Tomorrow When The War Began Essay

John Marsdens Tomorrow When The War Began does create a convincing and realistic representation of real life people in real life situations with realistic emotions and feelings. The characters in this novel are a truthful portrayal of a group of teenagers and how they would act in this circumstance. The storyline as a whole is implausible and unrealistic but the characters are true to life. The book explores the concept of survival, how people would react in a life and death situation, working as a group for survival, who leads and how, when it comes to leadership of the group and portrays a creative but believable emotional roller-coaster. The characters also have strengths as well as weaknesses.

Teenagers speak in a similar fashion to the characters in Tomorrow When The War Began. Modern day Teenagers, no matter where they live, in the city or country talk in slang and shorten and abbreviate words and sentences that do not fit with proper English. Slang and abbreviated words and sentences are most frequently formed on the internet and social networking sites such as Facebook, because it makes it faster to type. In some cases slang words and sentences are transferred to everyday speak. The internet and social networking sites are modern hence making using slang a modern thing. In the book Ellie refers to people that live in the country or in non-urbanised and built up areas such as the country, towns and farms, as Rurals. Ellie says rack off meaning go away or the typical Australian version, F*** off, meaning go away. The word rural and the phrase rack off are not what would be called proper English. Fi also said golly this is a shortened way of saying oh my gosh. This would make the reader feel like they can relate more to the characters and their dialogue. This is why the characters are realistic and portray a true representation of modern teenagers who use typical Australian expression and slang.

John Marsdens characters in the novel Tomorrow When the War Began are convincing. The dialogue between characters is very convincing due to its parallel formatting with modern teenagers using slang and classic sayings rather than the proper English. They also have the emotional feelings of teenagers and people in general. which is for these reasons why the charterers are convincing.