Taking advantage of semiotics to understand the full depth of Patterson’s work. Not only did Patterson develop and communist society with a minority of rebellion but he also chose to relate the society to one of the largest communist societies to every exist bringing a sense of forewarning to the story, the dark cloud of Nazi Germany hanging over the text. The deliberate choices in names and titles made by Patterson, to assist in the obvious good and bad characters in the book. The utilization of the negative and ominous naming for the N.O. and The One Who Is The One, assists in placing them in the directly into the antagonist role. While Whit and Wisty’s youthful names paired with their positive last name Allgood, paints them in a positive …show more content…
In the text, the resistance consists purely of children, which not only facilitates in the relating to the audience but it also puts the theme of the book into context, a controlling society, the children are left to defend and fend for themselves. The two groups of children in the book are the New Order Junior Informants, the children who serve the N.O. government and the rebellion, magical children who live in Freeland, reflect the two situations for children in war. Either the children fall to the ruling of the society, as with the New Order Junior Informants, or they suffer and try to escape the control which, in the text is achieved by living in Freeland. Freeland, is a physical representation of the hardships the rebellion suffers. The first rebel introduced, Sascha, leads the protagonists to the rebel hideout, gives the dark description of Freeland, The New Order does bombing every day. They know some of us kids are squatting here, so they run air strikes…This is what most of the city looks like. The N.O. is taking over ‘worthy’ communities and shaping everything in its image. The rest they’re just…razing. Like, totalling out of existence (Patterson, ??). Acting as a representation, the New Order Junior Informants are alike Hitler’s Youth the Nazi child soldiers of Germany, …show more content…
A theory of Hayward is that of ‘general politics’ and ‘regimes of truth’ which is the result of scientific discourse, which in the case of this text is magic. Hayward’s battle for truth’ is not for some absolute truth that can be discovered and accepted, but is a battle about ‘the rules according to which the true and false are separated and specific effects of power are attached to the true’… a battle about ‘the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays’ (Foucault, in Rabinow 1991). Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘theory of society’, is challenged by the text, where the minority group, rebels against its government and society, while Bourdieus’s theory states we can’t possibly do justice to here, or easily express in the form of applied methods (Navarro 2006). Even escaping the rebellion, they defy it the children escaping right underneath a huge portrait of The One Who Is The One (Patterson, ??), and when directly engaging with the authority, the rebellion exercises ‘power’ to defy them. Exampled by Wisty’s confrontation with soldiers, Actually, you should be petrified of us. And you should be. We have the magic. You don’t (Patterson, ??), thereby retrieving their power. Hayward’s 1998 theory which states power as boundaries that enable and constrain