essay

håber der er nogle der vil rette min engelsk opgave, jeg er ik særlig sikkert mht grammatiken og ordplacieringen.. på forhånd tak.. :)

Analysis of “Debbie and Julie”

I want to introduce the written exercise with a biography of the author, and give a summary of the story, and write something about the persons in the story and their relationship to each other. Finally I will in the interpretation and in the analysis focus on the genre, the narrator, the themes in the story, milieus ect., characterization of Debbie and Julie, and of her parents.

The author of the story is Doris Lessing.
She was born in 22nd. October 1919 in Persia (Iran), because both of her parents were living in Persia at this time. They were both English citizens. She had respected parents, her father was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia, and her mother was a nurse, but they moved to Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) to be rich. Doris Lessing spent most of his childhood in Africa; she described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. She was educated first at a convent school, and then at an all-girls school. She was an avid reader and an excellent student.

The text is about a girl, who is the protagonist in the story, she named Julie. The story opens with Julie when she is looking at herself in the mirror. Julie is described a fat girl, because she becomes pregnant, she have to leave her parents, because of her pregnancy. She move to London, and a girl named Debbie takes care of her. Debbie lives in an apartment in London, where she works as a prostitute. Everyday visits different men the apartment, they are some frightening customers, and some of them try to come in contact with Julie, but Debbie looks after her. Debbie has promised that she will help her, but when Julie is about to give birth, she is out of country with a man. Julie is helpless now, so she leaves the apartment. She takes a bus to the other side of the town, where she knows that there is an unlocked shed. It is sleeting and dark outside, when she gets a child, Julie is really in pain. Now she is confused, she doesn’t know what she should do. She has decided to put the baby in the telephone box, and overlooks the telephone box near a small window in the pub. She stands by the window for only few minutes, and then a young man and girl go into the telephone box. They pick the girl up, and the ambulance men come in no time. Now is the little innocent baby safe. Julie returns to her parents’ place after she has giving birth. She is very afraid to return back, because she thinks that her father will be very angry at her. It seems that the father isn’t angry at her, he lets Julie come inside. The mother, Anne, is very happy because her draughter has returned home again. Julie finds the father understandable, but also old and black.

Debbie is a girl, who lives in London in an apartment. She works as a prostitute ordinarily. She has promised to help Julie, but she breaks her promise, when she travels to Paris with an American man. She is a big handsome girl, her skin is very white and she has shiny straight hair. We don’t know anything about her past, and I think she is about 20 years old, because they understand each other, and she protects Julie. I think they are the same age or Debbie is a little bit older than Julie, because she is not finish with the school, and it is logical that a big one protects a small one.

Julie is pregnant in the first part of the story, and she becomes mother in the last part of the story. She feels proud and pleased after she has given a birth “Unexpectedly she was full of pleasure and pride”. Her pregnancy is a secret, it is why she lefts the home. She has to move away from her parents, because of her pregnancy and she have to notice the school. Now Julie is a changed girl when she returns to her parents after spending a long time in London, and she thinks that she knows better and she has learned the value of everything e.g. adulthood, i.e. her stay in London was a transformation. She is like an adult in a physically way, because she has giving a birth.
The band between Debbie and Julie is a teenage-pregnancy, who keeps them together, and this is the only thing they have in common, and the only reason for Debbie protects Julie.
Her parents live in a small house. The parents’ life is very scheduled and uninteresting. They never touch each other, very cold and sit apart. They are just as “robots”. The goal in the life is always the bedtime. The mother dominates always, mostly the father, Len, waits for his wife to take action. The first impression we get when Julie returns of the father is that he are large and black. He being shrunk, grey and become weak and ordinary. He seems to be happy, but doesn’t show it when Julie come back, he never looks at her.

The story is narrated from a third-person point of view; the narrator has a point of view closely aligned with that of Julie, with full access to her inner thoughts and feelings, Julie is as a reliable narrator in the story. This is a “short story” because there are few persons, not a complicated story, one consequence and the story don’t stretches over long time.
We hear about two places in the story respectively the small town and the big city. Julie lives in the small town, where everybody knows each other, with a quiet and relaxed milieu. It is a safely place, where the people have to considerate other.
Julie is an unknown person in the big city, there are both good and bad people: in this connection is Debbie being the good person, and the customers the bad people. It is an unsafely place for Julie. Loneliness, endurance and deprivation characterize the environment in the big city for Julie.
One of the themes in this story are teenager and ignorance. The themes are connected together, because when you are young, maybe you do something that you will regret in your future. We all know that we do something in our youth, which we regret later in our life. In connection with Julie, she gets a “love child” which is negative, because she is still young and there waits a long for her. I think she is ignorance because she doesn’t have an abortion, if she don’t was ignorance, maybe she will prefer an abortion rather than leaves the home.

What will become of Julie then?
Maybe she seems keen on going back to school and finishing her school, and if the school officer told the truth, it would work out. But the question is whether she would be able to go through with it. She will have to face the narrow-minded people of the small town and her friends at school with many questions. Maybe she will turn back to London, and try to find the little Baby, Rossi. She can still stay by the parents and lives with bad conscience over that she have abandoned the baby.