Conflict can occur in both large and small ways. Conflict has the ability to impact the lives of anyone, at any age. Conflict can be the most influential power in one's life. However, when young people are forced to deal with these controversies, they must learn to mature and their opinions and perspectives on various topics will change. Matilda Laimo, the protagonist of Lloyd Jones' novel Mister Pip, lives on a remote island in the midst of a civil war. Matilda is exposed to the dark side of her beloved island and needs to grow up quickly as the stark differences between black and white tear her world apart. In the novel, the colors black and white are used to symbolize conflict in Matilda's island life, inner thoughts and in her own family and describe how when young people are exposed to conflict they reach a certain level of maturity and new opinions arise. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Matilda's home island is full of conflict depicted through black and white. The villagers are intrigued by the mysterious white man who lives among them. Matilda "had grown up believing that white was the color of all things important" and the white man, Mr Watts, was no exception to what he thought was important. He ignites conflict and stirs up the village simply by being a white man. He has greater power in the eyes of the outside world than the rest of the villagers combined. His authority and prejudices are put center stage when his house is spared after everything else was burned by the redskins. The problem lies in the fact that all the villagers believe that "The redskins would not do anything that would cause displeasure to the whites" and this makes the villagers angry because they believe it is unfair and hold Mr. Watts responsible. They point the finger at Mr. Watts because he was the one who introduced Great Expectations to the village, which soon became another source of conflict for the island. The book offers a glimpse into the white world and opens the villagers' eyes to previously unheard concepts because it "contained a world that was whole and made sense, unlike theirs." The book changed everyone's lives, whether they knew about Pip or not, because of the grave consequences for the village that he brought with him. The confusion the novel brought to the Indians led to the annihilation of everything in the village, showing how the white world represented by Mr. Watts and Great Expectations collided with the predominantly black village and sparked a horrific conflict within it that forever changed the Matilda's life. Years later, he determined that “Mr. Dickens was easier to understand than Mr. Watts” which summarizes the impact both men had on his life, through story and teaching, and how the effects of the conflicts both men presented in his life are they are carried around for years after they occur (246). The introduction of the white world was so different from the world the people of the island were accustomed to and the unfamiliarity naturally resulted in conflict which greatly affected Matilda. With Mr. Watts and Great Expectations representing the color white and the village representing black, it is clear how the two colors tie into the conflicts caused by Watts and the book. The colors then subsequently lead Matilda to grow and develop due to the conflict they represent which has taken over her life, which shows how conflict has the ability to mature young people and change their opinions. Conflict rages in othersways in Mister Pip. It extends so deeply that it plagues Matilda's inner thoughts through the conflict represented by black and white. The main sources of conflict that influence Matilda's thoughts stem from her changing opinion of Mr. Watts and Great Expectations. Before Mr Watts became her teacher, Matilda saw "Pop Eye" as "a source of mystery" because he lived a very private life and she knew very little about him. After conflict breaks out on the island, Matilda's opinion towards Mr. Watts develops into a more mature one. Once she left the island, "it only recently occurred to her that she had never seen Mr Watts with a machete - his survival weapons were a story." Her adult outlook on life shows how the conflict led her to change and see Mr Watt in a new light and she realized how different he was from the people in her village who would resort to gun violence during the conflict but, Mr. Watts sought a more peaceful approach involving his simple words and his imagination. Great Expectations also severely affected Matilda's way of thinking later in life due to the conflict it brought with it. A noticeable change in his thought patterns is evident from the time he reads the book for the first time to when Matilda reads it again. When she was a young girl she felt that “it was always a relief to return to Great Expectations” but, once she dedicated her life to the works of Dickens, she felt as if the book was “an act of magic”. As a young woman, Matilda saw the novel as a sanctuary and an escape from the conflict that surrounded her, a way into the white world. After the conflict passed, the young adult considered the book a revolutionary work and acknowledges the impact it had on her by showing how the conflict made her less naive. Matilda's transition from an innocent teenager to a woman shows how the black and white conflict in Mister Pip demonstrates the fact that when a child experiences hostility they will experience a change in their identity and opinions. One of the most critical ways in which conflict is shown by the black and the black the white is due to the arguments in Matilda's family. His father's absence from his life is an important part of his identity. She explains that before her father left she had “an ignorance of the outside world” and her father's postcards were how she gained knowledge of the white world. Everything he had learned about the white world before leaving for his new job conflicted with what their family knew, leading his parents to "argue like chickens" about the differences between the two worlds. The way blacks did things was extremely different from whites and confused Matilda's mother, Dolores showed how black and white represented conflict in the novel. Another source of conflict for Matilda's family is Dolores' strong religious views which object to Mr. Watts' lack of this and how this affects Matilda. Dolores took matters into her own hands and decided to “argue” with Mr. Watts because “his lovely Matilda. . . he tells her he doesn't believe in the devil. She believes in Pip'.” Dolores' beliefs counter what Mr. Watts is teaching the children about the white world and Dolores begins to become overprotective because she feels like the white world is taking Matilda away from her and she holds Mr. Watts responsible. Dolores fighting Mr. Watts over Pip and religion shows just another way that black and white clash to formulate the conflict in Mister Pip. The pressure this all puts on Matilda leads her to form her own opinions such as believing in Pip and not the devil why.