The Unspeakable Act : Rape

David’s first impression of his teacher was: She’s mean and very sarcastic with her responses. At that point he knew he was in trouble. So, he

David spends the first two chapters eavesdropping into the conversations of his mother and father. This way of finding information in itself is very juvenile but is the only way. Because of the eavesdropping, the information David hears is interfered by his childish ways for example “part of me said to leave, get away, run now before it’s too late before you hear something you can’t unhear.” This quote displays David’s naïve thinking. The naivety of David is also shown though his feeling towards his Uncle Frank, he sees Frank as the charming, town doctor and loving uncle. In David’s eyes, Frank can do no wrong, and when he does, he along with his father does not believe the allegations, “why are you telling me this” “are you telling me this because I’m Frank’s brother? Because I’m your husband? Because I’m Maries employer? He paused “or because I’m the

The reader can infer that David doesn't come from the conventional household due to the first stanza. David has a single mother that works, implying he probably doesn't get much attention and hasn't been able to have obedience enforced onto him. Based on Catacalos word choice, David appears to be a troubled child who is insubordinate. At school he is constantly reprimanded for not meet standardized educational requirements. After analyzing the poem, the reader understands that David isn't simply an instigator, but a child that needs assistance. David is illiterate, but tries to do his assignments. If he were an absolute troublemaker, he wouldn’t make an effort in

At the age of 5 years old, not only did he began to take showers with his father, but when they went to the beach club, his mother bathed him in the shower in the presence of other naked women. By the age of 6 years old, David noticed the power men had over women, “when a male entered the women’s side of the bathhouse, all the women shrieked”. (Gale Biography). At the age of 7 and 8 years old, he experienced a series of head accidents. First, he was hit by a car and suffered head injuries. A few months later he ran into a wall and again suffered head injuries. Then he was hit in the head with a pipe and received a four inch gash in the forehead. Believing his natural mother died while giving birth to him was the source of intense guilt, and anger inside David. His size and appearance did not help matters. He was larger than most kids his age and not particularly attractive, which he was teased by his classmates. His parents were not social people, and David followed in that path, developing a reputation for being a loner. At the age of 14 years old David became very depressed after his adoptive mother Pearl, died from breast cancer. He viewed his mother’s death as a monster plot designed to destroy him. (Gale Biography). He began to fail in school and began an infatuation with petty larceny and pyromania. He sets fires,

Sophie allows for doubt to pierce its way into David’s life for the first time. At the start of the novel, when David first meets Sophie, he gets an insight into a deviant’s life. She has proven to be the first blow to efficiently impact David’s thoughts and make him question the authenticity of his society’s belief system. “It is hind-sight that enables me to fix that as the day when my first small doubts started to germinate.”

A group of students of the class had to determine who the cheater was and it was between Charley and David. The author foreshadowed the outcome of this situation when David agreed that the students should decide who was the cheater even though he knew that this wasn’t at all in his favor. The students automatically blamed David because of his religion, again showing prejudice. For example, someone in the group of students said, “What’s the matter with you Reese, you know he [Green] cheated, we all know how Jews are like”. Most of them have no doubt in their minds that David was the cheater because of his religion. As predicted, the students call in both Charley and David to tell them that they believe David was the one who cheated on the exam. They had no valid evidence to prove David was guilty of cheating other than the fact that he’s Jewish which is in many ways immoral and prejudiced. Once David was exposed as a Jew his friends view of him shifted and immediately had a preconceived opinion of

The first issue that is a major concern in the novel, is the torture and abuse towards David, and other members in the novel.

Shed tears of contrition? What will be enough to save me? (Coetzee 21). David’s constant objectifying of Melanie presents a “betrayal of ethical relationship, as he violates and will not take responsibility for her as an embodied human being” (Martin). Without Melanie’s considerations or opinions, David “also intrudes her home, her social life, her psychological wellbeing, her college, her career plans, and her body, showing that his treatment of her emphasizes the theme of power and powerless as it illustrates that he at first has power over her, then loses his power as a result of his actions” (Dailey).

