Essay: Chess
by Tommy
I decided to upload a recent essay I did for Leaving Cert. English. The essay was on “A certain freedom”, and I had a lot of fun writing it.
It was a very general title, as Leaving Cert. titles tend to be. The overall brief was “Write a personal essay about your understanding of freedom and why you think it is important.”
I decided not to go down the Mandela route, the “freedom from economic woes” route, or any other route that I saw as predictable. At the same time, I wanted to play to my strengths: I wanted to write about something I’m interested in, and I wanted to write in the style I was most comfortable in: some form of storytelling narrative, rather than abstract prose.
With that in mind, I wrote about the freedom afforded by the chess-board. I also debated whether chess players are also slaves to the game.
The essay, in .pdf form, is here:
Some notes on it:
- In my mind, the narrator is a more exaggerated version of myself. He’s a far better chess player than I am, but I also imagine he’s a lot more anti-social and more of a prick than I am. That said, there are a lot of similarities between us.
- There are a couple of nods to Tim Rice’s Chess in the essay. Anatoly Sergievsky was the Russian in the musical, and one of two sentences are lines from the musical itself.
- The match I describe is loosely based on the epic 1972 match between Fischer and Spassky.
- All chess moves and move sequences (the Marshall attack, for instance) are real. What I can’t vouch for is that all moves described make sense in context of an actual game.
- Did you spot the mention of 21st Century Breakdown?