Playing Beatie Bow Character Analysis

Ruth Park’s Australian literary classic, Playing Beatie Bow (1980), highlights how we can arrive at a more empathetic and tolerant view of the world, once we are able to interact in our relationships with a greater degree a perspicacity and altruism, and move away from a self-interest and mean-spirited approach to life. One of the main themes Ruth Park displays is a change in behaviour in children but especially Abigail. She shows her developing perspicacity, altruism and empathy for others.

To further a message Ruth Park displays that the world of human relationships can be quite difficult terrain to traverse, it can be seen that Ruth creates a protagonist, Abigail Kirk, which at the early stages of the novel displays a mean-spirited personality. She does not yet change in the early courses of the novel but infact gives off a self- interested and relatively intolerant personality which seems to be a problem for young people, Park is suggesting. For example, at the early stages of the novel Abigail doesn’t understand the relationship and situation of her mother and father, yet she still reacts in an immature manner. “ ...hit him hard on the nose.” From this example of Abigail’s
During her discovery of her role of “the Stranger”, she begins to show altruism, with the willing of helping others. “....you are our only hope.” During this time, Abigail does still think of her benfits of being able to return home after her job is done but also during her journey she changes and shows much empathy for the situations of others. As she starts to pay more attention to the things around her and interact with others she creates relationships and connections she’s never made before and begins to get a heightened sense of her own selfish