Essay - retning :)

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Loose Change
By Andrea Levy

In October 1996 444.000 people experienced homelessness in Great Britain alone – this is people out of which a predominant amount has either problems with alchohol, drugs, people who have been either physically or sexually assulted – or perhaps people who have been forced to leave their home country to maintain some sort of security, which is the case with Laylor and her brother – accounted in the short story Loose Change.
The title Loose Change illustrates the relationship between Laylor and the narrator, the small amount of money means nothing to the narrator – it is just Loose Change, compared to Laylor to whom the money is all her and her brother have left. Besides being economically superior the narrators’ attitude towards the loose changes also indicates her arrogant view on Laylor and her situation. An attitude which is also statet in the sentence: “Cupping her filthy hands round my bone china,” (l.104). As if the narrators’ china is too good for Laylor to touch, still it is of course good enough for the narrator herself, which leads to a general characterization of the narrators attitude to Laylor as being among other things very arrogant. The narrator clearly thinks much higher of herself than of Laylor.
Besides being arrogant, it seems the narrator is on some level scared. Scared of what will happen if she brings this strange girl into her house, and to convince herself that she is neither paranoid nor arrogant she starts constructing a theory that will give her a change to leave Laylor. “She had sought me out – sifted me from the crowd. This young woman was desperate from help. She’d even cunningly made me obliged to her,” (l. 92-93) The narrator tries to convince herself that it is all a conspiration, and that the girl is a desperate woman – which is not indicated anywhere else in the text. In contradiction Laylor is described as cheerful (l. 44) and sympathetic – since she is willing to pay for her share of the tea even though she is almost broke (l. 47-48), though perhaps a little funny looking (l. 13-17).
But by convincing herself that Laylor is trying to take advantage of her, she can leave without an unbearable guilty conscience.
It seems the narrators opinion on Laylor developes through the short story – she goes from being mainly curios and grateful to disliking and mistrusting Laylor, which the following sentence indicates: “It was then i began to notice things I had not seen before: dirt under each of her chipped fingernails, the collar of her blouse crumpled and unironed, a tiny cut on her cheek, a fringe that looked to have been cut with blunt nail-clippers,” (l. 71-73).
That Laylor needs the narrators help is suddenly more obvious than before, and the fact that the roles have changed scares and irritates the narrator. From being the one, in need of help, she is suddenly the one obliged to help. This is very much alike the development her grandmother experienced – from being a refugee herself, in need of shelter to complaining over and refusing to help other refugees, in the same situation, that she once was.
According to the narrator Londoners is not fond making friends with strange people and not at all helping them – the narrator is indeed a Londoner.
This is in contradiction to the fact that most britain people are christians and probably drank the parable about the good samaritan (Text 2) in with one’s mother’s milk. The Good samaritan has compassion for a wounded man and he is capable of helping him – even though he has not much himself. This is the direct contradiction to the actions of the narrator. She has all the possibilities to help, but she chooses not to – Laylor on the other hand, is very similar to the Good Samaritan. She lends out of the very little amount of money her and her brother have left.
Still the narrator can generally be characterized as selfcentered both by the fact, that she is willing to receive help, but not to give it. Also the sentence: “All Laylors’ grandchildren would know my name,” stated after a brief and unselfish consideration, of how she could help Laylor, shows that the narrator is selfcentered. By helping she would accieve something.
In general Loose Change is a story about the worlds injustice, where some people has so much and some so very little. It is also illustrated by the cartoon, Canada in a changing world (Picture 1), where the rich western world is defined by abundance and troubles with overweith – symbolised by the huge, white man hiding between a mountain of food, compared to the rest of the world, defined by poverty and hunger – symbolised by the underweight child with an empty plate.
Loose Change is a story of how the narrator gives up her original values and makes up excuses not to help a person, very much in need of help. The narrator can be seen as a picture on the modern western people in general, and her abbility to exploit the poor can be linked to a marxistic view on life, where the western world in generally takes advantage of the rest of the world.