Never Lonely Again, a children picture book written and illustrated by Hans Wilhelm told a squirrel named Chestnut who is lonely, but his life had changed after he played with Morris the otter. The readers commonly focused on the illustrations, plot, value message. This study was designed to investigate contradictions and conflicts that exist in the Never Lonely Again picture book by analyzing the binary oppositions of character, so as to exploit the character conveyed in the picture book.
Binary opposition is the way a word has meaning, and how these meaning are associated with them, the positive and negative connotations evoke how a word is understood. Binary opposition is used in the media and in literature and is often used in poems to demonstrate controversy and conflict in ideas, a theory introduced by Claude Levi Strauss and Roland Barthes.
The information I got from this book:
- CHESTNUT
Chestnut is a unimaginative person, he does not believe that nature can be a friend because it is very illogical. It describes as it follows;
““But these are just dump flowers!” cried Chestnut. “They’re not friends.””
- MORRIS
Morris is a imaginative person, he likes to imagine that nature is his friend. It explains;
““Why not? Aren’t they lovely with their nice smell? Look at them—they all seem to smile at us! someone who smiles at me is my friend!” instead Morris.”
In the end of story, Chestnut starts to believe that nature can be a friend, just like Morris's thought. It is described;
“That night Chestnut went to bed early. He set his alarm clock to make sure he wouldn’t oversleep the next morning. After all, he couldn’t disappoint all the friends who would be waiting for him!”
So we can conclude that, Chestnut and Morris have conflicting opinions about having friends. Chestnut assumed that friends were the same living things as he was, whereas Morris was the opposite, in his opinion all things can be made friends if we look at them from an unusual perspective. The opposite of characterization of this book not only caused a conflict between the two of them but also changed the characterization of the main character.
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