My Polish Teachers Tie

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EXPLORE THE WAYS THE WRITER PRESENTS RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CHARACTERS IN THE TEXTS YOU HAVE STUDIED. Use captal letters for titles of short stories In both My Polish Teacher’s Tie & the Compass and the Torch, we are exposed to a variety of relationships between the characters. Each character shares a different relationship with another and there are ways that each writer presents the relationships within the stories and uses different examples of language and imagery to get them across to the reader. My polish teacher’s tie is narrated by Carla; the protagonist in the story. Using Carla’s character to narrate the story from start to finish is a clever technique used by Helen Dunmore as it shows the reader that Carla is not connected to any of her colleagues or her boss and that neither does she share an intimate relationship with any of them; the narration therefore does the job of presenting her as an outsider. We know that Carla doesn’t have a relationship with the adults around her as she say that she “dishes out buns to the teachers... and shovels chips on to the kids’ trays, however she clearly states that she likes the job due to the kids, but does not mention the adults again. We are shown that she detaches herself from her work community, in the text she states that ‘the teachers’ pay for their tea and buns, instantly telling us that she differentiates herself from other people around her because they make her uncomfortable and as a result of this she’s gathered more than one fragmented relationship, similar to that of the young boy and his dad in the compass and the torch. We are constantly reminded in the compass and the torch, of the broken relationship between the father and son. The story starts off with a simple, subtle yet extremely meaningful sentence, “The road ends at a gate”, and this could easily be interpreted as the end of a

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