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Apart from the characteristics pointed out above, Luke occasionally reveals such unusual personality which seems difficult for others to understand.
His unpredictable thought and manners makes him look mysterious as well. Unfortunately, the boy’s complicated personality precisely takes him to further
matter, which in some respects builds many problems throughout his life. As a matter of fact, the conflicts an adolescent might encounter in such
phase precisely brings different mental attitude one to another, as it diversely affects one’s state of mind in turn. In a positive way, those who possess self-
defense mechanism can use it as a shield to protect themselves from such psychological ‘assault’.
Yet in contrast, the social pressures Luke experiences from his family, peers and school even trace bad impacts towards his psychological life as a
whole. As a normal child, he cannot hide himself from the effects he obtains due to those pressures. Feeling of guilty and regret, negative self-esteem, self-
estrangement, changing of attitude, and psychological disturbance thus become the influences of the deep pressures found in Luke due to his failure towards such
social interaction after all.
B. Suggestions
This section is divided into two parts. The first part includes suggestion to future researchers, while the other one merely contains the
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implementation of Night Train in teaching-learning activities, one of which is Intensive Reading II class.
1. Suggestion to Future Researchers
Night Train is an excellent book which is worth to read. This book clearly describes the life of an adolescent who is floundering to find his way in
life. Many controversial and inflicting situations are accurately portrayed, showing how problem after problem can add up in a youth life as it substantially
seeks its way out. Using the third-person narrative, Judith Clarke wants to effectively change the point of view to a different character for each chapter,
which makes it easy to read due to its well written concept. Being categorized as Young Adult novel does not even alleviate its
quality, though. Night Train can be equally recommended for further researchers and English teachers to share with a class of mature readers, as it will provoke
much discussion. The psychological aspects the writer has analyzed might provide a link to the next researchers to dig up new fields of study upon different
views. Biographical approach can be thus employed to examine the author’s personal life background, how far it relates her motivation to unwrap the life story
of adolescents, which is poured into most of her incisive novels.
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2. The Implementation of Night Train in Teaching Intensive Reading II
As reading is perceived to be an important skill to acquire besides the other three skills e.g. listening, speaking, and writing covered in language
learning, I thus consider its necessity to teach the students to read. “Reading is the most important skill of all for most students of English throughout the world.”
Paulston and Bruder 157 Paulston and Bruder propose two different kinds of reading activity
based on its main objectives, namely intensive reading and extensive reading. In intensive reading, the students are expected to focus on the linguistic features in
order to be able to decode the message. In extensive reading, on the other hand, the students are expected to obtain the meaning of the whole text 158.
They furthermore point out that the most important aspect of teaching reading is the selection of the reading text. As Lado suggests, literary works can
be used as teaching media, one of which is novel. In implementing novel as teaching media, however, the teacher should consider the students’ ability in
reading an English novel. That is to say, the teacher can teach English using literary works when the students are advanced enough in his control of the
language and his understanding of the culture to experience somewhat like the native reader 141-142.
I, therefore, suggest using Judith Clarke’s Night Train in teaching intensive reading for several considerations. First, reading is one of the important
basic skills which should be acquired in the process of learning English as a
