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The Savage by David Almond Three

Blue learns the  weight of being irrevocably himself in The Savage. He knows the isolation of the excluded through his grief for his father and his awareness of his new responisbilities for his mother and sister. Rejecting the ‘diary’ approach to his emotions, he invents a new story story, where his powerlessness can be assuaged. This new tale  transforms his world. Blue finds a language  through the narrative of the Savage that can give representation to the solitude and  rage of grief after his father ‘went away’. He writes ‘my kind of story just for myself.’ So much of life involves inhabiting stories which stifle and restrict us, which are palpably not ‘my kind of story’ . However the story of the ‘Savage’ gives expression to Blue’s previously undiscovered resourcefulness . In The Savage  he creates a  narrative  which gives vent to his  deep feeling of abjection and insuffiency which have silently creid out  see the pictures of the Savage) for expression and I do find the new story he creates, a tale of chivalry and courtesy as much as one of primal loss and rage. If the tale is about rebalancing a imbalanced world with its alien words, then such a rebalancing involves integration and fusion-hence to integration of the Blue and green colours throughout the text.

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