Cirrus@Austlit

In this essay, Bullen focuses on the interrelationship between class consciousness and individual agency in two novels by Markus Zusak, Fighting Ruben Wolfe and The Messenger. She interrogates how both texts reflect and contest class prejudice in relation to those who are marginalised and stigmatised through particular economic circumstances. By looking at how sport is used as a metaphor for life, Bullen critiques the popular motif of (social) winners and losers that permeates children's sport stories, particularly the assumption that success in sport is emblematic of success in other social fields. Fighting Ruben Wolfe centers upon illegal boxing, a sport often associated with or reflective of 'informal, lower class activities' and Bullen looks at the implications of class location and low status lifestyles by questioning the representation of social games in terms of social mobility, particularly when the notion of upward mobility assumes that a 'less desirable social location is left behind' (50).