COTD2

The first character that I am going to talk about is the most important character in my opinion, Harold.  Harold is a very strange boy who is not at all like any of the other teenagers his age.  He does not like to hang out with friends or play sports, Harold spends his time going to funerals of people who he has no idea who they were.  From the start of the movie aside from going to funerals Harold would fake suicide attempts to scare his mother (or at least try to).  He became very into the idea of suicide and I think that had a big role as to why he is always attending funerals.  The daily funeral seemed like a very common thing for Harold to do, just as common as going to get groceries.  He was even so obsessed with funerals that he drove around a herse.  Even when his mother got rid of his herse and bought him a brand new jaguar he designed it into a herse some how.  All of these scenes from the movie show the significance of death and funerals in this characters life.

The second character I want to talk about is Maude.  All though she was not the most important character she played just as an important role as harold did in the movie.  like harold maude like attending funerals of those she did not know.  She was a very rebellious women and was not really what people would picture an almost 80 year old women to be like.  She attended these funerals and found harold who she immediately liked considering they were pretty much into the same exact things.  She eventually fell in love with harold (as he did with her) and harold had planned to marry her.  Maude would say through out the movie that once she turned 80 it was the end of the road.  Harold never really caught on to that but on her 80th birthday she told Harold that she had just taken medication which would kill her within a matter of hours.  This reasons show how this character had significance with these topics.

The third character I am going to talk about is Harold's uncle.  Harold's uncle was in the army and had many experiences with death.  Through out most of the movie he was trying to convince Harold to join the army considering everything that was going on with harold in terms of death and his obsession with funerals and suicide.  What he does is that he tries to convince harold to join the army but Harold puts on a whole act to try and make his uncle think that he is to crazy to join the army (with the help of Maude of course).  The uncle tells him stories of his experiences with war and most of all death and all of the people that he had killed in the war.

In conclussion the significance of Maude and Harold's relationship is that Maude tried to show harold how to live.  Without Maude in his life Harold did not know how to live a normal life.  Maude showed him that even a person like her who has seen so much death in her life (the holocaust tattoo on her arm) can still enjoy life to the fullest as he should be doing.