Free «Lamb by Bernard MacLaverty» Essay

Lamb by Bernard MacLaverty is a thought provoking and rather a depressing novel where the religious cruelty of a historic culture is depicted having members that yearn for love and affection deemed through a normal life and how they escape to find it. The story takes on a remarkable shift when the main character Michael run away to London with Owen a boy that has several fits and faces violence at home. In order to save himself and the boy, Michael, who is a brother by profession escapes to London to for a few days experience what life is really about which was hard to do so while living in the home run by Brother Benedict. It is the last chapter takes the reader uphold where returning to Ireland, Michael drowns Owen into the river while he is having a fit. The beauty of the writing creates a sympathetic mode during the last chapter (MacLaverty, 1992).

Why does he kill him? The boy led a miserable life facing often the experiences of fits. Michael needed to save him, he did so once by taking him away from the cruel world. But he could not stay in exile from his homeland for long and doing so was wrong too, as he felt. The dilemma was then how to save the boy who would only return to the violence at home. Michael, though loved the boy very much, drowned him so as to let him die now rather than live a life full of torture and misery. The writer puts forwards a terrible state of mind and heart of the main character who stands helplessly after drowning him. He loved the boy and had peace with him while he was away but he needed to save him too. But the end he had to put was tragic and negative and he had to live with that fact (MacLaverty, 1992).

Micheal knew that the boy lived a short life and felt terrible about it. But objectively there could have been a second option but the call of the time and the threat of the consequences puts a man in a tragic mode of events which Michael found himself in. this is the drastic turn of events in the last chapter that puts grief in the hearts of the readers.