David is the societally ordered ideal of straight manhood, and killing him is Brandon and Phillip’s way to triumph over this order. David is established as the successful straight male because of his engagement to Janet and his depiction as the typical male. Janet, his fiancé, complains to Brandon about the role David forces her into. She tells him that David makes her feel like an “‘idiot girl’” and asks herself, “‘why must I try and be so smart with everyone but David?’” (Rope). Literary critic David Greven writes that in killing David, “the lover-killers mete out punishment to the heterosexual male who has abandoned their queer circle” (Greven 15). They choose David instead of Kenneth or a stranger because David has removed himself from the group of arguably queer individuals by his engagement to Janet. Thus, “David’s body within the chest… is the violated, savaged body of normative manhood”

Throughout the novel, David, the protagonist is abused and tortured several times by his very own father, Joseph Strorm and his recently discovered Uncle, Gordon. David’s father is a strict believer in his religion and is unyielding on the subject of mutations and blasphemy’s. If anyone neglects to follow his beliefs and rules, he has serious consequences for them, like with David, once Joseph found out that David knows a blasphemy, he immediately subjected to abusing him for answers. David’s father continues to beat him until he receives the information he demands. David has been abused more than once by his father and this is evident when David says, “I knew well enough what that meant, but I knew well too, that with my father in his present mood, it would happened whether I told or not. I set my jaw,

David had three kids, Amnon, Tamar and Absalom. We read how Amnon said that he was so in love with Tamar and he even felt sick, but the only thing he wanted was to have sex with her. Amnon rapes Tamar; although, Tamar begged him to not do that awful act. Amnon does not even call her my sister, he says to her, “I am in love with Tamer, the sister of my brother Absalom.” He doesn’t want to call her sister because he doesn’t want reality to hit him.

Patricia Lockwood’s The Rape Joke is a risky composition- not because it discloses information about Lockwood’s personal rape experience, but because it does so from a comedic stance, ridiculing the unfortunate event and the events leading up to and after it. While the creation of the poem was prompted due to the sexual assault she experienced, the content and subject are not centered around the incident or the assaulter but around rape culture and the sociological concept of victim blaming, from both society and oneself. There is no such thing as a rape joke-the joke is the incredulous ways society has guided people to respond to it.

Right as he says this, his guilt kicks in. His disgrace is starting to build as he corrects himself by adding: “But if she has got away with much, he has got away with more; if she is behaving badly, he has behaved worse” (28). This is the first major moment in the story where Melanie’s actions because of her disgrace are left to the reader’s interpretations and are instead used to further David as he tries to understand his disgrace.

The case with Melanie however, it a little different. David at first, does not show emotion but rather continues with his unemotional attachments. It is however, when Melanie does the same that he begins to change. Page 25 of the novel describes a scene in which they have been intimate. “She does not resist. All she does is avert herself; avert her lips, avert her eyes.” David thinks to himself, followed by “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to

Thought the novel the reader receives a little information about Melanie’s life in and out of the school. In the novel, the relationship with Melanie turns different for David. In fact, changed his life because David has to face the consequences of the moments he shares with Melanie. David lost his job and was asked to present at a disciplinary hearing. When David realized what was happening he was considering his own idea of Melanie. He was not considering Melanie as the real women as the student with him have sex. Melanie’s rape is not a traditional rape script because she was in the middle of a relationship and after the rape, she comes back to David. They have some kind of consensual sex couple times. Additionally, in the novel, we cannot find if Melanie thinks she is a victim of rape. But, we may find that the author constructs a silencing barrier around Melanie. Also, myth is part of Melanie’s rape for example in David defense he claimed: “I became a servant of Eros” (Coetzee 52). He brings the myth that man can’t control sexual desire and he declares that this situation wasn’t his fault. Melanie was raped by David, not like a traditional rape; he has sex with her and maybe she never says that she agree or enjoy it, and she keeps her thoughts in silence. For David, this is not conceptualized as