How Does Gary Paulson Present Sarny In Night John

In the book Nightjohn, by Gary Paulsen, an insight about life is presented through the meaningful texts. Nightjohn and Sarny both persevere through hard times. The narrator, Sarny, is an 11 year old—at the beginning of the story— girl who lives on Old Waller´s plantation in the South. Through the eyes of a child, the reader gets to understand how daily life was on a plantation for a slave. Nightjohn, an older male slave, comes in bad—which means that Old Waller brought him in with shackles around his neck, and no clothes on—and later on in the story teaches Sarny how to read and write. Life on the plantation was difficult, but both Nightjohn and Sarny live through it. In the book, Gary Paulsen adds in another character, Pawley. Pawley was

Waller went out looking for him and caught him. ¨So they from the white house set out with the dogs and Pawley he didn't run, or try to get away … but they get the dogs to have him anyway, hear him up to bleed but not kill him” (Paulsen 49). Pawley was not able to get through the times where he was getting eaten up by the dogs. After getting eaten, his punishment was being cut like farm animals. They cut went wrong and Pawley bled to death. A while after that, Sarny was caught writing ¨BAG¨ in the dirt. Nightjohn confessed to teacher her to Old Waller, so that Mammy—Sarny’s adoptive mother— would no longer get punished for not letting the cat out of the bag. “The toe came off clean, jumped away from the bisel and fell in the dirt” (Paulsen 74). Instead of giving up and running away just to get caught, Nightjohn stayed on the plantation. We can clearly infer that Nightjohn was punished for teaching slaves on other plantations, due to the many scars on his back. Last but not least, Nightjohn did not stop teaching Sarny the alphabet after getting both of his middle toes cut off. “Second night, he call me over to where he lay, … That’s the next letter. H. It sounds like huhh, or hehh” (Paulsen