The History Boys

840 Words4 Pages
Explore the dramatic role and characterization of Irwin, is he a liar, an inspiration or is he the wisest person in the play? Irwin is a young “Oxford” history graduate that is hired by Felix to give the boys “polish” and “edge”. I put Oxford between the quotation marks because nobody knows his real university. He lies, but he does his job well. He is smart, creative, and motivating. As a young pragmatic teacher, he is expected to teach the eight candidates of Oxford and Cambridge with a non-conservative way so that they will impress the examiner of Oxbridge. His way of teaching is somewhat contradictive and against Mr. Hector’s way of teaching. He is smart and he knows how to make them pass the exam. He asks the students to say something different, to find the thing that is uncommon in the society, to say the opposite, to find the other side. For instance, everybody agrees that Stalin is a monster, so he asks them to find descent, or anything to defend him. “The question in essay is about what you know, it is not about what you don’t know,” says he. He tries to eradicate the line of truth here, and it is very controversial in 1983 when the story takes place. Ironically, actually Irwin also is not that smart. He knows the technique, but he is never good enough for anything. He smiles when he looks at his students, may be because he never has their prodigious brain. Once again, there is a life that is being hidden by one of the character of the story. But, that’s not the only thing that is being hidden by Irwin. He is the second homosexual and he is attracted to Dakin, one of his boys in the history class. What is difficult to be explained is that how can he live like that? How come there is such a very different thing between the way he teaches and the way he lives? Unlike Hector, Irwin acts carefully for this sensitive issue. He never proclaims verbally, yet his
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