My Bro Jack: Chapter 3

Chapter 3! Basically a chapter that explores violence! Fighting! Anger! Frustration! Strength! Manliness! Etc.
davey n jack are still at school, jack is the tough guy rubbing peoples face in crap etc. Mother and father fight. etc etc.

“we could see huge branches tearing off trees and red tiles from the roofs of sea-side houses flying against a ragged wet sky that screamed at us” *violence of the storm setting the scene for the violence of the chapter...

-“my memories of the period all have the tint of nightmare.”
-“one must allow for time’s foreshortening, but I can hardly recall a night when I was not wakened in panic by the stormy violence of my parents quarrels.”


JACK
“Listen nipper, you got to have a go at it. Even if you know you can’t bloody win you still got to have a go. You’ll always be pissin’ into the wind but that don’t mean it isn’t worth givin’ it a burl”

“What baffled me for a long time was Jacks real attitude to all this violence. He loved conflict as much as he hated authority, and he was about as undisciplined and pugnacious as any boy I ever knew, and at the time of the police strike he had certainly seemed to be on the side of the lawless. Yet he had nothing but loathing and contempt for these big, wild gangs that roamed the street.”

-jack uses violence to fight against violence. He maybe hates the violence inside of him and needs to fight other violence to get rid of it?
-he’s untouchable (“not one of them lifted a hand”)
-there is a complexity in his character, he has conflict inside of himself
“One day I’m going to kill that bastard” (hates violence against his mum, but will kill his dad...)
“It must have been this cruelty that really launched jack into his fighting career.
Jack has power against his father “all right pop, that’s the last time you’re going to whale into me like that. You try to lay that strop across me next month, an we’re goin’ to fight it out see.” Even dad is scared of him...

FATHER
Frustrated by his failure to have made anything of his life. Hypochondriac, made him morose, intolerant, bitter and violently bad tempered. He’s a little crazy. Something not quite right about him...

"There were odd strange days when he would surprise us all by getting out his old violin and in a dusty haze of flying resin would play Irish jigs for us or the strange songs he liked to sing...”
-glint of old days. In a dusty haze. Far away. Almost forgotten.

Scene where mum and dad are fighting: evokes images of her being small wet whimpering animal. “Whimpering like an animal as she crawled into hiding beneath the dollicus.” (Ever thought how little mum looks”) And the father is portrayed as a menacing hunter perhaps “a gigantic black silhouette against the dim diffusion of light from the vestibule...in his hand the service revolver”

DAVEY:
“I would climb into (the chest) and pull the lid down and try to figure out ways of murdering my father without being found out”
“God knows what damage it did to me psychologically”
“I suppose there was a sort of masochism in my going into this depressing room simply to experience the claustrophobic privacy of the old sea chest.

“I don’t want it to be thought that dad was always brutal or that mother was always weeping. Through all these images there is a scatter of improbable brightness, like raindrops falling through sunshine.”
-rainbow. Illusion of promise of happiness.
“Enmities and prejudices were forgotten and there was always a lot of joking and laughing and singing of popular songs, they were good days”




Contrast between jack and Davey:
-jack calling Davey “nipper” portrays Dave as small young and naïve.
There was a very great disparity between us at this time. I was still small for my age, chubby, soft, pink and fearful.
Jack was fairly tall and rangy, with blue eyes, a beaky nose, and disorderly corn silk hair.
-Jack is a mean green fighting machine and Davey is a mummy’s boy, tracing Palmolive soap commercials.
Contrast
Jack tells his father to stop beating him. But Davey’s punishment only ceases because he is too weak to stand the pain and falls unconscious.

I began to dread the Saturday mornings of sparring practice almost as much as I dreaded the end of the month appointments with dad in the bathroom.
-there is a bit of his father in jack that Davey is frightened of.
Jack got fathers violence, Davey got his strangeness?

But jack wants to be like his brother. He looks up to him. Trying to prove his strength to him. “I looked across for his approbation, but his face was hard set. Jack tries to be strong like his bro, but fails.
“Christ almighty nipper, you can fight your own battles can’t you?”
“But I couldn’t”