Revenge and Pyrrhic Victory in Black Swan Green
The page numbers of my quotes may be off because I used a Portable Document Format of Black Swan Green. According to Merriam Webster, revenge is "an act or instance of retaliating in order to get even" ("revenge"). In Black Swan Green, Julia Taylor defines a Pyrrhic victory as “one where you win, but the cost of winning is so high that it would’ve been better if you’d never bothered with the war in the first place” (Mitchell 116). When the mom and dad are arguing about buying a rockery, the mom asks the question, "So it’s all right for you to spend six hundred pounds on a golf-club membership you hardly ever use, but it isn’t all right for me to improve our property?” (Mitchell 101). This response classifies as revenge because the mom is retaliating against the dad by rebutting that the dad spends six hundred pounds on a golf-club membership when the dad questions the cost of Italian marble in the rockery. The mom is also trying ...