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Just Like That by Michael Richards

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Just like that – by Michael Richards

The story takes place in Australia, where a man drives a boy to the outback to shoot kangaroos.
The boy is actually a quite nice shot, but the boy dislikes the situation more and more, as the number of killed kangaroos rises. Finally, the boy spots a male kangaroo, he shots the animal and feels like a man, but he also feels regret.
There are only two characters in this short story; we have the boy and the man. The boy is the essential character, and the one we follow throughout the entire story and the man is merely a sort of guide (page 1 line 1 – 9). The man could very easily be the boy’s father, but since he is not mentioned as “the father”, he could also very easily be a man, who the boy shares a bond with.
The boy is in his youth and is actually on his way to becoming a man, which he also does at the end (page 4 line 16 – 19), while the man is probably somewhere between 35 -45, since he is still in shape to hunt (page 1 line 16 – 19), but he is still old enough to provide some sort of guidance.
The boy relies on the man to help him execute the mortally wounded kangaroos (page 3 line 25 –
30), but the man does not seem to gain anything from this arrangement, besides that I might be his duty to see to it, that the boy completes this rite of passage.
The environment is pretty typical for any random outback in Australia; we have kangaroos (page 3 line 12), the temperature is high, the trees are green and the plain is long and wide (page 2 line 15
-16, page 4 line 4 – 7 and page 2 line 8) There are big tensions between the man and the boy, since there are not many spoken words, but many are hidden (page 2 line 32 – 36) – it is clear that they are both aware of the situation, and what they need to achieve from it.
Michael Richards describes the inevitable test, that every

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