The Turning Point in Celia Rees Pirates - 822 Words

There are such stories, if not most of them, that develop a turning point along their structure, that is to say, the storyline is constructed to reach a moment when the course of action starts following a completely different route than, perhaps, what the reader would have expected initially. Sometimes, the turning point may suggest a moment when a characters life, more often the main characters life, changes entirely because of a certain event. In Pirates, one such moment is the death of Nancys father. Its what triggers, besides the usual suffering of losing someone very close, her departure to the Jamaican plantations, the uncertainty of her future, her fear of being separated from her friends and home lands. She expresses all of these feelings quite succinctly when she notes of the last dying breaths of the storm that had wrecked my fathers life and mine alongside it. (Rees 8-9) However, our emphasis here is around a different event, one that may not appear of extreme relevance, b ut we think its one of the main reasons why, later on, the plot evolves into a more obviously fabricated story than following the realistic tone set in the first few chapters of the novel. Thus, the moment we are referring to is when, at her sixteenth birthday, Nancy is proposed by Bartholome, the Brazilian. By then, Nancy had long started to grow accustomed to life on the plantation and, although she felt she was still to come to terms with how the slaves were being treated, she