Examples Of Heroism In I Am The Messenger

I Am The Messenger Theme Essay The book I Am The Messenger by Markus Zusack follows the story of 19-year-old Ed Kennedy that is a taxi cab driver from Australia. Ed receives cards with messages he must send and complete. Ed Kennedy stopped a bank robbery when he was with one of his best friends. Never in a million years did Ed think he would become a messenger after receiving Aces from a mysterious man. After Ed stopped the robber his life changed. Markus Zusak’s novel I AM THE MESSENGER uses Ed’s intelligence, ordinariness, and bravery to illustrate how heroism does not have to come from a superhero, heroism can be from an ordinary person. Markus Zusak uses Ed’s intelligence to illustrate heroism. While this was happening in the book this

Ed is just like any other basic person and you can tell because of how he describes his life. “Then there’s Ed Kennedy, also nineteen…. Just prior to the bank holdup, I’d been taking stock of my life. Cabdriver - and I’d funked my age at that. (You need to be twenty.) No real career. No respect in the community. Nothing” (Zusak 15). Ed is just a 19-year-old that plays cards with his friends and drives a cab. There isn’t anything about Ed or his life that makes him special. Usually, you wouldn’t think someone like Ed could or would be a hero. “I’d realized there were people everywhere achieving greatness while I was taking directions from balding businessmen called Derek and being wary of Friday-night drunks who might throw up in my cab or do a runner on me. It was actually Audrey’s idea to give cab driving a shot. It didn’t take much to convince me, mainly because I’d been in love with her for years. I never left this suburban town. I didn’t go to university. I went to Audrey” (Zusak 15-16). Ed thinks very low of himself because he is living his life differently than everyone else. He also cares about his friends more than himself. The way in which Ed talks about his life and how boring it is helps the reader understand how ordinary Ed and his life are. Ed started out as just an ordinary 19-year-old man. But by the end of the story, Ed was a hero and many people looked up to him. This

The message Ed had to send was to teach Mr. Edgar St. a lesson. “I follow him over to the edge, aim the gun, and make sure. The trigger sweats across my finger. My shoulders ache. Breathe, I remind myself. Breathe. A moment of peace shatters me and I pull the trigger. The noise of it burns through my ears, and just like the day of the bank robbery, the gun now feels warm and soft in my hand” (Zusak 91). Ed received a gun in the mail and was expected to kill someone, Mr. Edgar Steet, but he was scared. Ed had never killed anyone before, he just knew how to hold a gun and appears like he knew what he was doing. Even though Ed was scared, he still pulled the trigger on the gun. That’s when it all became real to him. “I was supposed to kill the man, and here I am worrying about his well-being. I feel guilty about everything I did to him, but on the other hand, I feel guilty about not killing him. After all, that was what I was sent there to do. I think the gun in my letter box made that perfectly clear” (Zusak 103). Even though Ed didn’t kill the man he still showed his bravery. Ed still scared the man to death and taught him a lesson that made him regret everything he did to his wife and daughter. Ed showed bravery even though he did not kill anyone. Ed overcame his nervousness from the beginning of the book to the end, showing bravery. This shows that bravery doesn’t come naturally to