Peter Høeg’s novel, Borderliners, explores the human manufactured relationship between time and the control of others through the experiences of three orphans at an elite European boarding school. The three children, Peter, August and Katarina, do not fit the conventional mold of a student at Biehl’s Academy and it is their unwillingness to blindly follow the rules of the administration that leads them to discover how time is being used to manipulate them. Biehl’s Academy uses both strict scheduling of their students along with rewards for simply spending more time on assignments to control the student body, thus demonstrating the way in which time can be used as a tool by those in power to oppress others.
The oppression of students through…show more content… August experiences, and is frustrated by, teachers pointless emphasis on time when he receives a drawing assignment back from Karin AErø. Karin AErø uses gold stars placed in the corner of assignments to provide feedback to her students. However, when August received back his drawing, he found no stars. The next time August turned in a drawing he decided to fill in the background, leaving no blank spaces. When he received his second drawing back from Karin AErø, “a star had been stuck to the bottom left-hand corner. She said he had improved” (48). August noted that “‘it’s been colored in… that’s all’”, expressing his frustration with his teachers grading system. Later on in the novel, Katarina, August and Peter gather together and August explains his predicament to his peers saying, “‘you draw something… and you get nothing. Then you do the same thing again, but this time you get a star and are praised, how come?’” (87). Katarina is able to respond astutely, explaining how, “‘it’s something to do with time… you got a star because you had spent more time on the second drawing. And spent the time in a particular way’” (88). She goes on to explain how the second drawing was not actually better than the first, it just fit in better with Karin AErø’s (along with the
