“LockDown” is the short story of a man, named Evan Hopkins, and his time spent during his prison sentence. Hopkins received 16 years in prison for armed robbery and spent his sentence at Nottoway Correctional Center in Virginia. Hopkins describes the prison in great detail down to how it operates on a lockdown, hence the name of the story. In the period of the lockdown, prison guards checked for contraband hidden in cells, or in possession of the inmates. Most of the lockouts last for a week, but this one was due to a botched escape attempt.
I can't imagine how hard it was for them to see their son's place of death. Although I originally thought his parents had done some horrible things in order for their son to leave them, I see now that they were just normal parents. They just had a son who wanted to live independently. When he left, they were mad, which quickly progressed to worry before ending in grief.
Walter Dean Myers titled this book “Fallen Angels.” What is a “fallen angel?” In the biblical standpoint it is an angel that revolted against God. This book was mainly about people fighting in the Vietnam War. Some survived and some didn’t.
Choice Novel Assignment The Vietnam War was a very brutal war where many of the American soilders were young men with a bright mindset of serving their country. Even though many Americans forget about this war. Many veterans do not forget about the harsh expirence and how it effected them. In ¬Fallen Angels, Walter Dean Myers accurately describes the young American soldiers experiences in the Vietnam war on how it effected them mentally and physically.
The story begins with the narrator arriving at a small house in Jacksonville, Alabama to visit his father. As he greets his father he recalls past memories of when his father was healthy and can’t believe that he is now so old and frail. It is around this time that he states how even though he knows it’s the last time he’ll ever see his father he is unable to meet him in the eyes. The father, then, goes on to question as to why none of his other sons are there to see him in his last moments and the narrator hints to the reason being the neglect the father showed his sons and wife when they lived together. The son, however, does not tell him this because he realizes the toll life has taken on his father.
What happened in this case was that the son left his dad for his own selfish desires. Whatever benefited the son was what he did. This caused so much grief and confusion for the father, while the son did what he needed to
After the father breaks the bind that kept him to his trauma, it could be assumed that he lived the rest of his life with his
“He was right, I thought deep down, not daring to admit it to myself. Too late to save your old father…You could have two rations of bread, two rations of soup… It was only a fraction of a second, but it left me feeling guilty.” At the end, he is able to regather himself and care for his father until his final days; Although, still under the burden of tremendous stress and guilt for wishing death upon his
But as time goes on he finds himself resenting his father more,
For both of them, they are “each other’s world, entire” (6). Nothing or no one else matters because they can only trust and love each other. As the man 's wife points out before her suicide, "the boy was all that stood between him and death" (25). In other words, the man 's thirst for survival is fueled by the love for his son. While the man may expect his own death, he lives in order to seek life for the boy.
The father’s wife had recently died, leaving him with the boy to take care of with the only mindset of keeping him alive, doing anything for their survival. This affected the father in a big way, leaving him with little hope and hardly any reason to stay alive, but the boy was “his warrant” (McCarthy 5) , his only reason for life. The boy starts out very scared and weak, always wanting to hide behind his father, knowing that one day he will die. The boy matures with every event that happens, and he maintains to have hope throughout most of them. “The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead.
However, even though they do these things together the boy does show signs of some different ethics than the father has, for example the boy will question if they should be taking things, then he says after finding the
to still keep established pace and tone, which is that calm, disassociated mood. At this point the father, the reader might think, is a construction of the husband’s mind, because the husband had focused on “the idea of never seeing him again. . . .” which struck him the most out of this chance meeting, rather than on the present moment of seeing him (Forn 345). However surreal this may be in real life, the narrator manages to keep the same weight through the pacing in the story to give this story a certain realism through the husband’s
The father tells his son that if he were to die he would die too. The man’s son is what motivates the man to keep on living. The love
The father had been given a second chance and makes a choice to take advantage of his chance and make his son late yet again. The mother had lost all trust in the father when he brought his son home late one night because they had been at a nightclub. The father had brought the son to see Thelonious Monk. Which was a band that was popular in this time period.
