Characters |
James Scobie
James Scobie is a character that appears in the book at the very start of part 2 (chapter 12), as Miss Tarango introduces him. Ishmael (the main character) describes him as ‘a little too neat’ he also says that ‘His hair was parted perfectly on one side and swept back from his forehead like a poised wave to break’. When it comes to Scobie’s clothes Ishmael say that ‘it was as if his grandfather was his fashion guru’ and all together he was ‘enough to make Barry Bagsley’s eyes light up’. Scobie makes an impression on everyone straight away as a geeky know it all, a perfect target for Barry, but little does everyone know that Scobie isn’t afraid of anything. They don’t know this straight away. Barry tried to make his move straight away but is shut down on the first try. James proves to Barry Bagsley that he isn’t afraid of anything when Barry attempts to prove to everyone that this is false, again, he hides a spider in his desk along with many other creepy crawlies, but fails, again. Scobie is a bigger person than Barry and is a great inspiration to Ishmael, Bill and all the other victims of Barry’s bullying. In the book James decided to enter St. Daniels into a debating contest which at first wasn’t a popular decision among the students but in the end had a brilliant outcome, which changed a few of their high school lives. Barry Bagsley Barry Bagsley is the bully of the year 9 St. Daniel boys, he is a cruel, mean character that treats many of the characters in the novel horribly. He has an effect on people like Ishmael, Bill Kingsley, Ignatious Pridanble, Orazio Zorzotto and even tries on James Scobie, but he is not successful in bullying all of his ‘victims’. I interpret Barry to be a misunderstood boy, who is just wants to make others feel bad for being smart because he's not and wishes he was. This is the reason I think that he bullies the smarter kids or the kids who don't quite fit in because he wants to seem better than them. You can tell that Barry is a bully right from the start of the book where he is introduced in chapter 5, this is when he greets Ishmael for the first time ‘Ishmael? What type of a wussy-crap name is that?’ He goes on to call him many different, interesting and mean names, things like piss whale, fish dick, Le spewer, Le sewer, whale piss or even something like fish paste. |