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Small Great Things Character Analysis

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This essay will deal with the main characters, Ruth from Small Great Things and Thomas from A Walk Across the Sun. Both characters grow and develop throughout their individual novels. Their growth and development are due to three factors: family and external parties, watershed events and the justice system.
This essay will deal with the main characters, Ruth from Small Great Things and Thomas from A Walk Across the Sun. Both characters grow and develop throughout their respective novels. Their personal growth and development are due to three factors: family and external parties, watershed events and the justice system.
In many ways the character of Ruth and Thomas are very similar, both are hardworking, extremely driven in their careers and enjoy the work they do. The parents of Ruth and Thomas play a large role in their personal growth and development in the novels. Thomas’s mother advises him to go to India in order to gain his life back and restore everything that is wrong – the separation of him and his wife. Like Thomas, Ruth is influenced a lot by her mother as she teaches Ruth everything. Ruth’s mom inspires her to work hard and achieve big. Without her mom, …show more content…

The key event in Small Great Things is the death of the Bauer’s (a white supremacist couple) baby. Ruth is ordered not to tend to their new-born child, but due to the hospital being short staffed, Ruth has to step in for another nurse to watch over the baby during a simple procedure when a problem occurs. Being requested not to tend to a child is new to Ruth and it just makes it clearer to her that people still are not as accepting or open to the idea of having different races treated equally in the same country. “For a moment, I honestly don’t understand. And then it hits me with the force of a blow: they don’t have a problem with what I’ve done. Just with who I am.” (Picoult, 2016,

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