How was young Gerry and his siblings different in their attitude towards the
scorpion? What is your take about Gerry’s decision to carry the scorpion family
home? How would you react in such a situation?
Answers
Answer:
A step-sibling is related to you purely on the basis that one of your parents has married someone else who already has children. The children of the two earlier relationships are step-siblings and there is no biological link whatsoever. A half-sibling, meanwhile, shares a parent with you.
Gerry is the narrator of the novel; he's ten years old when his family moves to Corfu, a Greek island. Gerry's youth means that he's the first member of the family to learn Greek, and he adapts to many of the local customs, such as bathing in the sea instead of in indoor bathrooms. Because he's the youngest Durrell child by almost a decade, he occupies a liminal space between child and adult, and his primary interests are biology, botany, and the care of animals. To this end, he spends most of his time in Corfu observing the plant and animal life in his family's gardens and around the island, and he spends a great deal of his narration detailing his discoveries for the reader. Gerry has a distinctly negative view of education; he sees educational pursuits that have little or nothing to do with science as boring and unproductive. However, his tutors recognize that Gerry latches onto subjects when they insert a zoological flair to the lesson. Gerry spends most of the novel acquiring exotic pets, either by capturing them himself or purchasing them from the Rose-Beetle Man. He regularly anthropomorphizes the animals he observes and spends time with. For example, Roger, the family dog, is often described as being almost human, and Gerry goes to great lengths to describe animals' personalities, tics, and preferences. Gerry's love of the natural world is trying for the rest of his family, and Larry in particular takes issue with Gerry's passion and does his best to try to introduce Gerry to great literature, though he experiences little success. One of Gerry's greatest friends on the island is Theodore, an esteemed scientist who treats Gerry as though he's an adult and knowledgeable in his own right. He provides Gerry with a number of books and tools (microscopes, slides, chemicals for preserving specimens) that help Gerry learn more about the natural world. As Gerry's menagerie becomes more and more exotic, he goes to great pains to construct enclosures for his animals that mimic the animals' natural habitat as closely as possible. He also spends much of his time cleaning and caring for his animals, as he recognizes he's the only family member willing and able to do so.
Gerry Durrell Quotes in My Family and Other Animals
The My Family and Other Animals quotes below are all either spoken by Gerry Durrell or refer to Gerry Durrell. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one: The Natural World Theme Icon). Note: all page numbers and citation info for the quotes below refer to the Penguin edition of My Family and Other Animals published in 1956.