Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

Literature is a study of human being experiences. The writer can see experience of human in the literary works that people write. Literary works show us how people faced some problem and solve it. Sylvain Barnet, Morton Berman, and William Burto stated that An author may share her or his feeling toward the social condition, life experience and views of the issue which appear around her or him through work of literature. Therefore, it can be said that literature portrays the reality of life 1963:3-5. The quotation means that the writer can find out about the author thought to the social conditions that exist around us from literary works. It is because of the literary works sometimes explaining the situation and social conditions in expressed or implied. Except the social condition, through a beautiful packaging author also invites us to be more critical about personal character around us. There are many kinds of literary works. Those are novel, poem, and script of the drama. In literary work there are many elements could be analyzed. Those are theme, plot, setting, message, character, point of view, title, tone, and etc. In this research the writer chooses one of Jodi Picoult’s novels entitled Nineteen Minutes as an object in this study. The writer chooses Nineteen Minutes as an object of his research because this novel is created by Jodi Picoult an American author who likes to write a novel about family life. Jodi Picoult is good author in writing novel about family life because most of her novels that tell about family life are becoming a best seller. Moreover, Jodi Picoult always makes character to make the reader understand with her purpose why she writes a novel in this case in Nineteen Minutes. After reading clearly, the writer decided to uses character as the subject of his research. It is very important to know about the character because there is a relationship between character, author, and the reader. In the novel, the author controls what character is like and the reader should try to respond to that character in a way that is true to what the author has done. Richard Gill says that characters in the book are not real people, but figures who have been specially created by the author. Characters also may have all sorts of link with the people we meet every day, or in some cases we feel more strongly about them than real people 1995:127. Richard Gill also said that character makes the reader easier to understand the characteristic of the people in novels and sometimes character differentiates between good stories and bad stories. Good stories, to begin with, are interesting; they present characters you care about; however fantastic, they are yet somehow plausible; they project a moral world you recognize. Because of many reasons above the writer chooses two of the characters on Jodi Picoult’s novel entitled Nineteen Minutes as the writer research subject in this research. Then, the writer chooses Josie Cormier’s character and her mother Alex Cormier as an object of this research; it is because those characters represent the relationship between mother and her daughter that is in the adolescence period. Before the writer talks about the characters, the writer has to know about adolescence period. Adolescence period is a transitional stage in our evoluntary development from beast to human. Stanley Hall, the pioneer of theory of adolescence said that being adolescence was something like being a fully grown animal in a cage, an animal who sees freedom, but does not know quite when freedom will occur or how to handle it. Adolescence is a very important period, much character that the writer have as adult, formed when the writer are in adolescence period. A psychologist Robert Havighurst also added his thought, the pattern of development a particular adolescent display depends upon great many factors. The most important of these include the individual’s adjustment in childhood, the level of adjustment of his or her parents and peers, and the changes that occur during adolescences. In the other words, the writer has aims to show how important of parenting style is and to make parents understand that the parenting style can influence their children’s characteristics and their behavior.

B. Problem Formulation