Breaktime

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The novel Breaktime by Aidan Chambers is mainly about two young adults; Ditto and Morgan, which are two very decent friends in their troubling teen years. Especially Ditto has to deal with a lot of issues, one concerning his relationship with his dad, another concerning his feelings for a friend named Helen, and an issue he has to make clear to his dear friend Morgan: that literature is not crap. Morgan is for the idea that literature is crap and his reasons are given as,
1.) “Literature as a way of telling stories is out-moded”
2.) “Literature is, by definition, a lie. Literature is a fiction. Fiction is opposite to fact”
3.) “Literature is a GAME, played for FUN… It is a pretence” (pgs 9-10).
This part was actually one of my favorite parts in the book, along with the relationship between Ditto and his father. Though first, let’s take a look at his literature matter.
I must say that I don’t really agree with Morgan, that literature is crap. His given reasons makes me picture him either as a person in the depth of absolutism (seeing things only in black and white) or he is basically misinformed. Literature for me is a key to education, regardless of level. By this I mean that by reading literature, by using literature as resource for our study, we can broaden our knowledge and our ways of thinking. Perhaps we could even change our opinions to a more right position from where we are standing today. We learn mathematics from math books, and I think that literature is one main source that can be useful for strengthening our language, in this case English and at the same time gain more vocabulary and use more properly used grammar.
Nevertheless, before going deeper into the subject, what exactly is literature? A simple defintion could be – “written works such as fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism that are recognized as having important or permanent artistic value” (Encarta ®World English Dictionary: 2001). To argue Morgan’s statement, the definition proves that literature don’t always have to be fiction. Poetry, drama and criticism could be reality based writings. Not all literature is for language-basis knowledge, but even fiction could be used for learning. For instance, reading novels can progress our vocabulary, even though the content is made up. It could also be fiction, presenting real life – that the plot of the novel could have been real, or might have happened. Other than fiction and reading novels, poetry is an important part of literature. Poetry writing helps us express our feelings towards something/someone and we develop our writing skills by writing poems as well. For people like me , poems are a lot of help for expression and illustrating state of minds and opinions. The literature of drama could be related to plays and acts that we are necessary to visit as a class at school. Even though these plays seem to be useless, they actually carry out a meaning for us to learn and possibly to have in the back of our minds. What about criticism – how could it be useful? Well, to think very deeply in the purpose for criticism, what does it do? Criticism is a spoken or written opinion that point out one or more faults of somebody or something; which can actually result in learning the method of handling criticism towards yourself, as criticism is a part of our everyday life.

My next point is to extract the feelings between Ditto and his father in the book. Ditto and his father are in conflict with each other because of a conflict in the past. Although both are trying to smooth things out, sometimes misunderstanding and lack of understanding for each other break their bonds into sudden arguments. Since both feel regretful afterwards, they find a way to solve their disagreements by acting as if the argument never happened. I think that this part of the book was quite interesting, even though it is a very usual state teens are in with their parents even today.
I am convinced that Ditto is trying to get close to his father and try to show him that he wants to be accepted as himself, and respected for it. I am doubting that he would want to hide his feelings, manly emotions from his father – especially his father as his father was once in Ditto’s stage too. The complex relationship between Ditto and his father also affects Ditto’s mother – being caught in the middle of her family. I actually have sympathy for Ditto in the case with his father because Ditto is young, probably a teenager who’s developing and beginning to experience of what’s right and what’s wrong. He’s trying to find his identity, and I suppose that Ditto’s father could be more understanding for this reason, and maybe at times swallow his pride and show his son more understanding, tender and care as that’s what a young adult needs from his parents. Ditto is in a complicated situation where he isn’t a child anymore, but not yet an adult either. This could be difficult for him to classify himself as a child or an adult – and this is his time to experience and to dig in to himself, his emotions and thoughts to resolve on who he is and how he is as a person. His hormones are changing resulted in mood swings which would be very common in his state, so parents like Ditto’s father need to be aware of and able to accept this process and show more understanding and empathy in order to let their children grow out of their “teen curse”. It’s a natural process that almost everyone goes through, that almost everyone has to go through in order to develop, find an identity and have an own state of mind.

Ditto’s father on the other hand, has a dissimilar personality to Ditto, maybe because he possessed a much more different personality? Or perhaps Ditto’s father didn’t have an understanding father himself, so he was never taught to be relatively sympathetic towards his own children – he didn’t know how to do it. That’s just a theory, but my own personal opinion towards Ditto’s father is that he seems to strain himself to be a more sympathetic father to Ditto, but that it’s hard in his case and that because he might not have seen it in his own family during his younger years before. It could be hard for him to make a start, rather than continuing with this trend. He finds it difficult to be a dad for a young adult – that seems the case in my view.

Although being fiction, ‘Breaktime’ was interesting to read representing it’s logic behind ...