Ernie Breaks Essay

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Ernie Breaks which is a short story written by Genevieve Scott around 2010 is about expectations, which you can define as the hope of you or others to things or people to be able to accomplish something. If you are not able or just can’t measure up to expectations, there is the solution to make others believe that you don’t dash their expectations. Sometimes expectations are to big to satisfy, in such a case even your efforts or intentions are not enough. That might well be so for many of the characters in Ernie Breaks. So we can ask us how you react and which solution you can choose, when you are not able to live up to expectations? The short story Ernie Breaks is told through the eyes of Cara, who tells us about the passing present of her and her brother called Jed. Observing the behavior of the characters we can conclude that what she notices about them can be set under the main themes expectation and consequently their try to hide their insufficiency. In the start Cara tells us about the mother and how she tries to stop smoking with help of Quit4Life but buys secretly cigarettes at a pharmacy. Here it is obvious that either the people from Quit4Life or she expect from her to stop smoking. For hiding her incompetence she does it secretly and keeps up the appearance of living up to. The same behavior is visible at Cara who is expected to take care of Ernie, but she kills him by dropping him on the floor, because he bites her. She pretends having accomplished the expectations by not telling her mother the truth. The story also explains expectations on Jed. He is for example supposed to take car of Ernie but maltreats him. In opposite to his mother and sister he doesn’t have to keep up the appearance because nobody would tell his mother about his actions. The narrator is a young girl, who is not very intelligent, as can be seen in the story when she refuses to
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