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The Bench

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Submitted By LarsErlandsen
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The Bench
Through history of human life, it is often displayed how the black people have been oppressed several times. The apartheid system was no exception. Between 1948 and 1994 South Africa was based on racial segregation which basically meant that blacks were denied their rights that are theirs by birth. Richard Rive, a black man living in South Africa under apartheid, wrote in 1963 a short story called “The Bench” which is about a young boy challenging the superior white people, in his own way.
The short story deals with a 3rd person limited omniscient narrator. By doing so it makes us as readers connect with the victim, who is Karlie.
Karlie is from a village in the country-side of South Africa, but the story takes place in Cape Town.
The fact that the story takes place in Cape Town plays a big role in the way the reader understands the text. Karlie is obvious very surprised about this whole episode the grounds in his ignorance towards a big city life. He has been living in a small city, working for whites, all his life and he does not know of anything beyond this closed society. Out there he would never have experienced such a public rally, and he would never have dreamt of seeing a white person offer a black person a cigarette. When he enters Cape Town, it is as if he enters a whole new world. He feels like he becomes a part of a closed society “On the platform were many speakers, both white and black, and they were behaving as if there were no differences of color among them.” (l. 10-13 p. 32)
All these experiences confuses him, and he can’t really figure out whether to believe in the speakers or not “This was new, this set one’s mind thinking, yet he felt it was true.” (l. 3-4 p. 33) Another thing he can’t figure out is why there still, in the streets of Cape Town, was people, white people, who did not understand what the speakers meant, it must have

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