Sticks and Stones

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Essay 2 – Sticks and Stones Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. This sentence is from an old children’s poem about not letting bullies taunt you. Bullying is the main theme in the short story Sticks and Stones by Trezza Azzopardi, which is about a young man, who has been bullied as a child. This has made him traumatized and made him live his entire life running away from his problems and hiding instead of dealing with his difficulties. The young man’s name is Lewis and he is a teacher. For about 15 years he has had the same dream every night. He dreams about a night 15 years earlier on a dune at the beach. In the dream he is running away from some boys that are chasing after him. Suddenly Lewis runs out of ground and he is standing on the edge of a dune. In a desperate last try to escape the pursuers he jumps of the dune. In the fall he ends up with a broken arm, a concussion and twelve stitches in his lower lip. This is the dream that has haunted Lewis through 15 years. In the story Lewis is temporarily living with his mother, after leaving central England and his girlfriend Anna. Lewis didn’t leave his girlfriend Anna because of them having problems. He left her trying to run from the thought of one of his students, Paul Fry. Paul was one of Lewis’s students back at the school where he is teaching. He recently committed suicide because he could not handle being bullied by some of the other students, and Lewis fells that he is to blame for not helping the kid in need. Lewis is extremely affected in his adult life by being bullied as a kid. It has made him an insecure man, that can’t stand up for him self, and he is not able to face his problems in life. He fells weak and has a low self a steam. “Survival of the fittest”, his mom always told him. Why wouldn’t he stand up for himself and take on the bullies. She became
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