Engelsk eksamen 2013 - sorry for the loss

har lige været til engelsk eksamen i dag, skriftligt, og valgte at skrive første analyse, dvs. analyse af en novelle. jeg er meget i tvivl om den, og det ville være skønt hvis nogle ville kigge på den? ved forresten godt den er for lang!

Sorry for the Loss
How is it possible that a young man who has been an inmate for at least five years, can still have glowing white teeth, glowing skin and a big grin? Why is a knife that has been made to kill and slice been named after an innocent creature such as a butterfly? We have all these weird questions, as to why two very different things, which clearly make up contrasts, are put together. Why is this, really? There are no answers, or in fact there might be all the answers in the world. You decide and you create the truth. In the literature of the 21st century we are allowed to make up our own truths. Bridget Keehan takes us on a journey in Sorry for the Loss where these questions pop up more than once. In the following I will try to make up my own truth to these questions.
The plot of the story proceeds chronologically and starts in medias res; this means that we are thrown into the story, with no introduction as to where we are or whom we are going to meet. A third person narrator with a restricted point of view, the narrator is not a participant in the story, tells Sorry for the Loss. A restricted point of view, also called limited omniscient, means that the narrator does not have full access to the thoughts of anybody but the main character, in this case Evie the Catholic chaplain. The restrictive narrator gives no access to the minds of Victor, the young inmate, or the officer. If we knew the thoughts of these we could have a clearer picture of the situation; what does Victor really think about the fact that his Nan has just died, and what are the officer’s real intentions? The restricted point of view means that we know how Evie thinks and what her opinion about various subjects is. This is an advantage for us as the readers; it gives us a clear picture of how Evie is as a person, for example we know that she finds the “environment of the prison abrasive and intimidating” (line 18 to 19), and that she wishes to help the young Victor after the death of his Nan.
Evie is the main character of the story, which also makes her the protagonist. She is characterized directly by the narrator; she has been on her post for over a year (line 18), she likes to be alone without the prisoners and enjoy the view from the arch window in wing E (line 43). Evie is very religious; every time she has to walk through the intimidating and harsh hallways of the prison, she says a prayer to god, and right away they make her feel safe. Evie’s prayers comforts her as if “a fleece, gentle and soft, were enveloping her“ (line 36 to 37), she compares the feeling to the feeling a drug addict gets when he enjoys heroin. She practices her religion on such a high level, that she has direct contact to god.
The fact that she has to tell Victor that a member of his family has just died makes her frustrated. It is the first time she has to do it on her own and she would give anything for it to be over quickly. But it has to be done right (line 1 to 2)! As she tells Victor that his Nan has died, she hopes for a typical reaction: the bereaved gets upset and starts to cry, but not Victor. Evie feels as though she has failed in some way. She wants to do a better job, and tries to make Victor pray for the deceased, but nothing helps, Victor does not want to show his feelings. When he starts to talk about the Imam, a religious leader who leads the prayers in the Islamite religion, she feels jealous, why is she not good enough for Victor? Why can he not just pray with her?  She wonders if there is ever anybody who thinks of her as “a good woman” (line 124), she wants to be as good as possible, and to be interesting, insightful and helpful, but Victor does not seem to care. That annoys her.
All of a sudden she gets anxious to leave, nothing more is to be done, even though she feels certain that there was something more she could have said or done to help Victor. She feels that he was putting up a façade. She stands in front of the arch window, to overlook the prisoners while they wave and say goodbye to their loved ones. The sight of these big brutal men waving and blowing kisses makes her emotional. All of a sudden the officer who led her into Victor’s cell stands behind her. He tells her the real story as to why Victor is here; he stabbed a fellow pupil with a butterfly knife, more on the knife later. Evie leaves, now certain that she cannot do more.
Victor is the young man to whom Evie has to deliver the death notice. Victor is characterized indirectly through his behaviour and speech. The indirect characterization means that we, the readers, have to make our own assumptions and come to a conclusion about him. Victor is a young boy, not at all what Evie thought he would be like, but a “slight, good-looking boy who appears barely old enough to even be in an adult prison” (line 75 to 76). He is a contrast to what we may think when we hear of an inmate; his eyes are sparkling, his skin has not lost its glow, his skin makes his eyes look even brighter than normally and he has a big “welcoming grin” (line 81), even though he has served five years in prison. He is uncertain as to why Evie is here; he hopes it is because of his application to the SORRY Course. The SORRY Course seems to be some kind of privilege an inmate can earn if he is in remorse from what he has done. When he realizes why she has come, he utters a hard sniff and looks away for a minute. At first it seems as though he is going to be upset, but instead he asks: “Why should a dog, a horse, a pigeon have a life and Nan no beath at all?” (line 101), to which Evie asks if it is from Shakespeare’s King Lear, a tragedy about the relationship between parents and children. Victor tells her that some of the guys from the book club are putting up the play, and he plays Cordelia, the youngest daughter of King Lear. Cordelia refuses to fight for the love of King Lear with violence, and therefore she gets neither possessions nor land from Lear. As to why this particular play by Shakespeare is mentioned, could be because Victor, as Cordelia, does not want to show his sadness through violence or tears, he shows it inside. This particular place in the story seems very heartfelt and sad, but it changes very quickly as Victor says: “I hope she was stoned”, a reference to his deceased Nan, who says she smokes to better her multiple sclerosis. It seems strange to mention this, but again, maybe Victor tries to hide his feelings. As we get to know Victor he starts to seem more and more unlikely to be a typical inmate; he seems educated, intellectual and spiritually curious – we get a feeling of sympathy for this young boy, perching there on the edge of his bed. Then we find out what he has done, and everything changes. It is hard to come to a concrete conclusion about this troubled boy, because he has two very different sides, which are clear contrasts to each other, one being a heartfelt young man and another being a brutal killer. The only thing we know for sure is that Victor is not a normal boy.
Sorry for the Loss takes on a lot of contrasts; an intimidating prison and the life on the other side of the car park, a young, somewhat handsome kid in prison with white teeth, glowing skin and a big welcoming grin and the fellow inmate, who traps and kills pigeons. Last but not least there is the butterfly knife. In the very end of story, after Evie finds out that Victor killed a boy with a butterfly knife, she thinks of how strange it is that a thing that has been made to “cut, slice and stab” (line 188) has been named after a butterfly, something so “delicate and easy to kill” (line 188). It seems as though these contrasts are a very big part of the conclusion, which we have to make about the story. Maybe it means that everything has a clear, sometimes invisible, contrast. Nothing is as it seems; a butterfly knife has nothing to do with a butterfly, a young good-looking kid with a welcoming smile does not equal a good citizen, but can might as well equal a brutal cold-hearted killer. Nothing it as it seems, everything has a surface that tells us one thing, but right underneath this good-looking surface, the truth lies, and it can be a very harsh truth.
But this is just one truth to all those weird questions, which I introduced at first. Bridget Keehan’s Sorry for the Loss is a typical Post-modern short-story filled with intertextuality, the use of Shakespeare’s King Lear, and other important Post-modern criteria such as giving the readers the authority to make their own conclusions. The story has always interesting open ending, which opens up to a thousand interpretations, none of them wrong and none of them right.