Seabiscuit question?????????

Question

Explain how hardships and tough times can shape or mold a character in the novel seabiscuit. Please help me with this i dont understand how to relate this to the novel atleast 3 examples please

Answer 1

Well, Seabiscuit himself was nearly ruined as a 2 yr old by overwork and under-appreciation in the wrong barn.  That made him a head case and cripple and it took a lot of patience, skill and lots of leg work to straighten him out and turn him into a champion.  The movie quietly left out most details about his chronic leg problems, but they definitely created hard times for him and his trainer, and added to his character.  The fact that he had to travel long voyages by train and pack huge weight loads in order to take on all challengers across the nation in his quest for respect, certainly helped mold his character too, and the fact that his mission was chronicled on live radio broadcasts that gave starving, depression-era Americans something to hold on to, just adds to his heartwarming image.  The story of Howard's rise as a businessman from a bicycle repairman into a major car dealer - spurred on by the great fire - is really fascinating I think, and I was really sorry the movie couldn't take the time to recount more of this part of the story.  That plus the loss of his son hugely influenced his character.  Of course, the biggest message of the whole saga is the deep attraction we all have for the hero who rises from obscurity, and overcomes huge obstacles to become a winner.  

Answer 2

Red-

He was well off before the depression, then his parents had to send him to racetracks to work, and they moved into a shanty town.

Sorry let me look through my book for more.

Answer 3

I'm guessing that you may not understand how pervasive and severe the Depression was, which is the first thing you have to understand to begin to grasp how it may have molded character.

Right now, if you turn on any financial news show, you'll see the talking heads on the TV pulling long faces about "recession" and talking about unemployment and about the mortgage mess and the foreclosures people are facing, and we've had a couple of bank failures.

Well, that's the sort of thing the Depression was all about, except there were no safety nets for people.

If you lost your job, you couldn't collect unemployment, because they didn't have unemployment insurance.  If the bank that had your savings in it failed, you lost all your savings, because there was no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to insure your savings and take over the bank when it closed its doors.  There was no medical insurance program of any kind, either public or private, so if you got sick and didn't have money to go to the doctor, you were out of luck, unless someone offered you charity.

At the height of the Depression, in 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%.  That means that one out of every four people in the workforce was out of work.  It was a desperate time for a lot of people, a time when things seemed to be mired in hopelessness.

When Seabiscuit came along, he was a "blue collar" workingman's kind of horse.  He was a reject from the Wheatley Stable, which was owned by the Phipps family.  The Phippses were old money, descended from and intermarried with the Carnegies and other old moneyed families.  Seabiscuit was unfashionably bred, his early race record was at best "better than an empty stall," he was a bottom-rung claiming horse when Charles Howard got him.

"Silent Tom" Smith, Seabiscuit's trainer, was a man who had lived on the edge of perdition.  He was tough and tenacious, not a man to give up or whine because he didn't have access to resources others had.  The tough times had taught him not to waste anything-- he took the discards of other trainers, and found ways to patch them together, keep them going, eke out an existance with them.  Hard times had taught him that he had to find the key to getting the best out of every horse he had.  He wasn't in a postion to discard a horse because it had problems.  

Charles Howard, Seabiscuit's owner, was a man who made his own fortune.  He had managed to survive the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 and his dealership thrived even as the city was recovering.  Howard was tenacious and learned early that he had to depend on his own resources and seize opportunities as they presented themselves.  

Seabiscuit, when he came under the ownership of Charles Howard and into the training of Tom Smith, represented a lot of things to people:  he was the down-and-outer trying to make good with his last chance.  He was the upstart against the establishment.  He was the dream of investing a small sum of money and parlaying it into a fortune.  He was the tough guy who thumbed his nose at the bluebloods of the establishment and beat them at their own game.  He was HOPE in the body of a horse.

(The reality, of course, is that Seabiscuit was just a horse and didn't know what hopes and visions were invested in him.  But what he represented to people caught up in the hardship of the Depression was a vision of what might be possible, if you just hung on, kept trying, and seized the chances that came your way.)