Corinthia Resendez
English 218
Professor Corbally
April 6, 2010
Cirque Du Freak: Choice vs. Chance
	Stuffed with vampires and psychic spiders, miniature part-humans made up of spare parts, fortune tellers and men a man who can bend time and space, Darren Shan’s Cirque du Freak: The Saga of Darren Shan has enough horror and adventure and bizarre twists to satisfy teens raised on tabloids and shock television.  It also offers the sorts of insights about relationships and adults vs. kids and growing up that is the staple of young adult fiction.  But beyond pure entertainment value, this first in Shan’s series of vampire books wrestles with a tricky question:  is life controlled by chance or choice? This often-debated philosophical idea is looked at from different sides the by young protagonist of the book, Darren Shan.  Shan goes back and forth between which has more influence making the reader wonder if the results (expected and unexpected) in our lives are determined or random, if our planning and free will have any effect on how our lives turn out. 
	Early on in the novel Shan states, “Real life’s nasty. It’s cruel. It doesn’t care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins” (Shan 17).  The tone here is cynical and hopeless; Darren feels life just happens whether we like it or not, whether we try to change it or not. But the book is not one-sided.  Yes, people do die and evil does often win, but one of the most empowering things about life and about Darren’s character is that there are choices along the way, as life and the story progress. Even if the choice is very limited, there is always a choice. 
Shan and his friend Steve are drawn to the weird circus by what seems a random chance, a flier announcing the sideshow acts just happens to fall into the hands of another friend.  But the paper is released by the mysterious Mr. Tiny at just such a time and place that guarantees the circular will reach the boys. Darren  looks back at the paper fatalistically: “Little did I know that Alan’s mysterious piece of paper was to change my life forever. For the worse!” (21).   Darren seems to suggest that the paper itself is responsible for the turn of events in his life rather than the choices he makes. He chooses to go to the Cirque du Freak despite warnings from two of the most trusted adults in his life--his mother and favorite teacher. To Darren’s dismay there are only two tickets between four friends so they decide to toss the tickets in the air and see who gets one. Again Darren is relying on fate or chance that he will get a ticket: “I was about to start grabbing, when all of a sudden I got an urge to do something strange. It sounds crazy, but I’ve always believed in following an urge or hunch. So what I did was, I shut my eyes, stuck out my hands like a blind man, and waited for something magical to happen” (29) / he fact that Darren uses the words “waited for something magical to happen” further suggest that chance controls things in his life. Instead of trying to argue logically why he should get a ticket he decides to leave it to chance. It seems luck is on his side: “For a second I felt paper blowing by my hands. I was going to grab at it but something told me it wasn’t time. Then, a second later, a voice inside me yelled, NOW! I closed my hands really fast” (29).   In his hand Darren does indeed have a ticket to the Cirque du Freak and feels that the reason he got the ticket was because he trusted it to fate.  But this scene itself is contradictory.  If magic helped guide the ticket (just as Mr. Tiny may have guided the flier), then someone’s free will (even if it’s not Darren’s free will) is having results.
	Darren and his best friend, Steve, go to the show and enjoy it, but as the book is written in retrospect, he has this to say about it later: “If only I hadn’t been so scared of looking like a coward! I could have left and everything would have been fine. But no, I had to act like a big man and sit it out to the end. If you only knew how many times I’ve wished since then that I’d fled with all the speed in my body and never looked back” (32).   Looking back at the situation Darren understands that he could have made a different choice but goes back and forth between chance and choice, alternately blaming the situation and himself for his predicament. 

	NOTE:  this is a bit less than ½ of the entire essay; the finished paper is five pages
	in MLA format (with 1” margins, double spacing, not BEFORE / AFTER spacing, 
	heading, headers, title, etc.).  The entire paper continues to look at the one thesis
	point—the exploration of free will and fate, choice and chance in the novel, and the 
	student continues to support her observations with both documented  quotations from 
	the novel and explanations of those quotations.