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Child has been taught from the beginning that the family is sacred, and is the most important thing in the life of every person. Family can give what no one else can give: love, protection, and it shapes a person's identity from the birth. Very often parents are judged by the way their child behaves, however there is a huge number of disordered families. Lack of a parent or unstopping abuse and arguments can cause a child's personality to change, in most cases, in a bad way. Children like that are unsocial, lonely, misbehaved and sometimes are full of hatred towards themselves. So does the character from the novels, Lives of the Saints and In a Glass House, written by Nino Ricci.
These two extraordinary novels are told by the boy, Vittorio Innocente, about his life in Italy and his life as an immigrant in Canada. His life completely changed once he was brought to Canada. His mother died while giving birth to his half-sister, his father was too busy, working on the farm, to take care of both children. Atmosphere in Innocente's family, desire to escape from his present life through travel and acceptance are factors that affected Vittorio's perspective on life as well as they had shaped his personality.
Family atmosphere plays a certain role in the development of the young individual. Each member of a family should have a responsibility, father should discipline and protect the family, and mother should love and take care of it. Unfortunately, in the novel Lives of the Saints, father of young Vittorio left Italy to work in America, and Vittorio was left with mother and his crippled grandfather. It was a stable family with its daily problems and routines.
Vittorio was loved protected and was taken care of, actually he was overprotected, given too much attention, so he got spoiled. "Growing up like a weed. Do you ever see him getting up at four to help with the harvest? He and his mother play like schoolchildren all day. " (Lives of the Saints, 51) Two of Cristina's friends were talking about Vittorio. However the situation changed, when Cristina was found pregnant from another men. The normal, peaceful household turned to chaos. Arguments and accusations constantly were going on between grandfather and Cristina.
All respect for the grandfather, as a mayor vanished, with the shame for his daughter he had to give up his position. Grandfather hated Cristina for what she has done. I've suffered everyday of my life, but I've never had to walk through this town and hang my head in shame. Now people come to my house like they go to the circus, to laugh at the clowns! You " ve killed me Cristina, as surely as if you'd pulled a knife across my throught. In all my days I've never raised a hand against you but now I wish to God I'd locked you in the stable and raised you with the pigs, that you'd died and rotted in the womb, that you hadn't lived long enough to bring this disgrace on my name? (Lives of the Saints, 145) Cristina's deed was considered a scene, the work of "evil." They were avoided, and they were excluded from the life of the village; basically they were treated like an outcast.
It gave a great impact on Vittorio; he waited for things to go back to normal, spent most of the time alone. "I spent my time alone now, waiting for something to happen that would restore the normalcy of things. " (Lives of the Saints, 75) On the other hand, Vittorio's life was completely different in Canada, in the novel In a Glass House. His father had to work really hard to get some money, and he expected Vittorio to work as hard as he did, in order to support the family. " For a week or so he had me clean out an old chicken coop in the barn. After the barn he set me to work collecting broken glass in the alley between the greenhouses, " Mario did tell Vittorio not to fill the wheelbarrow too full, "But I did pile it too full; and even feelings its weight begin to lean as I lifted its handles. There was a tremendous crash. After that I worked on my own. " (In a Glass House, 31 - 32) Things were going rough for Vittorio. In addition to his everyday work on the farm, he had to take care of his newborn half-sister.
It seamed like nobody cared about this little baby, except Vittorio and a girl named Gelsomina. Even though Vittorio was Mario's son, they did not connected with each other; there was no father-son bond between them. Most of the time they spent in their own world, thinking about different things, not wanting to allow each other into their hearts, however Vittorio was aware of his father's presence. "But usually he was silent, the work taking him over, bringing out in him a hard-edged concentration that seemed somehow to free me from him. He had seemed like someone who had nothing to do with me, who was outside of me like a stranger, who I had to think about, be awkward with. " (In a Glass House, 3, 33) People saw Mario as an angry, aggressive and abusive man; even family members were victims of his anger.
Since Vittorio was brought to Canada, uncles and aunts surrounded him; they were helping Mario with household and on the farm. Without all these help, Mario would never built his business and he would never be successive, nevertheless he always was upset about something, he never gave a chance for somebody's opinion, it was only him and his ideas. " 'I'll tell you why I'm a fool, because I didn't see from the first how you " re dragging me into your big ideas just to get what you want. Now I understand how you see things! You always want to be the big man!' my uncle said, my father and my uncle didn't speak to each other for the rest of the winter. For month we lived under the shadow of their suppressed anger. " (Lives of the Saints, 85) It was another fight between Vittorio's uncle and his father.
His uncle helped Mario to built greenhouses for the farm, to improve some of the equipment. There were another arguments abuse and anger in Innocente's family; it turned Vittorio to hatred of the family alliances. I was secretly pleased then to see a tension arising between my uncle and father, their exchanges marked more and more by the familiar parsimoniousness of emotion, by their unthinking need to blame, to contradict, to dismiss. Something in me feeling vindicated in this reversion as though it were my deep monstrous wish now to see our family destroyed, to watch its slow burn to some pure and final violence. (Lives of the Saints, 136) Vittorio went through a lot in Italy as well as in Canada.
Environment that Vittorio lived in triggered a need to escape, to change his present life and start all over again. Vittorio changes his life in order to escape from his present. A lot of people took an easy way out by moving to a new location to start a new life, sometimes it shows a week side of a person, but sometimes the situation can be so complicated and so impossible to solve that the only thing is to move, to start from the scratch. In the novel Lives of the Saints, life of Vittorio and his mother, Cristina, became unbearable when the villagers found out about the baby, that Cristina was carrying. Cristina was psychologically attacked by her own father, by friends and other villagers. She was fighting for her dignity and honor but this fight gave her no more than more avoidance, hatred and fear to be cursed by the "evil" one.
She could stay and fight more, but at this moment she was thinking not only about herself but also about Vittorio's future and the baby, therefore the only choice she had, was to leave the country. But in the few days that remained before our departure, I walked through the streets with a strange sense of lightness, as if at any moment I might simply lift up and walk on air; and houses, faces, voices...
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Research essay sample on Lives Of The Saints Half Sister
