Taking Things for Granted

Through out my entire life I have read a bunch of books, but this is the first time I have seen a twenty-three year old write as he if he was thirteen years old. He is written in present-time, which is something that can be hard to accomplish. I sometimes forget that this accident happened almost ten years ago. “I don’t know why people need backs. I don’t think I need mine.” (Pg.125) Comments like this are the ones that reassure us that Brent is still a little boy that says things out loud before thinking them through. A twenty-three year old man would never say such thing. This is exactly how Brent wants us to read his memoir; he wants to sound childish. He wants to take us back to his childhood and the more he writes as a little boy, the more impacting the story is.
Its not only the childish tone he uses that lets us know that he is a boy, but the structure of the sentences and paragraphs.  Most of the sentences are short and an adult would probably use a different structure to write them down. Also the vocabulary is from a thirteen year old, we don’t see any complex vocabulary.

Enough talking about his way of writing. I now want to talk about a certain aspect that caught my attention. As I kept reading the book I realized that it had been more than two months since the last time Brent walked. I don’t even want to imagine how weak his body was. “Walking. I remember doing this my whole life. Although it might not look like it.” (Pg. 132) He then started describing how he took each step and how he had to concentrate to take each step and each turn. “Turning, okay, turning is done by placing the right foot at an angle and then moving the left so that it´s at the same angle as the right and then moving the right again at an angle and again following with the left.” (Pg.75) At this moment is when I realized that we all take walking as granted. For must of us walking is the most common thing and we don’t even have to think on how to perform it, but we forget that not everyone has the opportunity to walk.