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Vernon God Little

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Vernon God Little
Explore how DBC Pierre displays his ideas to shock the audience in Vernon God Little.

Vernon God Little, written by DBC Pierre, is a satirical novel based around a massacre at a high school in Texas in which some of the students got possession of a gun and murdered some of their teachers and fellow students. The novel is about a boy called Vernon who is best friends with the main killer, Jesus. Vernon is framed as an accessory to murder and the story line follows the down fall of his life. There are lots of features of the novel that come across as very shocking to the readers. For example in chapter seven, when Vernon visit’s a psychiatrist; Dr Goosens, he puts full trust into him, because he has a well-known profession. The psychiatrist goes on to violate Vernon which, in a way, makes Vernon loose all trust in everyone, because if he doesn’t feel safe around a doctor, he doesn’t know if he will feel safe around anyone. Especially when almost everyone he used to trust has turned against him to try and frame him as an accessory to murder. The passage in chapter seven uses grotesque imagery; “His breathing quickens with the march of his fingers, they trace a tightening circle around the rim of my hole.” and “a cool finger invades me”. This shocks the readers because it is disturbing and because Dr Goosens is a doctor and is in a position of trust and is not expected to break this trust. DBC Pierre does this because the novel is satirical and he tries to inform the audience that people are not everything they seem and you ‘can’t read a book by it’s cover‘. A shocking character in Vernon God Little is the journalist, Lally Ledesma. We begin to see Lally’s true colours as we progress through the novel as he becomes almost unbearable. At the beginning of the book, Lally is first presented when he is trying to interview Vernon on the massacre. Throughout the novel, he does many shocking things. For example, he uses Vernon’s mum and builds a relationship with her,

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