Announcing April #GreenMileAlong Readalong
Presented to you by @AvidReader25 and me! Recent Twitter activity: A few quotes, a few observations, updates. Pretty quiet. Facebook has an update that someone raced through to the end. No worries! It’s flexible. Just keep engaging.
Part 4 – April 21 ✦ Part 5 – April 26 ✦ Part 6 – April 30 – The End ✦
Discussion on any part is not limited to only these dates. Be early be late, all good.
Part 3: Coffey’s Hands
In comments on post for Part 2, it was mentioned that King uses a LOT of cliches. Anyone have any to share? I didn’t note them but did give a chuckle of recognition when I encountered “no good deed goes unpunished.”
THE QUESTION.
King constantly portrays Percy much less sympathetically than Delacroix of Coffey. What is he trying to say?
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Link to Melissa’s AVID READER blog…
Care's Books and Pie 
That Percy is a rat. LOL.
Percy is despicable. Horrid. He *IS* a rat.
I think it’s Percy’s cruelty that’s so disturbing. He picks on those weaker than him. I think Paul expects the prisoners to be a bad lot, but he feels like the guards should not act in the same way. It feels so wrong to have the unpredictable, dangerous one on the other side of the bars.
p.s. I finally posted on the halfway point! Sorry I’ve gotten behind.
Woot woot! All good; check in dates are guide/suggestion only 😉
I’m on Part Five already, so I stopped reading for a bit, but I’m probably going to rush through to the end once I start again! I commented on the question about Percy and Delacroix over on Melissa’s blog, so I’ll try not to repeat myself here!
I agree with the others above that Percy is more dangerous and a nastier piece of work than the two convicted criminals Delacroix and John Coffey. King doesn’t make his bullies sympathetic in the slightest and is kind of sadistic himself in giving Percy the last name of “Wetmore” and making him pee his pants humiliatingly in front of the other guards.
We haven’t heard as much about the third inmate William Wharton who is a bully in a class by himself, apparently, but I imagine we’ll be hearing more.
After Wharton’s surprise attack on Dean, Paul says “What I saw was the face of an animal — not an intelligent animal, but one filled with cunning…and meanness…and joy. Yes. He was doing what he had been made to do. The place and the circumstances didn’t matter.” It seemed like King is saying that Wharton is possessed by evil, or is evil incarnate, while Percy is nasty and a rat, but in a human way, and is probably a coward and a bully because he grew up being bullied by his father or older brother; under other circumstances or in another place and time, Percy might have turned out differently, while Wharton is a natural predator through and through, regardless of where he is, which makes him inhuman and unlike all the other criminals Paul had on the Green Mile before or since.
Applause, applause!