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Living in the global village both limits and extends individual freedom.

Imagine your whole life put up on a screen for the world to see. Your innermost thoughts, your milestones in life, your highlights and lowlights are all out in the open for strangers to see. Now imagine that you have stories to tell, but every time you open your mouth you have to worry about losing your job, your house and everything that was ever important to you. In Nick Enright’s A Man With Five Children and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, the issue of freedom is presented in a way which both glorifies and demeans the global village in two almost opposite facets of it. The global village, as simply as it can be put, is the shrinking of global culture due to advances in communication, and both texts pose a question to the reader about whether this change is positive or negative.

A Man With Five Children shows the effects the global village can have on an individual’s freedom, and interrogates the claims that it either limits or extends freedom. Enright writes about a man, who traps five children into a documentary which follows them around for a day of their life, every year, until they turn twenty-one. The filmmaker within the play, Gerry, claims that he will merely observe and reflect reality, but Enright makes use of theatrical techniques, including a screen which plays clips of the show-within-a-play to deliver the message that this “reality” has been manipulated into what is merely a distorted vision of reality, and that by the process of sharing these stories among the global village, he is thereby shaping the lives of his subjects. While Enright portrays the global village as having a mostly negative impact on people’s lives, restricting their freedom, he also highlights a number of extensions of freedom within the text, even if these extensions come with a negative side-effect.

One major example of the extensions of freedom provided in the global village is that of the character Jessie. Enright initially portrays her as a happy-go-lucky seven year old girl, with no worries about her future.