On the Sidewalk Bleeding
The story focuses on a 16-year-old young man named Andy and his last moments after being stabbed by a rival gang member in an alley. Andy does not yet know he is going to die tonight, but that he will. Andy slowly comes to the realization that he may die, and then that he certainly will die, in this dark alley.While he is lying there, unable to speak through the blood in his throat, Andy thinks about his girl Laura and what she must be thinking about him not returning to the dance, and about how much he loves her. He thinks about his identity as a Royals gang member and how wearing his Royals jacket has gotten him stabbed. Andy wonders whether he was stabbed as Andy, or ''had they simply known that he was Royal wearing
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However, there is one main theme, which is the importance of self-identity. In the story, Andy, a member of the Royals gang, is stabbed by a rival gang, the Guardians and left on the sidewalk to die. The Guardian that stabbed him did not know anything about Andy, other than the fact that he was a Royal. Everybody sees Andy as a Royal and that is the reason that he was stabbed and wasn’t saved. If he wasn’t wearing the Royal’s jacket, he would have been a different person. From this, we learn that it is important to be ourselves and not have labels define you we are. It also teaches us that we have to be careful of labels and not to associate with bad influences such as gangs, because they are what people will see you as. Instead, we must avoid labels and develop our own character. There are several events in this story that demonstrate this theme. For example, Andy meets the couple, Freddie and Angela, who refused to help him because they saw he was a gang member. In the climax of the story, Andy wanted to take off his jacket because when he dies, he did not want anyone to see him as a Royal who was stabbed, but as Andy. At the end of the story, when the cop and Laura find Andy, the cop writes off Andy as a Royal, as if he thought the death was justified, because he was a Royal. In all these examples, Andy was instantly judged as a gang member, although they did not know anything about him. This is why the theme of identity is key in this story. Andy just wanted to be himself, but the label of being a Royal stopped others from knowing who he truly