Analyse af Robin Blacks novelle 'Divorced, Beheaded, Survived'

Divorced, Beheaded, Survived is a short story written by Robin Black in 2010.

The short story starts with the narrator as a child and a lot of memories from her childhood. The narrator in the story is at first a girl named Sarah with long hair and later after her look back on her childhood she is a 40 year old woman. In the beginning Sarah plays with a bunch of children including her brother Terry and their neighbor who lives behind their house. Her friend is a yellow-haired girl and her name is Molly Denham. They are playacting and Sarah is dressed out as Anne Boleyn who was the second wife of King Henry the VIII of England and Molly is dressed as Batman.

They all have a great imagination. They are pretending they are in the past when executions were made. Molly used a white enameled lobster pot turned upside down which was Johnny Sanderson’s idea. Johnny was a year older than Sarah and a year younger than her brother Terry. Johnny had himself figured out and by the age of eleven he already knew who and what he wanted to be – a history professor as Sarah’s father not reading about American history but European history. It was by Johnny’s interest he made the other kids by convincing them playacting. He knew just what to say. Sarah’s father joined the history department the same year and university as Johnny Sanderson’s dad did. Those were the days when there were still teas and formal dinner parties for new faculty and by that you can see that the short story is happening in the late 1900ties around the year of 1973 but the story isn’t chronologic it skips in a lot of places such as 1973 was when Sarah were in fourth grade a few months before Terry got sick and on page 2 line 25-28 when Sarah mentions Johnny’s and her own dad at the time they were studying at the university.