Engelsk stil. Nicky

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Our Nicky's heart
“The family is more sacred than the state.”
Our Nicky’s heart is a very sensitive and touchy family story. The loss of a family member when he was so young and lively must have been a tragic round to the family and on top of that the youngest child.

The story does not begin in medias res as you might think because the narrator elegantly uses 5 lines to introduce the family and their background. As first sight it looks as if there is a classical narrator. “I know because she told me, years later” , the quotation shows the transition when the narrator, whose name is Mark , steps I into the story as one of the characters. The technique makes the story more personal, more credible and more realistic. If you take as closer look at some of the verbs, “had”, “married” and “was”, you will get the distinct feeling that most of them are written in the past tense. Therefore, you can conclude that the entire story is a flashback – the narrator is simply reminiscing. Since Mark is one of the characters, he can not be the om-niscience narrator. However, there are numerous examples of him assuming what his mother is thinking, “… she must have thought for a few wild seconds…”. These examples must be pushed aside as pure speculations from the narrator.

The narrator, Mark Randall is thinking back on a tragedy which struck his family and almost de-stroyed it.
This is a story, which is of the countryside where the heads of the family like the father wants mostly to have sons to help him out with the land and the farms. As we can see here, Frank Ran-dall had three sons Michael, Eddy and Mark. He was very proud to have to them. When they grew old, they accomplished his dreams by helping him out at the farms though one of them named as Mark went out for study and he decided to be a vet.
Despite this, the mother wanted to have a daughter too. As every mother secretly wants a daugh-ter, she did also. She wanted a daughter so that she too would have some company, to share her ideas, to be listened by someone and mostly to feel a daughter’s love towards her parents. And when she got pregnant for the fourth time which she had not expected, she got very hopeful that maybe this time God will her a pretty daughter so that her dream would come true but unfortu-nately, it was a boy again. “So when she… she even named her Sally secretly to herself…” , the quotation proves that she deep down inside wanted and longed for a daughter.
Although every child is a blessing of God but she got disappointed. This can show that every parent wants to have children, girls and boys, those who don’t have any sons, they want sons and those who don’t have daughters, they want daughters. It’s a part of the human nature and it’s also a parents’ desire to have both children. As Nick grew old, he looked a little like a girl. The mother loved him the most because he resembled a girl and he was the last child, he got a little out of hand.

Although he is named Nick, the narrator keeps referring to him as Nicky, which is a female name. Maybe at some unconscious level is seen as the daughter the family never had. This theory is also substantiated by Nick’s deviations in relation to his brothers. Both his behavior and his parents’ treatment of him are different. The elder brothers, Michael and Eddy are farm workers, Mark is the clever one and Nick is the “cocky”, “reckless” “stud”, he is a contrast to his elder brothers. The narrator expresses some negative thoughts about his own brother, Nick “…while to the males of the family he was always the baby and something of an amusement…” . Mark is perhaps a little jealous since Nick is the mother’s favorite and gets more attention. Nick does not work hard like Eddy and Michael, and he probably does not care for school either like Mark does.

When the parents approve Nick’s purchase of a Yahama bike Marks shows a hint of bitterness, the quotation is an example of this, “Michael and Eddy would never have been allowed to do this, nor would I, if I’d wanted, but with Nicky it was somehow all right. Somehow it went went with Nicky.” He used to roam his bike between the farms and do the tricks on highways and this led to his tragic death. He was hit by a lorry, got a brain injury and died because any of his fam-ily members came to their consciousness. His death affected badly the family, their feelings were terribly hurt especially the mother’s.
I do not think that he dislikes his brother because when Nick dies at the hospital, Mark shows that the accident had a traumatic effect on him. He even remembers exactly what time the doctor came in and told them Nick was dead. Mark is not keen on donating Nick’s organs but his mother decides to give his heart away. It is the mother who has to make the decision and the fa-ther just goes along with it. This shows that is not patriarchal family.
“Twenty-five years of being in charge of 400 acres and all that lived on it,
generations of Randalls ruling the roost, of which he was the latest heir, haden’t
made him capable at that moment of being the one to step forward to speak”.
Even when he ought to be the strongest of the parents, the father leaves the responsibility of making the decision to the mother and Mark is clearly irritated by this. The style help illustrating Mark’s dismay regarding organ donation. Every time he talks about Nick’s heart there is a break in the story, look at lines 98, 130 and 148.

