Robert Cormier Quotes Analysis

Reading the news, just to come across the sad story of a young child who injured his parents. The child was regularly abused, emotionally and physically, and badly injured the mother and father in attempt to get away. When reading this story, the child is not looked down upon, but instead pitied because of the poor lifestyle this child was provided with. The parents were injured, but are looked at with angry eyes, no pity involved. This effect, consisting of disregarding actions and placing the blame on another individual, is extremely evident in books of Robert Cormier. The repetition of child corruption in Cormier’s novels, influence readers to overlook the brutal actions of psychologically damaged adolescents. In his novel, The Rag and

Lori’s dad is out of the picture, with her mom’s boyfriends being inappropriately attracted to Lori. These inappropriate relations with elder men explain the flaunting of her body. When jumping into a random man’s car, Lori thinks to herself, “I am aware of my short shorts and move my legs. I spread my legs a little more and sigh, my shoulders at attention, knowing what this does to my top” (15). Her relationships, always consisting of lust, makes her want love, or in this case, tenderness. Although she likes her mother’s boyfriend, Gary’s, tender touch, she leaves home, fixated on Eric. Eric Poole also has a lack of tenderness in his life, in which Lori heard, “...about the scars on his body from the times his stepfather abused him” (170). The pain he endured led him to murder his parents, and kill the young girls he would lust after. Both being affected by their broken families, it is easy to relate the story of Lori, to Eric, both on the search for tenderness, since it was not received at home. The background knowledge of the corruption taken place in their home lives already influences the reader to feel bad for them. Although it may be hard to overlook homicide, the relationship between Lori and Eric shows that he is not a cold hearted murderer. Josiah, also from goodreads.com, writes, “The relationship between the two main characters in Tenderness, Eric Poole and Lori Cranston, is a thing of strange, unnatural, unexpected beauty” and “On one level we feel the urge to vehemently condemn Eric, but deep down we know that part of him is also part of each one of us.” His review shows the complexity of the the love between Lori and Eric, and also the attachment of the reader onto their relationship. It also explains the tendency to relate to the potential evil in a person, ie, Eric. For those readers that still do not pity Eric, in the end