English 8 Peter Straubinger

9/17/05 Period 2

The poet E.E. Cummings once said: “The hardest battle is to be nobody but

yourself in a world that is doing its best, night and day, to make you just like everybody

else”. The novel The House Of The Scorpion, by Nancy Farmer, fairly embodies this

quote in its theme, plot and characters. This book is about a young boy, named Matteo

Alacrán, who is the clone of a Mexican drug lord. Set in a Central American country in a

near future full of brain-deadened slaves and opium fields, the story follows his

escapades as he begins to realize who he truly is, and the cruel fate that was planned for

him since his birth.

The meaning of E.E. Cummings quote is that people must always be themselves,

and always do what they think they need to do. This describes The House Of The

Scorpion, because the story revolves around a boy’s battle with the fact that he is just a

copy of someone else, and that others have seen him as inferior since before his life

began. Because of this, Matteo must find out who he really is, what he wants to do with

his life, and how to escape those trying to harm him in their contempt.

There are many examples from the novel that show this theme in the plot and

characters. For instance, when Matteo asks one of his “father’s” bodyguards about his

birth, he gets the reply: “…You’re exactly like El Patrón [Matt’s “father”] when he was

seven years old…you don’t have a father or a mother”. This is the first time that Matteo

truly realizes how different he is from other people.

An additional example is the way Matt is treated before El Patrón visits him,

when he is about nine years old. He is kept in a room full of chicken litter, soiled
newpapers, and a single barred window. He is brought niggardly amounts of food, and

the scraps are left to rot with him. A doctor examines him to make sure he is not deathly

ill. However, this changes when El Patrón, in his fury at the abuse of Matt, has the

caretaker turned into an eejit, one of the mindless slaves of the opium fields.

As is apparent, the plight of Matt in the novel The House Of The Scorpion is

described well by E.E. Cummings’s quote. The plot, and characters all embody this

struggle for individuality, in a world trying to mold each person to be the same.