Analysis Of The Beggar In The Living Room By John Watkins

Living in a luxurious house with understanding and patient parents is a dream of every child, right? William John Watkins in “The Beggar in the Living Room” draws a portrait of an orphan who was “lucky” to be adopted by amazing family of Aunt Zsa-zsa and Uncle Howard, who act like caring and supportive parents. Finally, protagonist gets away from abusive step-father and gets into the family of well-educated, supportive people. However, behind various acts of attention, story examines complexity of relationships and problem of miscommunication which can force a person to abandon even luxurious home. The problem of miscommunication is clear from the first sentence where reader is exposed to tension between character’s ideas and

Communication and lack of mutual understanding is an important and central idea of the beggar in the living room. Despite the fact that we learn a great deal about identity of this child, there are important questions that are still unanswered. Despite the fact that this boy is the narrator, reader is deprived of various interesting facts about protagonist. How old is he? What is his name? What relationship did he have with his mother? What did he really feel about Aunt and Uncle? Reader is only introduced to facts, like death of Lester and wealth of Aunt and Uncle, however do we really know protagonist that well? Does he open up? A lot of things in this story is open to interpretation; protagonist doesn’t try to help the reader out. His final decision to leave the house didn’t have any explanation or information about his future plans. All we can do is infer how he felt living in a world of holograms and fake reality; however, we will never know for sure what his thoughts were. Author’s decision to not allow the reader to communicate with protagonist sets yet another barrier for forming a relationship, which is the central topic of this

Protagonist starts off about his childhood dream of living with people like Aunt Zsa-zsa and Uncle Howard, however as soon as he gets adopted, this situation changes and he realizes that there is a huge gap between himself and these people. It seems like death of Lester was a chance of starting a new life at a new place, however things didn’t go as planned. First important problem is that he is labelled as “Lester’s child”, which is an important misclassification considering that Lester was abusive step-father.Aunt Zsa-zsa says that “your parents are who raise you not who gave you your genes”(2), however, she failed to raise him up and form meaningful relationship with protagonist.“They were like TV parents, they never yelled, not even at one another, and when I did something wrong, they sat down and talked to me and explained why it was wrong and what I ought to do about it” (2).Despite this description, there was no bond between these people, because they lived in a fake world of holograms, where reality and imagination where very arbitrary. While they claimed to be worried about protagonist, they treated hologram child with cruelty and total indifference. Through these holograms Uncle Howard showed his lack of compassion and strange obsession with violence and misery. They masked this terrible nature by beautiful house, ice-cream and tasty food, however protagonist still