Symbolism In The Star

Symbolism In The Star

When you read the star by Alasdair Gray for the first time, you think it’s a simple story about a young boy who finds a star, while in fact the symbolism behind this story is far far away from that. Indeed the characters, the setting & even the star itself have very deep meanings.

Cameron is not just a regular kid, he is the symbol of all the children around the world who suffer from negligence & maltreatment by their parents & teachers. He is also a symbol of children raised in poverty, children who miss a lot of crucial things in their lives.
On the contrast, Cameron also represents the energy & imagination of young kids. The author, chose his setting very wisely, a home & a school, the most basic educational systems in a child’s life. The home is a symbol of negligence & lack of attention & the school & the teacher are symbols of corrupted educational system.

Cameron’s mother is just a picture of many housewives, who spend the majority of their days doing house chores, without even noticing the damage they are inflecting upon their young kids by being negligent & carless to their children’s needs & emotions. Cameron’s father is not that different from his mother, he’s a symbol of a lazy father who suffers from unemployment & expects the sky to start raining gold & silver.
The star that Cameron finds is the symbol of hope, the symbol of imagination & comfort, the symbol of every beautiful thing that Cameron & other unfortunate children miss around the world.
Analysis of Cameron Character

Cameron a young boy who’s the victim of negligence & demeaning & insulting treatment from his parents & teacher finds his comfort in his wild fertile imagination. Yes indeed, Cameron is a very energetic & imaginative child, who suffers every day from lack of attention. Everything around Cameron seems to be dark, cold & emotionless.

Cameron is the central character in the story, who lives in a tenement in Scotland. The boy seems to suffer at home & at school as well. To escape his disturbed reality, he finds shelter in the company of an imaginative world of a star which is in reality just a marble. On his way out to find the star, Cameron bangs the door, which shows his desperate need for his family’s attention. He is angry & furious. And by banging the door he thinks that he might get some attention from his family. Poverty & the environment around Cameron have a great influence on his character & language. As he finds all his dreams in his new marble, Cameron is not willing to let go of his star easily, & this shows how much this star means to him.
& when he fainted at the end, I think it’s the writer’s way of telling us that there are a lot of people like Cameron who live in the dark, & nobody is taking good care of them.