In “You Can’t Touch Me” by Blake Morrison we follow a primary school teacher, who gets caught in a sticky situation. He stops a physical altercation with a bully and a smaller child, but when he can’t overpower the older boy, Campbell, he becomes physical himself. The situation goes awry.
I found Blake Morrison’s way of storytelling to be unreliable. We’re in the head of Ian Goade, a primary school teacher. Who’s to say he’s telling the truth? There’s no reason to trust his opinion, just because he’s the narrator. No character in this story is unproblematic. They are not archetypes. No one is fully good or fully bad. Take Ian Goade: We first see him as a teacher, who takes his job seriously. We like him, because he seems like a good person. He teaches kids, he cares for them (“I helped the boy up from the ground and asked if he was hurting anywhere”) and he doesn’t seem arrogant (“Not because I’m a better teacher than my colleagues”). Right now, we trust him. But some of that trust goes away, as soon as he puts his hands on Campbell. Suddenly we don’t know where to put him. He’s seemingly good person, but he hurt a
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Ian Goade was not trying to hurt anyone, he was trying to help. The bully gets to live on without facing any reprimands or consequences. Ian takes the fall for both of them. Misunderstandings is another theme. Had the situationen been correctly handled from the beginning, a happier outcome might’ve been achieved. When it comes down to it: No, Ian should not have hurt Campbell. He was the adult; he should have acted like one. It is never okay to do what he did, even if Campbell was provoking him. But like in life, it’s never that black and white. We’re not perfect creatures, we act out, we snap and we make mistakes. We’re all spread out along the grey scale. Everyone is capable of acting out of anger. Exciting literature challenges the idea of good and bad, and this short story did exactly