe Baba’s defiance of the cultural norms back in Kabul: ‘Baba had been such an
unusual Afghan father, a liberal who had lived by his own rules , a maverick who had
disregarded or embraced societal customs as he had seen fit.’ When they moved to San
Francisco, Amir says that ‘Kabul is a city of ghosts for me’ and that he ‘embraced America’
demonstrating his new-found belonging to a new country. Both Baba and Caitlin are outliers
in their immediate society who resist the shackles of conformity to belong elsewhere while
Amir has proved that it is possible to find new belonging in a foreign land.
Thus we can see, through reading Herrick’s verse novel and Hosseini’s novel, that
belonging is a challenge that may be resisted or embraced by individuals. For someone to feel
a strong connection to another person, place or group, there are many factors and experiences
necessary. In conclusion, the interplay of complex factors and events are an essential
“The challenge to belong may be resisted or embraced.”
How is this explored in your prescribed text and ONE other related text of your own choosing?
component in creating an avenue for the individual to embrace a deep and long-lasting sense
of belonging.