A Sporting Chance: Class in Markus Zusak’s The Messenger and Fighting Ruben Wolfe

Abstract

The final decades of the twentieth century saw a shift in popular attitudes to class. Class location came to be viewed as a product of individual merit and self-responsibility, obscuring the role played by social structure and power. As a consequence, social disadvantage has come to be variously attributed to a poverty of civic values in poor communities, or to the failures and flaws of character of individuals. This ideological inflection of class promotes a culture of blame by endorsing the notion of an undeserving poor and a perception of the working poor, the unemployed and never employed as 'Other' to the middle class. As such, class oppression is not simply a question of economics, but class prejudice and its effects. The question this paper asks is, to what extent do Markus Zusak's young adult novels, 'Fighting Ruben Wolfe' (2000) and 'The Messenger' (2002), reflect and contest such understandings of those living on the social margins? To answer this question, this paper focuses on the interrelationship between the characters' class consciousness and the potential for individual agency.