You can say that there is a kind of hierarchy in the family, maybe even two different hierarchies, in everyday life the father appears to be the one in control. He is the man in the family, and thereby automatically the natural provider, you might go as far as to call it the primeval times syndrome. Then there is the mother. The mother of his children and a housewife, she is the one who gets to decide things along with the father. Mark, the third child, is number three in the hier-archy along with Nick – the baby of the family when he was alive; he would be at the same level, or maybe a little higher. The eldest brothers, Michael and Eddy are at the bottom – the farm workers.
The second hierarchy is the one under pressure, e.g. the whole situation with Nick’s death. At this point the father is no longer at the top of this hierarchy, it has been switched around the mother is now the one in control, which now equals Mark after the mother, the father and once again the two brothers at last. The reason why Michael and Eddy have such low status in the family is probably due to the fact that they do not have an education. I believe that they are pre-destined to take over the farm after their father. They are to make sure that the farm most likely will stay in the family for several more generations.
The most terrible things that confronted them was the fact the doctors wanted his organs as he was a healthy boy. They wanted his heart, it was a very tense decision for the family and most irritating was the fact that they won’t be able to know to whom the organ would be donated. Do-nating organs after the death has now increased a lot, even famous actors announce their organ donation just to get some fame. People also do this for others help and also they do so that they may get some reward for their good deeds from the God. But the writer was behind the idea that if only if they would insist the doctor or the management of the hospital to let them know to whom the heart would be given then it would be much more better to see that their Nicky’s heart would be alive in someone’s body. And this will in turn give then peace by seeing someone alive and someone living his life. After a long search, Mark only found out that it had been trans-planted to a woman who was forty-six years old. At this point, Mark thought that if only his mother had spoken and she herself could have asked the doctors to put the heart in her body and give her heart to that old woman.
To save the pain, Mark lied to his mother so that her sorrow can be bearable and this lie has tor-mented Mark throughout his life. The heart was given to a girl, a young girl so that she would become happy and feel as sense of relief that her Nicky’s heart is living inside the body of a girl because she always wanted Nick to be a girl, in a far fetched interpretation you say that she fi-nally got a daughter.

It is important not to suppress traumatic experiences or else you will be haunted by the same emotions later on. Mark did not handle his grief correctly and that is why he seems bitter. He clearly disapproved of the way Nick was brought up and he did not want to donate Nick’s or-gans. The ending shows that Mark needs to seek counselling because his thoughts, about his mother taking Nick’s heart, are simply to insane. As to the rest of the Randall family it is diffi-cult to predict anything because the story has an open ending.
The whole story has showed strong emotions of a family. The powerful love that has been shared by the mother and the son, and the love of a brother have been emphasized excellently. The title “Our Nicky’s heart” symbolizes the Love and the bond there are between Nicky and his family. The title could very easily have been”Nicky’s heart”, but the one word “Our” has such a strong meaning to it. It’s not just any Nicky it is their loved family member.

For or against Organ Donation
Organ donation is a blessing for those who need them and a torture for those who lend them. It can be made simple by saying that if the relatives of the dead want to donate his or her organs to someone in need then it would be okay and if not, then it shouldn’t happen.
I believe that organ donation is a good thing as it gives life to another person who accidentally happens to lose his organ. And also, we all know that it doesn’t happen by forcing someone, people do give their relative’s organ after his death from their own will. But there are some points that should be considered. One is that the dead person’s relative should be given the ad-vantage to ask the doctors to transplant the organ to someone more close to the dead by age or of the same sex. If this is not possible, then at least the management in charge of transplantation should let the dead person’s guardian to know that to whom the organ would be donated. In that way, they would be able to see their own lost relative’s hint into the curable person.
By becoming an organ donor, people engage in improving some else’s life at no cost. Although the question of religious or moral costs comes into effect, there is no virtually no physical cost by becoming an organ donor. However, in many families it is a taboo to talk about death, and espe-cially organ donation. I can say that my parentals reacted which mixed feelings when I told them I wanted to be donor. If something happened to me I think my family would feel that by saving another life it would take some of their grief away. It all boils down to one question which every person needs to ask: Is it reasonable to accept another’s heart, if I will not give up my own? I said no. What will you say?