Technik & Design
Busse-Informatik

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 Of course, we also had to take a written exam. Here it is:

Tasks:

1. What kind of character is Will Freeman? Refer to the excerpt taken from chapter twelve of Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy to illustrate especially Will’s human relations and his attitude to work.
2. Other people see Marcus as weird, and so does he. Explain to what extent Marcus is different from other children at his age.
3. Describe the narrative perspective in About a Boy and its effect on the reader.
4. Do you think the title of the book is well chosen? Explain your view.
5. “Will didn’t need a job,” it says in chapter 12. Outline what "work" means to you. 

Don’t forget to count your words after each task.

Filling days had never really been a problem for WiII. (…)
The evenings were fine; he knew people. He didn‘t know how he know them, because he‘d never had colleagues, and he never spoke to girlfriends when they became ex-girlfriends. But he had managed to pick people up along the way — guys who once worked in record shops that he frequented, guys he played football or squash with, guys from a pub quiz team he once belonged to, that kind of thing — and they sort of did the job. They wouldn‘t be much use in the unlikely event of some kind of suicidal depression, or the even more unlikely event of a broken heart, but they were pretty good for a game of pool, or a drink and a curry.

No, the evenings were OK; it was the days that tested his patience and ingenuity, because all of these people were at work (…).  His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops ... That was nine units of a twenty-unit day (the evenings didn’t count) filled by just the basic necessities. In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? (…)

Occasionally, when the mood took him, he applied for jobs advertised in the media pages of die Guardian. He liked the media pages, because he felt he was qualified to fill most of the vacancies on offer. How hard could it be to edit the building industry‘s in-house journal, or run a small arts workshop, or write copy for holiday brochures? Not very hard at all, he imagined, so he doggedly wrote letters explaining to potential employers why he was the man they were looking for. He even enclosed a CV, although it only just ran on to a second page. Rather brilliantly, he thought, he had numbered these two pages ‘one‘ and ‘three‘, thus implying that page two, the page containing the details of his brilliant career, had got lost somewhere. The idea was that people would be so impressed by the letter, so dazzled by his extensive range of interests, that they would invite him in for an interview, where sheer force of personality would carry him through. Actually, he had never heard from anybody, although occasionally he received a standard rejection letter.

The truth was he didn‘t mind. He applied for these jobs in the same spirit that he had volunteered to work in the soup kitchen, and in the same spirit that he had become the father of Ned: it was all a dreamy alternative reality that didn‘t touch his real life, whatever that was, at all. He didn‘t need a job. He was OK as he was. He read quite a lot; he saw films in the afternoon; he went jogging, he cooked nice meals for himself and his friends; he went to Rome and New York and Barcelona every now and again, when boredom became particularly acute.. . He couldn‘t say that the need for change burned within him terribly fiercely.
 
 
594 words
Nick Hornby, About a Boy, London 1998, pp. 71-73