English - Essay Example

He wants to find his father, and thinks that a black American soldier is his father, and so he goes to find him. The soldier give him gifts and bring him back to the nuns. The real point of this story, however, is to tell two stories at the same time. The first and simplest story is the search of the boy Joe for his father. The much bigger story is the problem that all human beings have: they need to figure out their own place in the world. The time and the place of the story are explained at the beginning.

There is a clue to the universal nature of the themes in the first line when the children are called “eighty one small sparks of human life.” (line 1) This description emphasizes how important each child is, even though they have been abandoned by their parents. The war has meant that these children are separated from all that they knew, and some of the local German people look at them and wonder what nationality they have. The nuns do not care what nationality the children have, and just see them as children needing care.

There is one child who is given a special name, “the Brown Bomber” which is the name of a famous black American boxer. This is quite amusing for the people watching but it is not funny for the boy. Actually he has no name. The nuns call him Karl Heinz, which is a very Germanic name. The people watching call him Joe, after Joe Louis, which is an American name, but the boy does not speak English and does not understand that the name belongs to a boxer. It is only when he sees the black soldiers that he realizes there are more people like him: “I ran away from the orphanage because I belong with you.

” (line 193) The sergeant realizes that it is not so simpler and points out that it is not a joke, because the boy is all alone in the world. The setting in Germany is very interesting because the Nazis were very fond of blue eyes and blond hair, thinking that these were signs of a super race. Joe has blue eyes, and he has black skin, and so he holds in his nature two opposite things. He is only six years old (line 30) and it is very sad that he does not know what his real name is, or who his parents are.

He learns the truth from one of the older children who tells him that his mother was German and his father was an American soldier. The author does not mention that this was seen as a very shameful thing by the Germans, but the reader can guess this from the nun’s reaction. She explains that no one knows who his parents are, and reassures him, saying that he is a good boy and so they must be good people. The young boy Joe does not even know what an American is, or where that place is, and he has no idea about the ocean.

This is a very sad part of the story because he is absolutely lost and abandoned with no idea about his own origins. Children often see the world more accurately than adults, and the story shows that he understands only that he must find out where his own people are. People tease him and say his father is in the woods, but he does not understand the joke and thinks they are being serious. On a deeper level, the story is saying that the American soldiers are, in a way, the father of this lonely little boy.

His attachment to one particular man is a symbolic attachment to his ethnic origin, and also to the country of his father. The chocolate that the black soldiers give him is something he has never seen before, and it, too, is a symbol of the good things