"Friday Night Lights"

Book Review # 117684

English > Analysis
Literature > American

An analysis of what the extreme obsession with football has done to Odessa and its young citizens in the novel "Friday Night Lights" by H. G. Bissinger.

1,405 words () | 1 source | MLA | 2009 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper attempts to describe the town of Odessa from "Friday Night Lights" by H. G. Bissinger in order to present a clearer picture of the town's single-minded devotion to high school football. The paper attempts to understand how the history of the town has
affected the citizens, especially the young and concludes that some of the parents applied pressure to the sons to excel at a sport either to get a ticket to a college or live a dream they were never able to attain.

From the Paper:

"In Friday Night Lights, author H.G. Bissinger gives us a picture of the town of Odessa, Texas, in 1988. It was geographically divided between a poor, rundown western section and a suburban section on the East side. "It was still a place that seemed on the edge of the frontier, a paradoxical mixture of the Old South and the Wild West, friendly to a fault but fiercely independent, God-fearing and propped up by the Baptist beliefs in family and flag but hell-raising, spiced with the edge of violence but naive and thoroughly unpretentious" (Bissinger 32). In spite of the economic differences between the citizens, there was a united longstanding obsession with the high school football team. Odessa had gone from the promise of rich, vast lands to the depletion of its citizens due to the lack of water, gritty sandstorms and then to the fortuitous discovery of natural oil and gas. "