The Marrow Thieves Internal Conflict

The Marrow Thieves: Life-Changing Internal Conflicts

Is it the experiences that someone has that make them who they are? Or how they overcome and deal with the internal conflict they go through that does? Well, the character of Frenchie in The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline can answer this. This quote by Anthony Brandt, “Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.” can be used to describe the premise of Frenchie’s life, and how the change he goes through affects him. The book takes place in a future world where only indigenous people are able to dream, so they are hunted for their marrow to cure the rest of the world. The story follows Frenchie, a 16-year-old, Métis boy who has been on the run from Recruiters for years.

These life-changing experiences are not what change him, but the different forms of internal conflict within Frenchie that rebirth him as a person. Frenchie first experiences this internal conflict with grief and hopelessness after the death of his brother. He then goes through an internal cognitive dissonance and has to kill a man to save his family. But his last internal conflict, potentially the most important one, comes when he reunites with his father, who he thought was dead, and his relationships with others change.

The first and potentially most important time Frenchie experiences an internal conflict is when he is grieving after his older brother Mitch is captured by the Recruiters. At the outset of the novel, Frenchie and Mitch have lost both of their parents and now were living in a treehouse, with Mitch taking responsibility for Frenchie as an older brother. But when suddenly the Recruiters find them, to protect Frenchie, Mitch sacrifices himself and is taken. It is after his brother's death that Frenchie is consumed by guilt and thinks he is going to die. After Mitch’s death, Frenchie says “Mitch had sacrificed himself so I could

When Frenchie and his new family are heading north they come across 2 indigenous men by the name of Travis and Lincoln who invite them to dinner. This turns out to be a trap and Frenchie is awoken in the middle of the night to his family being held at gunpoint, and after a series of events, RiRi is killed by Lincoln and Frenchie is standing pointing a gun at Travis. Out of rage, Frenchie pulls the trigger, and he sees the world differently. He says “Something had changed since I fired the gun, since I’d killed Travis. It was like a colour had ceased and now the world seemed dull.” (139) Frenchie now sees the world as an even more miserable place than before. This goes back to the idea that it's not necessarily the event that changes him but what goes on within Frenchie that makes him into a new person. This is the supreme ordeal of the novel, Frenchie is now facing his most dangerous situation yet, and it also goes on to be his toughest internal conflict. Equally important, Death is a very prevalent theme throughout the novel, and this is a new form of how death changes Frenchie. In this new situation, Frenchie for the first time makes a decision that leads to his metaphorical rebirth. He is now a tougher person and has now felt a new sense of