How does alan bleasdale create pity for yosser in yosser’s story

Alan Bleasdale created ” Boys from the Black stuff”, a 5 part very touching story about unemployment in the 1980’s in the heart of Liverpool. One of the four stories, ” Yosser’s Story”, follows a man struggling to find a job and look after his three children! It was made into a verisimilar T. V. play in 1982. A T. V. play shows the reactions of Yosser close up. We get to take a journey in his mind and feel the emotions he feels. Using a range of techniques, Alan Bleasdale makes us feel pity for Yosser throughout this story.

Irony is created quite often for Yosser using juxtaposition. We are given evidence of this in scene 12 and 13. In scene 12 we see Yosser trying to assert himself that he can cook and that he isn’t a failure, while doing this he clearly tells himself,

” Sod the chippy”(sc 12).

However in scene 13 we cut to see Yosser and his children coming out of the chippy. This shows Yosser’s failure to even cook a simple meal for himself and his family. These two scenes are very powerfully juxtaposed to create a pathetic moment for the character of Yosser.

The anacalutha in Yosser’s speech shows that he may be afraid of something. The examples in scene 29 prove that he is self conscious in talking to the priest. We can tell this by the way he stutters as he approaches the confession box,

” Father, father… I’m… I’m…”(sc 29).

As Yosser hesitates to talk to the priest, we feel that he is very threatened by the priest. In conjunction with him being very frightened at the particular moment, we have sympathy for Yosser because he doesn’t have the courage to talk to a total stranger.

In scene 25 we learn just how sneaky Maureen really is. When Maureen is being interviewed in an isolated room we find out important information that could ruin Yosser’s life forever. The way that we know more than Yosser does is called dramatic irony, this is where we know more than the character does like a hierarchy of knowledge. In this scene Maureen talks about some history of Yosser, for example she starts off talking about how he used to hit her and then the kids, then she continues to talk about how he’d lost his job and a big house they owned, we realise that this must have been the start of the downwards journey Yosser is taking in his life. By the end of the scene she concludes with telling the interviewer about her thoughts about the kids not belonging to Yosser at all.

” I don’t think they’re his neither”…” there’s a good chance they’re not”(sc 25).

In this documentary style interview Maureen is trying to sound as if Yosser’s children aren’t his. We are tricked into believing everything Maureen is saying, however the stage directions change our decision because it tells us that Maureen is smoking heavily, this connotes the fact that she is clearly lying. We feel very sorry for Yosser in this scene because Maureen is making him seem like a nobody for crashing both their lives and she is just trying to get back at him.