"Google something interesting! Google 'William Blake and sex.' He had all sorts of interesting ideas about enlightening the body."
Spoilers ahead for David Almond's Skellig.
First of all -- cover love, am I right!?
So before we started talking about David Almond's Skelling, we had to talk about a lovely feller named William Blake, because Blake's ideas heavily influence the plot and the characters of Skellig. So here's some background!
Now, Blake had a lot of interesting theories about mythology and the senses and how one should become enlightened, but I'll focus on what's important for Skellig -- his theories on contraries.
I can ramble off a bunch of examples of contraries, and we talked a lot about Blake's contraries in class, but I'll give you my favorite (and one I wrote an essay on!). In The Hunger Games, caring and killing don't act as opposites like you'd normally think, but instead Katniss kills because she cares about people. Take, for instance, the Tribute she kills because he killed Rue. She does it out of love for Rue, not because of an overarching hate for the other Tribute.
(There's lots of other examples in The Hunger Games, but I can't give you my entire essay, now, can I?)
But if you're still having a hard time at grasping it, it's basically two parts of one whole. For anybody who watches BBC's "Merlin," it kind of works like Arthur and Merlin's relationship -- the whole 'two sides of the same coin' thing. They're opposites, but they're not opposing forces, which makes them contraries.
Now, in Skellig, we learn all about Blake through a lovely little character named Mina.
Mina talks a lot about Blake -- she uses his ideas that sensory experiences should shape the world around you, she quotes Blake constantly, she believes in the kind of evolution Blake believes in.
But most of all, she embodies one half of one of the contraries in the novel, which is formal versus informal education. Though they're opposites, neither is opposing the other; instead, they work together to balance out the education in the world. Informal education expands Mina's mind, but formal education expands Michael's social skills.
The other main contrary in Skellig is spiritual healing versus physical healing... but we'll talk about that next class!
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