Tangerine final Essay Siblings don’t always get along with each other, but in Tangerine Erik torments Paul throughout the story. Erik is a main character and his choices have have shaped Paul’s personality in the past and present. Erik’s choices impact Paul by making Paul feel useless, hate himself, and unimportant. Erik Torments Paul and knows exactly how Paul will react to most of the situations he puts Paul in. Erik Had hit Tino for taunting him about thinking a field goal was real and flipping. “ Immediately, faster than I thought he could, faster than Tino thought he could, Erik lashed out, smashing the back of his hand across Tino’s face, smashing him so hard that Tino spun halfway around in the air and landed in the grass.” Erik hitting Tino made Paul feel powerless, like he couldn’t even help his close friends. “Was it hard enough to knock him out? Was it hard enough to kill him? I didn’t know,” (Bloor 205). When Paul is feeling this he doesn’t want to meet the same fate as Tino, Paul is terrified of what Erik will do. Another one of Erik’s choices that made Paul feel powerless and useless and unable to help, was when Erik ordered Arthur to hit Luis with a blackjack. “ …show more content…
Erik had helped one of his goon Castor spray paint Paul’s eyes, Paul’s parents told him he looked into an eclipse so that he wouldn’t hate Erik. “Erik was still in his rage. He was talking to Arthur Bauer, but he was staring at me when he roared, ‘Shut up, Castor!’” (Bloor 262). When Erik is raging about Paul finally standing up to him Paul realizes why the spray paint is so familiar. Castor and Erik spray painted his eyes when he was young, “And I remembered Erik’s fingers prying open my eyelids open while Vincent Castor sprayed white paint into them,” (Bloor 264). When Erik did that he knew that Paul would never be the same and when his parents wanted them to be closer they might have torn them apart even