Christy Brown's , "My Left Foot", about how he can best describe the struggles and hardship as a mentally challenged individual is more than gripping as it poses a great dramatic effect along with an unpredictable story line and continuous flow of events leading up to Christy Brown's later life.
Christy Brown, born with cerebral paulsy, faced difficulty of learning and fitting in from early age growing up with such a large family. Besides tagging along and occasionally doing what his older brothers would find themselves occupied with neighborhood type activities, Christy would often stay independent due to his constant growth of discovery of his disability. As his siblings progressed throughought their early childhood, Christy was often left behind in the more intellectually active events. To cope with this lack of activity, Christy became adept in using his left foot as a propable and usable extremity as his right and left hand would often twitch to and fro due to his disability. He was left with queer, untamed muscular movement in both arms as well as his speech patterns and other muscular groups. The only hope Christy really found to free his inner tension was to continue to train his left foot to understand humane movements and perform tasks that he could not yet do. It was a breakthrough to Christy himself as his left foot connected him with the "outside" world because of his lack of communication through his mumbly natured speech impediment. Discovering more about himself, Christy often struggled through phases of depression seeing his life as a whole and realizing how embarrassed he was to not be able to be "normal" like the people surrounding him and have to use foot as means of communication. Although Christy was in and out of his depressive behaviour, he was always and over expresses the comfort given to him by his mother throughout the years he went through the hardships of suffering from a mental defocaulty. Christy's mother always had hope in him and believed he was capable of learning and developing a practical mind, just as the other children in the household and in the community had and always urged him to learn and push forward. When she first discovered his sudden use of his left foot, she would constantly spend hours of her time a day to help him learn the alphabet up to writing full structured sentences. When Christy got older and his brothers and sisters started to develop families and become adults, Christy found himself lonely and shut out from the world. He soon developed yet another way to cope with this by painting pictures and exercising his brain through his brush on canvas flat in front of him. Christy would often haste days from sun up to sun down, crouched up in his own secluded room, painting and expressing inner thoughts and deep ideas that he could not do by just conversing with another person. Besides this physical relief, Christy enjoyed listening to classical music and receiving aid to his challenging life by certain individuals.
Christy's childhood was interesting as he explains in depth detail as well as he can remember and the delineation of certain events makes the reader ponder over how a mentally challenged person's brain differs physically from one might be labeled as "normal". Overall, "My Left Foot" is a compelling novel which deserves a 9 due to it's perspective by the author and extraordinary uniqueness that sets it apart from the rest of novels written with extrenuous predictability and boring nature of unoriginality. Reading from the perspective of a well educated (now adept in penmanship) mentally challenged individual who could not even produce comprehendable sounds up to the middle of his childhood is truely worth reading and is definitely something that is out of the ordinary.
-Rob
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