Mathias Aagaard Christensen 1.U Roskilde katedralskole B The Death of Tommy Grimes The text “The Death of Tommy Grimes” is about the eleven-twelve year old boy Tommy and his father. The story starts of in medias res where we hear about Tommy later in the story, and we get no introduction here. We get the introduction few sentences later in a flashback, where we hear about Tommy’s father trying to instruct Tommy in his shooting skill, but at this moment Tommy just can not pull the trigger. Tommy starts practicing his increasing shooting ability while his father teaches him about hunting, and how the nature cycle, in a metaphorical way, works on earth. In the end of the story, Tommy and his father go hunting, and Tommy ends up shooting a black man – something which makes his father awfully proud, and in the very end he boasts about it in the local bar saying the words, “my boy became a man today”

The character Tommy is the protagonist in the story, and he lives in a small village with his father and the other inhabitants. From the descriptions in the text, it sounds like the environment Tommy lives in is very stuffy without any significant contact to the outside world. This is also why Tommy’s father has an enormous influence on him, including the fact that he probably does not know anything else, than what his father tells him. This draw the conclusion, that Tommy is completely dependent on his father, because he is the only source to knowledge about the world. During the action of the story, Tommy goes through a dramatic development and change. In the beginning Tommy is an insecure, innocent boy without the nerve to meet his father’s unreasonable aim; killing something. But as time passes, his father gets more control over Tommy’s mind, and he ends up completing his fathers aim; shooting the nigger (referring to the choice of word in the text). This action is an