I'M Not Scared

I'm Not Scared charts Michele's increasing maturity and sense of morality. Discuss.

The novel "I'm Not Scared" is a coming of age story in which Michele must ultimatly choose between his loyalty to Filippo and his loyalty to his father. In Italy during the 1970s, it was tradition for families to be patriarchal, in which the father was boss. However Michele still retains a strong value system which prevents him from turning his back on his friend Filippo, a boy who has been kidnapped and now resides imprisoned at the bottom of a hole. Throughout the novel we see just how Michele's maturity and sense of morality increase, and the unpleasantness he must go through in deciding how he can still obey his father, whilst not betraying his promise to Filippo.

It is important to remember that at the commencment of the novel, Michele Amitrano is far from angelic. Similar to other nine-year-old boys he is at times immature and believes his life is unfair. He refuses to fetch the wine when asked to by his mother, argueing that he had to do it the night before and refuses to give in. He is also frustrated with his father for not buying him the same sort of toys Salvatore's father buys for him. "Why didn't I get anything?...[Father] had given me a stupid Venetian boat...and i couldn't even touch it." Another display of immaturity is when he suggests to his friends that they steal a chicken from Remo's father so they could "throw it into the pigsty and see how they tear it apart." However, these examples of immaturity must be collocated against the strong evidence in the latter sections of the novel which display Michele's increasing awarness and most of all maturity.

Michele is without doubt a boy of moral fibres such as loyalty, compassion, morality and at times maturity. These virtues are evident also in the initial section of the book where Michele turns back to aid his little sister, meaning that he would loose the race between he and his friends. Another perfect example of these integrities is where he chooses to relieve Barbara of her forfeit which he saw as being unjust and innapropriate. "The forfeit was too harsh... There was something dirty, something...nasty." This act of compassion is beyond any expectation of a nine-year old. It was known to all members of the group that they had cetrain rules, and one of them was that the loser had to pay a forfeit.

And Barbara had lost.

Michele