once were warriors
...rs sing the waiata tangi; the death lament” (1). Another crucial theme is the power or desire for change. Again the setting of this story is very important to come away with a better understanding of the theme. The novel begins with Beth looking toward the Trambert property with envy. Envy of what they have and what she does not. According to Erica Dillon of Brown, “The Trambert house functions as the standard by which Beth measures her dreams, her failures; her transformation involves approaching this symbol of success through only within the confines of Pine Block” (1). The suicide of her daughter Grace awoke this theme of change from inside Beth which cause two major premise shifts; “Beth’s house shifts from one among many anti-premises of lost potential and spiraling despair into a premise for Maori invention and hope” (Wilson 1). The other premise-shift occurs to Jake when Beth kicked him out of the house. The streets were his battle ground and his purgatory; but become his redemption road when he befriends a lost little boy who talks to Jake only because he is intimidated. (Wilson) The novel is not exactly a quick read and Alan Duff’s style makes it that way. While I was reading I found myself going at an incredibly slow pace; not because of any overtly complex vocabulary or sentence structuring, but because of his wording. That is he uses common vocabulary used in everyday life along side dialogue without quotation marks that somehow raps the reader around the story. The grammar and slang created by Duff is another important aspect of his style in the book. Most of the characters that live on Pine Block drop the g from words ending in “ing” which makes them even more believable as a poorer class. Duff also utilizes sound-effects such as HAHAHAHAHA and YEUW to really impound the situation into the readers head and to do so as realistically as possible. (Tung 1) The element of fiction that is by far the most interesting in the novel is the point of view by which Duff tells his story. He, “utilizes stream-of-consciousness narration, and his roving first-person narrators and their internal monologues create a voice intricately bound to the modification of the English language that occurs throughout the text” (Tung1). The three main narrators that have a large amount of the storyline and subplot are Beth, Jake, and Nig but they are not the only narrators. In fact there are about six of them all together and they all have a significant role in causing the book to have an original flare. This custom narration puts the reader in the head of the narrator, giving the book a very present tense feel. “Overall, this technique attempts to portray a vivid picture of the lives and moment –to moment thoughts of characters” (Tung1). Duff creates a gritty virtual reality that completely consumes the reader until he feels he is within the narrator looking out; able to hear and see everything on the outside as well as the inner most thoughts. As with all books that are turned into a film, there is a considerable amount of the original plot and storyline missing. A director has many options on how to shorten a book to fit a movie format but in this case he decided to just leave out the last half of the book. This causes a reader to be quite disappointed with that aspect of the film but those that have never read Once Were Warriors would never know the difference. With that said the movie does certain thing...