Essay Questions

Cassie and John Peyton Jr. are presented in River Thieves as being largely indecisive. Support this statement using illustrations from Michael Crummey’s novel of the same name

After Buchan is tasked with negotiating with the Red Indians, who are also the inhabitants of Newfoundland, he is met with excessive hostility, abhorrence, and animosity. However, he meets John Peyton Jr., a character who is well presented as being indecisive. John is torn mainly between respecting his conscience and pleasing his tyrannical, autocratic, and totalitarian father. While he forms an alliance of sought with Buchan, he is also concerned with respecting his father. However, his conscience is primarily against him as he feels that the ruthless behavior exercised by his father should stop.

Additionally, Cassie, who also runs the Peyton household, is also presented as being indecisive to some extent. While she secretly yearns to support John Jr. At the same time, Cassie also wants to be loyal to his employer, John Senior. Additionally, as a strong woman, she also has an inexorable desire to be independent and autono==mous.

Michael Crummey’s River Thieves is essentially a novel that spans violence and murder. Support this statement using the same novel for illustrations

As the novel begins, the Europeans are presented as having an interest in occupying the lands owned by the native Indians. Buchan is tasked with the responsibility of negotiating with the natives to see this through. As the locals are unyielding with regards to giving up their land for the settlement of the Europeans, they take to violence and murder in order to acquire the lands. The women are kidnapped at night and the men murdered by the foreigners who then deny their involvement after that. As such, the Beothuk community is under the verge of extinction.

Show how the theme of imperialism is brought out in Crummey’s River Thieves.

Imperialism and colonization as a theme runs deep in the novel as most of the dirty, bedraggled, and unfathomable vices that are committed against the native inhabitants are so that the foreigners can inhabit the land owned by the locals. The murders as well as the violence that the native inhabitants of the land that is being taken away suffer is so that the Europeans can have this land.