Tuck Everlasting Analysis

Time

Two of my most recent favorite books, Momo, by Michael Ende, and Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, tackle the theme of how time affects the way a person lives life. Momo is an extraordinary fantasy about a girl of the same name who saves the world from time thieves with her ability to listen. In Tuck Everlasting, the Tuck family lives forever. Each member of the family develops an idea of how to live when life has no end. In Tuck Everlasting, Winnie, the youngest child of the Foster family, decides to run into the Treegap wood where she meets the Tucks, a family that lives forever. There are four members in this peculiar family: the parents, Angus and Mae, and their two children,

One perspective is that people should balance their time between work and fun. This is the way most of the city people lived their lives before the arrival of the men in gray. The adults would work and whenever they had a problem, another would say, “Go see Momo,” and Momo listened so attentively and intensely, that their worries died and their pain deceased. On the other hand there is the second point of view regarding time: the opinion of the men in gray. They say that people should “save” time, by taking out all the things that make life worth living. They argue that people should instead save their time to make dreams of an uncertain future come true. Some of the ordinary pleasures that the men in grey convince people to abandon include daydreaming, visiting with friends and family, and/or feeding a parrot. They promise that all the time saved by not doing these things can be used later in the “future”. This is what the men in gray say, but really they use the time that they steal for themselves. What author Michael Ende uses to represent time are lilies. Each time that a petal falls off of a lily, an hour of a life is gone. What the men in gray do is steal people’s lily petals by convincing them to exclude all fun from life and to only work. The men in grey then smoke the lily pads, and this smoking is all that keeps them