About my feeling also.danielma wrote:Oh I know its madness...like I said, I don't sympathise with their actions and I do agree that the paths they go down are that of irredeemable and repulsive...but I strangely enough can empathise with that core idea of empowering one's self. It's partly the magic of JAL's writing, by all accounts I SHOULD dislike these characters but yet I felt strangely compelled by them and never found myself completely repulsed by them
I didn't lose the empathy for them even then. It was like it was a product of the society and the circumstances, even if Teresa did it of free will, she had been pointed in that direction for a long time.danielma wrote:Sympathy is questionable...but I did get a strange sense of Empathy
though I found her sympathetic at first (all sympathy evaporated when she murdered the shopkeeper).
This too was where my sympathy started to go awry
I actually did go looking for the shop - it is fairly well geographical described in the novel - and the feelings I got when I (believed) I found it, was an image of a (child) soldier coming into my mind, even if Teresa was older than that. This new universe was all she got, and she acted according to it.
Or, putting it slightly differently, if we just killed or stowed away Teresa, this could happen again. If we dealt with the forces in the society pointing her in this direction, it would perhaps not happen again.
I view Little Star as a (weak) parallel to the Utøya massacre in Norway last July, where one man killed 69 teenagers, and wounded 66 within an hour. Except from serving the hunger for revenge, It does not help much to just punish this guy. If we leave it as that, same thing could happen again, and we're left with a pesky revenge relief . If you truly want to deal with this case, you will have to go behind the actions, and try to block the forces and circumstances that lead to the massacre.