In the summer of sass’s Italy, Niccole Mantis’s I am not scared explores the darkness of the childhood imagining and the cruelty of reality. However, comparing these two we know it is complicated to work out which one is worse as they both make the story dark and dense. The reality in the story is created by the people who Michele love and respect, he has no control and no idea what is going to happen, that is one of the reasons why the reality is more horrible than the imagination made up by Michele himself.Pin, Missile’s father, has always been the perfect model of a real man who always teaches his children the right things, ‘Papa had a nice smile.
.. Neither my sister nor I has inherited them’ ‘It was like bending an iron bar’. However, it is precisely because his father is the best man for him, the reality that his father kidnaps Fillip is much more horrible for Michele. The scene which Michele peps the adults watching news at night and sees his father ‘made the scissors sign with his fingers. Two ears we’ll cut off.
Two. , which leaves an evil and awful image of his father in Missile’s mind and completely ruins the good model of the previous papa. Since then, Michele is stuck with the cruel reality that ‘Papa was the bogeyman’ While I told the story, I could see papa cutting off Fillips ears and putting them in his pocket’. By contrast, although Missile’s previous imagining of ‘Maybe the boy in the hole was my brother..
. O as not to frighten my sister and me’ also frightens him, it pales into insignificance comparing with the truth and the reality he works out. However, by looking the adventure of Michele, we can see the imagining has never told him the truth and has led him to explore more and has brought him great danger. When he first time comes back from the boy, the shocked and horrible image keeps driving Michele to imagine what that body really is, ‘l imagine him dead in the earth..
. His eyes were like two hard-boiled eggs’ ‘But what if the boy was alive’.The question that whether the boy is alive makes Michele always imagining the possible Tories about the boy and he always tries to work them out by getting close to the boy dangerously.
On the other hand, the reality shows you the truth and fact which you can do nothing with it and stop you to ask and explore more. At the part of the talking between Pin and Michele after Michele gets caught with Fillip, Pin claims the fact that the boy will get killed if Michele goes for him again, and Michele is forced to except the reality that he cannot meet Fillip again by swearing on his father’s life.This later on works like a brake of the story slowing everything down, Michele temporally forgets about Fillip even when he remembers it, the reality that he has sworn on his father stops him going. The reality somehow stops Michele being in a more dangerous position.
The reality and the darkness of childhood imaginings are certainly terrible enough tort a 9-year-old boy like Michele. The adults make the cruel reality which ruins innocence of Michele, the imaginings also leads him to the danger.
